He made his name as the keyboard player and main songwriter in the mega-successful Australian rock band INXS, but as a solo artist Andrew Farriss is operating in a completely different genre.
He tells MusicRadar: “I’m a songwriter. Always have been, since I was a teenager. And now I’m enjoying not having to worry about a specific audience. I don’t care about all that so much anymore. So I can think much more clearly about what I want to do – and that’s music that I wouldn’t have performed with my old band.”
Farriss’s new solo album The Prospector is released on 10 July and continues in the vein of his self-titled album from 2021. This is, pure and simple, a country record.
He recalls: “When I started writing songs in the 1970s I listened to country music on the radio and particularly the outlaw country stuff, which I thought was really cool. I liked the gritty nature of the lyrics. Some of that early country music was more like folk music – songs about funerals, very real lyrics – so not a lot of pop bullshit going on in that.”
His love for country music was never evident during his career with INXS, but with the band long gone – their final live performance was in 2012 – Farriss has settled comfortably into this new niche.
He recorded The Prospector in Nashville and at his home studio in Australia.
“I live about seven hours inland on a large cattle station,” he says. “It’s like a farm. I’ve owned it for many years. I guess I’m a little different in that way.”
If this sounds like the perfect setting for making country music, Farriss confirms that it is.
“When you get in your car you don’t have to drive very far to see people with cowboy hats – not because it’s fashionable, but because it keeps the sun off your face.”
For this album Farriss collaborated with a number of songwriters including married singers Stephen Wilson Jr. and Leigh Nash, and the last frontman of INXS, Ciaran Gribbin. Even so, Farriss mostly writes alone.
He explains: “People would ask me, ‘Who are you writing with in Nashville at the moment?' And I’d say, ‘Myself!’
“I write songs wherever I am in the world, and when I’ve been in Nashville I’ve been fortunate to write with some very clever people – girls and guys, different ages, different sort of backgrounds. I’ve written with other people in Australia too, but more and more I tend to work by myself. I like co-writing with people. I enjoy it. But I also enjoy just trusting myself to write the song.”
He says of the recording sessions in Nashville: “I worked with some of the best session musicians that I’ve ever worked with anywhere – and it’s the amount of incredibly talented people in that place that just blows your mind.
“They’re very talented musically, not necessarily technically. They’re not super groovy electronic AI experts. They’re just damn good musicians and singers and great songwriters, and they all like making music in real time with other human beings. And really, why wouldn’t you want to do that?”
He says there is genuine meaning in the title of this album and his appearance on the cover.
“I wanted a lot of the lyrics on The Prospector to relate to looking for things. I dressed up looking like a guy from the 1880s with a horse, a turned-up hat, a gold pan and a pickaxe over my shoulder like I’m prospecting for gold. But it’s really about looking for other things – whether it’s looking at your relationships, things that are good in your life or things that are bad, all these things that are happening around you.”
Asked to name a few key tracks from the album, Farriss picks the lead single Rolling Home, the Southern rock-influenced Something Stronger and the Old West tale Truth Or Consequences, the latter inspired by a journey through Arizona border country – on horseback.
Farris recalls: “Instead of reading about it or watching a film, I thought I’d actually go to these places with my wife. We rode horses in this desert along the Mexican border. We got to Tombstone and walked around that town where people had shootouts. We saw places where Geronimo and Cochise had been.”
Looking back to his early days with INXS, Farriss says he rediscovered his passion for country music partly as a reaction against the noisy music the band played and the rowdy audiences they played it to.
He recalls: “INXS formed in 1977 as the Farriss Brothers. We changed our name to INXS in 1980 or something, and we experimented as a band with all kinds of genres of music. We played a lot of funk music, we played some blues, we played some rock stuff, and then, of course, punk music started.
“We were playing in pubs, noisy places where people smoked cigarettes and drank too much alcohol and got into fights. These people were our audiences in the early years, so we played the sort of music that we assumed those people would like to hear.”
He continues: “After a while we started realising that it wasn’t all about playing live. We started making records.
“The recordings we made at first were not particularly great. I think the songs were okay, but we were a bit weird. I don’t think we were like any of the other acts, really, at the time.
“We were a bit odd in the sense that we didn’t really jump on anyone’s particular train. We just kept experimenting, as we did for our whole career as INXS, which is probably insane from a commercial point of view.
“What the record company wanted you to do, of course, was to make one kind of record that was a hit record, and then they want you to keep replicating that song over and over and over again, so they know how to sell it, because it makes their job easier. They don’t really care about you being creative or experimental.
“So I ended up writing songs for the INXS live show. I kept writing for this living organism, this theatrical thing we were doing, and as it went along and we actually started to make some money, we started to get some hit records, then I had the luxury to start thinking: what kind of music do I like, what do I want to play, and where is this going?”
In all of this, Farriss’s creative foil was of course Michael Hutchence, the singer who fronted INXS from the band’s formation until his death in 1997.
“Michael and I began to experiment a lot with different styles of music,” Farriss recalls with a smile. “We tried to incorporate a little less of that ‘let’s blow them off the stage’ kind of attitude to everything. I started to think about gentler sounds and softer, more emotional subject matter, so the music behind it became more sympathetic to an emotional aspect in someone’s life.
“And that's where I began to start enjoying a lot of the country music again. I revisited a lot of the early country music, and actually Michael was a fan of some of that older country music too.”
