Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

As Mike Farris takes the stage at The Caverns with his band the Fortunate Few on August 3, he’ll be walking into a one-of-a-kind venue that he’s been fortunate to become familiar with.

“It’s just such a unique experience, you know? There are venues where the venue itself is a draw, and that’s kind of what the Caverns is,” explained the Grammy winner. “The venue itself is great but also the people who run it, own it and operate it are all great, and they’re all friends of mine for many years, so there’s this family atmosphere to it for me on that front.”

Farris considers the underground stage at The Caverns his hometown venue since he was raised in nearby Winchester, Tennessee where he spent a lot of his time playing sports like football and baseball and swimming at Tims Ford Lake.

He and his friends would ride bikes from bridge to bridge to see who was hanging out.

“It was a magical time actually,” Farris fondly recalled. “We had different places you can go back in the woods and find a rope swing and stuff like that. It was pretty cool.”

Despite lamenting that some of the local hangout spots like the Boulevard aren’t as prominent as they were back in his youth, Farris says the city still has its small-town charms.

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful part of the world and full of great people that are still there doing their thing,” he explained. “It’s an awesome place to be raised.”

Farris says it’s always exciting to get to play for the “hometown crowd,” especially when that crowd gathers at a venue like The Caverns.

“If people haven’t been there yet, you owe it to yourself to go and check it out because it’s such a unique thing that is in everybody’s backyard down there that people across the country and even the world have heard about, and it’s on their list to go to a show down there,” he noted.

Farris’s show with the Fortunate Few will feature songs from his entire career but will also showcase a lot of the tracks from his most recent album “The Sound of Muscle Shoals.”

The album was recorded at the iconic Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama which Farris says shares the same kind of vibe as his hometown.

Farris’s first idea for the album was to travel to many of the noteworthy music studios across the South such as Sun Records in Memphis and Criterion in Miami to record a couple of tracks at each one.

The first person that he reached out to was Rodney Hall at Fame to see how much it would cost to record a couple of songs. Hall called Farris and offered to let him record the entire album at Fame at Hall’s expense which is how Farris explained the music business should be.

“We’ve been aiming to do a record together with all of the Fame folks and Muscle Shoals folks for many years now just because we love and respect each other’s musical acumen, so finally it came together,” said Farris. “It took me all this time to find my way to Muscle Shoals to make the best record I’ve ever made.”

The studio at Fame, as Farris explained, is like a time capsule of a bygone era in music which creates a unique vibe.

“It’s like everything is the same with wood panel walls, and it looks like there’s nicotine stains pressed into everything from way back in the day,” he recalled with a laugh. “It’s also about the overall laid-back vibe of that community and that area down there. It’s a palpable, spiritual, laid-back place. I can’t explain it.”

Farris says that he couldn’t have recorded the album in Nashville because the much larger city has a different speed and mentality than Muscle Shoals.

“It’s turned into a job with everybody up here, and it’s not a job for those guys down there,” he said. “It’s just like ‘Let’s make some music, and let’s do some good stuff.’”

The album is a celebration of all of the genres of music that Farris grew up loving from rock to blues to soul and even old spiritual music. 

“Bird in the Rain” started out as a bluegrass idea, and the album features a cover of the gospel song “Slow Train,” a favorite of Farris’s written by Steve Cropper and William Bell and originally performed by the Staples Singers.

“I was like ‘We’ve got to put some kind of gospel song on here,’ and ‘Slow Train’ had been at the forefront of mind for quite a while, so that’s how that ended up on the record,” explained Farris. “The fact that my wife and I got to be friends with Steve and his wife Angel over the past few years made it a little more special and a little more obvious to do it as well, and it’s a great arrangement. The intro and that long guitar part is just beautiful.”

Farris recruited respected Nashville photographer Ed Rode to shoot the album’s cover which is inspired by a photo that Hall sent Farris of the “Fame Gang” session musicians standing on an old railroad bridge in Muscle Shoals.

The bridge, now unusable by any modes of transportation, contains two levels: railroad tracks on the top level and a passage for cars underneath. Farris knew he wanted to shoot the album cover on the bridge but hit an obstacle on the day of the shoot.

“We got there, and it was locked off and you couldn’t get back to the bridge,” he remembered. “It just so happens as we pulled up, we were looking at this locked up gate and the owner walks up. We were like ‘Wow, what an opportune time for you to show up’ and so we went over, and it was blistering hot, and we shot it.”

The cover features Farris standing on an old railroad cart on the bridge facing towards Muscle Shoals with the city of Florence, Alabama behind him and the Tennessee River flowing under him.

“Ed just does such a great job of capturing stuff,” said Farris. “He’s done a lot of work with me over the years, so it was great to have him on it. I think he killed it too. I love the shot.”

While Farris has fond memories and an affection for his hometown of Winchester, he didn’t actually discover his musical talent until he moved to Murfreesboro during a rough spot when he “had no direction whatsoever in my life and was trying to figure out what I was here to do.”

“I was in a bad way and my dad took me in,” he explained. “I probably hadn’t seen my dad in years. My mom and dad divorced when I was young, so he was not really around that much, but I moved in, and he had this guitar.

Farris started teaching himself to play the instrument which he did within a month or so. He then woke up one morning with a song on his mind which ended up being the first song he wrote called “Gypsy Lullaby.”

“That was the beginning of it, and I just started doing song after song after song and within a year or a year and a half I was signed to Atlantic Records and had a major record deal going from zero to Mach 3 and touring the country,” he recalled.

Though his musical journey started elsewhere, Farris says he always enjoys reconnecting with his roots.

“It’s always good to come down and touch base with all my hometown folks which is really big for me.”