Pokey LaFarge Ventures Into Rhumba Country
The American original talks about travel, spirituality and his eclectic new album
Pokey LaFarge has spent most of his life on the move.
When I call him, he instantly names several places near my home, and we discover that we likely unknowingly crossed paths years ago. I ask him how he knows the area, and his answer is simple.
“Traveling,” he says. “The United States is my roadmap.”
There’s no surprise then when “Run Run Run,” the third song on his new album Rhumba Country, starts playing. The Latin number features the singer expressing an urgent persistence, the continual movement necessary in order to “get there, son.” LaFarge sings that he “can’t stop” and “won’t put my hammer down.” The next number, “Like a Sailor,” keeps the tropical feel while getting “lost at sea.” LaFarge makes the point explicitly: “All around the world I’ve been looking for a home.”
“My life has been a series of dramatic changes ever since I was a kid,” LaFarge said. “Sea changes every three months.”
Even so, he seems to have found some sort of rootedness. LaFarge elected to have one cover on the new album, the old Ken Boothe rocksteady number “Home Home Home” (now given an Old West feel). The singer here looks for a home, but seems to have already found comfort in knowing it exists. LaFarge’s traveler just needs to get there, where family and candy and ice cream await him. Home is as good as realized, even if the journey isn’t over yet, and LaFarge performs the number with a great sense of peace.
Much of Rhumba Country hinges on the tension between this sort of longing, best perceived as an existential condition, and its fulfillment. LaFarge himself has reached at least one level of satisfaction, but his understanding of that empty space we try to fill. That yearning, leaning on Augustine and Blaise Pascal, might be understood as a God-shaped hole, the space in humans that is meant to be filled by something bigger. LaFarge plays easygoing roots shuffles, but a philosophical profundity underlies the performances.
“I’ve come to realize that we’re all just sojourners here,” he said. “This isn’t our home, yet it doesn’t replace the longing that we have to get there. People would say that longing was created it at the fall; other people would call it futility. That longing I felt so strongly my whole life and not knowing how to fill it or who would fill it, but still trying to find a way to fill it, as everyone is…”
LaFarge points to “drugs, alcohol, women, money, food, exercise” and more as means through which people try to find fulfillment, explaining that he’s tried most of those himself, and can “still sometimes slip into those kind of things, hopefully just for hours or a day.” When we chase empty means for realization, we come up empty, and now much of LaFarge’s work shows a commitment to spiritual well-being. In fact, you can divide his career into periods of “before” and “after,” when it comes to this kind of consideration.
To be more specific, LaFarge describes the break as “my music before the Lord and my music after,” his awakened faith marking a major turning point not only in his personal life, but in how he considers his art.
“Before the Lord, I was serving myself with music, and now with the Lord, I’m using my music to serve people,” he said. “Music is meant to be shared. Who writes a song and just sings it at home and doesn’t sing it for people? What artist doesn’t want to share their work? It’s a gift, but a lot of people are putting it out there to get accolades, to get money and success, which I used for a long time. Now it’s just a matter of using the posture that I’m supposed to share this music, I have a responsibility, an opportunity to better people’s lives.”
That doesn’t mean you’ll hear LaFarge proselytizing on his albums. He explains, “I’m not a gospel singer. I’m not a Christian making Christian music, but a Christian making secular music. I’m supposed to be a witness … just being a bridge.”
Part of that witness is simply expressing some core feelings, mostly joy.
“I could go bag groceries, I could work on a farm, be a superintendent at a school…ultimately the gift that I would be meant to share is joy,” LaFarge explained. “When you lose perspective and start searching for something else that’s not you, that’s when you lose yourself and you lose perspective of what your actual gift is. I lost perspective on that for a long time. That’s how people get lost, lose themselves, get into depression, and sometimes die. They get totally lost on who they are. It’s usually pretty simple. The Lord’s just got me using the music to convey that gift.”
VIDEO: Pokey LaFarge “So Long Chicago”
While his music mostly sounds upbeat and relatively positive, there’s no naivete in it. LaFarge has gone through the same challenges as the rest of us (he mentioned losing his mom two years ago). During the pandemic period, he “was bopping around,” releasing a couple records and moving to California, where he met the woman who would be his wife. She thought she’d like living in Maine, even though she has a large, close family in Orange County. She moved to Maine, so he went with her. He wound up on a farm, writing songs as he sang while working.
