“Paramore is a community,” Zac Farro says, sitting across from me on an inescapably sweltering day in the East Village. “The infrastructure of being in something that long is just unmatched. Having that family, and that purpose, is unmatched.” The Nashville-based artist and I are picking apart his triadic musical journey, which now not only encompasses Paramore and halfnoise, the funkier project Farro fronts, but a true solo album, released under his own name. “halfnoise was this stepping stone for me to feel confident, though I think you can hide behind cheeky music videos and things. It’s a lot of heart and happiness, too, and it was a great exploration of sound and personality — halfnoise kind of leveled me up — but now, it’s time for me to express my real personality.”
It’s not that he hadn’t been present for that project, Farro assures me, but with his debut solo album, Operator, things just came together easier than ever before. For lack of a less cliche term, I diagnosed what he’d experienced as personal and creative growth, plain and simple. “I was being myself,” he says. “I was following what I was inspired by, and it really all fell into place in an effortless way.”
Read more: Fan poll: 5 most underrated Paramore songs
The new album, which Farro mixed and produced himself from his Nashville studio, reflects that in a manner that’s on the nose, in a brilliant way, both sonically — with a ’70s easy rock-inspired sound that grooves hard, and enshrouds the listener with a warm, comforting sense of nostalgia — and in its lyrical depth. Though crafting crate-digging worlds for the modern ear is familiar to Farro — the last halfnoise project fused ’80s Japanese city pop with the band’s signature jangly psych-rock — cracking open and getting personal is completely new for the artist. And it’s paid off. The project finds perfect juxtaposition in raw, nascent vulnerability and bright, fuzzy instrumentation. Atop twanging pedal steel, thoughtful, detailed drum patterns, and a steady bassline that ties the album together with the strength of a nautical knot, Farro unfurls themes of anxiety, communication breakdowns, family relationships, and lays out the very real struggles of connecting, or disconnecting, with others.
Love happens when you’re not looking for it — an eye roll for any single people, but a mantra that actually applies here. With no assurance of what the year would look like — touring, or otherwise — Farro asked two friends, also heavyweights in the Nashville music scene, Matt Chancey and Josh Gilligan, to commit to the first two weeks of January — which they spent locked in his studio. “I just miss records like that. For example, Is This It — you know they recorded it in a month? There was no tweaking or overthinking it. Inspiration is just gone when you open a song up that you haven’t worked on in a year. It’s like you’re looking at a photo and thinking, ‘I don’t like that shirt anymore,’” Farro explains. “I don’t like to revisit stuff. Hopefully, as you get older, you do less. You get better at realizing you have to just go with what works. I’d like to think after all these years of being around music and in the studio, I know what I’m getting after… Some of the best stuff has happened in the moment. If it’s not, move on.”
It’s not a lesson Farro was born knowing, but the “stepping stones” previous projects provided have led him there. “I always downplayed halfnoise stuff while secretly hoping it would get playlisted or do something,” he says. “I don’t think I had the wrong motives. I just needed to recreate and correct them, to not have expectations that anything happens…” This perspective shift allowed Farro to lean into uncomfortable decisions, and break the molds he’d set for himself. “We went on a limb and put out ‘My My’ as the first single, which is a song I would’ve never led with, with halfnoise,” he adds. “I would’ve done the most upbeat song or funkiest one. But Zachary Gray and AJ [Gibboney] said, ‘If you want to do something different, you should put that one out first, on New Music Friday. And I’m like, ‘That’s insane for my music.’ It makes sense for Paramore, but that doesn’t happen for me.”
Zachary Gray
But despite his instincts, he submitted to creating a new pathway, sinking into the newfound immediacy, intimacy, and intuitiveness that this album process had wrought for him. Forgoing a lengthy tease, or a drip feed of singles, the album remained organic, with no room for forecasting or insecure conjecture, from inception to its release into the wild. “It’s not fucking Jurassic Park. It’s a song,” Farro laughs, on his realization about announcement overkill.
But once Operator was out, he had yet another realization. The teachable moment was still underway. “Hayley [Williams] and I were talking about this the other day. It’s really weird what you learn through writing lyrics. You’ll think you have the concept, and then once it’s out and has its own life, and people are sitting with it and they converse about it, you’re like, ‘Weird. I exposed more of myself than I thought I did.’ You think, ‘Oh, this is a universal theme’ — but it’s so personal.”
Across the album’s nine tracks, he doesn’t hold back. However speedy the turnaround was, there’s an evident level of intention, crystalized by elements like a throwback fade in on what’s arguably Operator’s silkiest song, “Sunday Driving,” a slick saxophone part in “1,” the poignant and diverse piano riffs that pepper the entire project, and Farro’s powerfully simple use of percussion. And yet another layer can be heard in the album’s wonderfully imperfect moments. “I left some pretty uncomfortable takes in there where I’m not hitting the note, but I’m hitting the heart,” Farro tells me. “It’s hard to make those decisions when you’re doing it yourself. That’s where a producer comes in, like, ‘Oh, trust me, this is vulnerable.’ But I had to just wear that other hat, and I’m proud of myself for it.” This can be heard in the fleeting seconds that slip out of tune on the emotionally fraught “My My” and closer “I Need You” — the first song he’s cried while singing, Farro tells me. And that initial tearstained take is what you’ll hear. It is an incredibly tender album, held up by a brocade of subtle sounds perfectly suited to tell its stories of discomfort, heartbreak, grief, and ponder the wistfully somber passage of time.
“I have never felt so present with myself as a person in life. And I think that comes across,” Farro explains, when I prod him to speak more on Operator’s level of honesty. Why now? How did he get there? He takes a moment to finish answering. “I think I’ve tried so long to fit in. Maybe it’s my Gemini personality or being a middle child, but so much of my personality was just, I want to feel accepted. So you end up being a big chameleon, being super adaptable, and really wanting to get approval. I had a friend tell me a long time ago, ‘If you act like everyone else, no one’s going to know who you are. You have so much to offer, and you have so much to bring. Just focus on being yourself.’ It felt like I really started to implement that when I turned 30 — and that’s funny because I’m 35 now, but I feel 5 years old with myself.
“This record is the first time I actually feel like myself,” he continues. “I know it sounds weird because I’ve made so much music, but it’s the first time I don’t listen to it and go, ‘Oh, I hate how my voice sounds on this. Why did we use that guitar part?’ There is so much trust. I trust Chancey. We just worked together so well. And I was in a place where I was making calm, collected, good decisions, and I prioritized myself, which I didn’t use to do. I would just brush through things, or I would pull out the red carpet for everyone else that I work with. For my stuff, I’d be like, ‘Well, it’s good enough.’ Why should I treat myself? I should go treat anybody else.”
Though there’s been intimate release shows for Operator in NYC, Nashville, and one forthcoming in Los Angeles, Farro can’t say whether a tour is on the horizon just yet — but it’s looking hopeful. “The long short of it is I didn’t want to initially. But then the record came out and I played it, and I was like, ‘It feels like the music’s begging me to… People are used to seeing the halfnoise side of me. But it was cool. At the Nashville show, I sat down the whole time until the encore. It was really reserved, and it felt a lot more vulnerable and grown-up. I didn’t feel like I had to be funny or crazy or entertaining. I could just close my eyes and play the music. As a performer, I felt really connected, and there’s something to say about that.”