“I realized that I was supposed to farm, researching all winter, [working in a] greenhouse seeding program,” he said. “It was an opportunity to learn new skills, a new challenge, embrace the rural life in Maine. It forced my hand – I had to do something. It’s an amazing, beautiful surprise and now it’s a new interest.”
These past few years mostly feel like an upswing but he doesn’t forget the valleys (see Rock Bottom Rhapsody, for example).
“Every few months something crazy’s happening,” he said. “I’m just expectant of it and I’ve learned to embrace change. That can prepare me for suffering through life and death … people’s comings and goings.”
With all his travels, his challenges, his faith, and his sense of joy, LaFarge recognizes that part of his responsibility isn’t preaching or forcing the issue, but to simply tell his story.
“For me, the way I utilized that is knowing the power of one’s testimony – my experience out of desperation to call out to the Lord. I was going to die if I kept living the way I was living. The vulnerability doesn’t feel like I’m preaching. It makes it more personal.”
LaFarge has learned to “rejoice in the midst of suffering. This is all temporary. Whatever one is forced to endure in this life, it doesn’t matter, it all gets turned into something beautiful in the next. Hardships going to make me stronger. Endure the pitfalls, encourage others who are enduring suffering.”
In that understanding, LaFarge finds himself in his place, doing what he was always meant to be.
“The picture is becoming clearer,” he said. “There are more colors coming in. The frames getting pushed out. The messages we all kind of inherently know. Some theories I’ve been pondering: I feel like we kind of already know what we’re meant to be doing. We already know who we are. We already know God. We’re born knowing God. It says that in the Word: that eternity was written on our heart. He gives us the desires of our heart. He’s not a genie. He the one that plants on our hearts what we’re supposed to be doing. Even before I was a believer, I was 14 years, I heard the Lord tell me I was going to do something special. I was going to do something different. Even those words in a very dark time – my parents had just gotten divorced – were a big reinforcing catalyst. People forget it, trying to learn what they already know. Life is meant to be simple and we have to try not to overcomplicate things.”
The topic becomes tricky at this point, as LaFarge has figured something out that might not feel applicable to those who don’t share his faith, but he believes that finding our true purpose, being where we’re meant to be, can be achieved.
“To a nonbeliever and a believer, I’d probably say something similar,” he said. “Faith, like love, is a verb, an action. There’s a lot of different ways to express faith. We have to step out and take a chance. We have to move sometimes before God moves. We have to step out in faith, and then the Lord meets us there and takes us 1000 times farther than we thought we would go. Until we show we know he’ll meet us there, He’s just waiting.”
VIDEO: Pokey LaFarge “Sister Andre”
If there’s a before and after to LaFarge’s career, though, there isn’t a clean aesthetic break, in part because one of the staples of his sound is his restless combination of various forms of roots music. He’s steadily moved as his interests take him, from the Mississippi River to a more global sound (who’d have expected Tropicália grooves coming out of a farm in Maine?). He continues to explore musically, bringing more knowledge into each new album. The process does have some complications, though.
“As an artist, I’ve found that people don’t want you to change,” he said. “Whether it’s band members or singing style or songwriting style. They don’t like it when you change. But a lot of my heroes didn’t let that them get that down, so if there are any artists out there, that’s an encouragement to them. Whether you’re a songwriter, an entrepeneur, or whatever it is, it’s essential to stay curious. You’ll then always be finding new ideas. You’ll stay stagnant for a short amount of time. You have to stop and let that well fill back up but curiosity keeps you searching. That can be with any relationship, whether with the Lord or with our spouses or just our work. That’s what I’ve found has really served me, and why you see so many different influences in my music, and why my music keeps changing. I travel so much and that’s out of curiosity. I listen to tons of music, and that’s out of curiosity. So naturally the work’s going to change from that.”
LaFarge suggests that his past couple albums have acted almost like mixtapes with all the styles he’s incorporated, but he thinks that for the next one he’ll do something more focused on a single sound, “streamlining it and just making an up, sort of funky dance record, like every song being in the vein of ‘So Long, Chicago’ on this album.”
That cut, of course, is a song about movement, about breaking out of the old places to find new places to see and new things to do. For Pokey LaFarge, that joyful discovery remains something to dance about.
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