When Rick Faris released his first solo album Breaking in Lonesome in November 2019, he was enjoying playing his own music. He had written all but one of the songs on the album, which was taking off. In January, he gave notice to Greg Cahill of Special Consensus after playing mandolin with the band for six years and guitar for five, planning to leave the group with the close friendships intact.
“Then the world fell apart in March,” he said. But Faris found ways to make the most of the enforced change of pace.
“I did a lot of things during the pandemic. I started a fitness journey and lost 62 pounds,” he said, adding that he had resumed running, after having slacked off following a knee injury. When Covid came, he said, he realized “The fitter you are, the better off. Time to dust off my running shoes.” With the shutdown, he found other important ways to spend time.
While playing with Special Consensus, Rick had been on the road 180 days every year.
“And if I wasn’t recording, I’d be gone even more,” he said. His wife Nicole gave birth to their second son in July 2020, and he has missed only 17 days of his life, which he considers a great blessing, something he had missed when his older son was small.
Like many in the music business, Faris felt some anxiety during the pandemic. He says Special Consensus had only four gigs that didn’t fall through between March 2020 and March 2021. He had also invested in his own solo career the previous November. Suddenly finding himself with free time, he says he ticked items off the long “honey do” list and got used to sleeping in his own bed again.
He was also able to focus on his luthier business. “Honestly, my waiting list was getting out of control and starting to cause anxiety. People had to wait three years for a guitar, but now I’ve been able to whittle that down to eighteen months,” Faris said. “I definitely had my bouts of thinking, ‘Oh my goodness! What am I going to do?’ because our living was swept right out from under us.
He found he had more time to spend with his dad, who is disabled and lives just north of Rick’s family. “I moved the shop out there to spend more time with him,” he says. Faris got his musical start playing in his family bluegrass band. His father, whom he calls a phenomenal singer and picker, played country and western swing, as well as the bluegrass. He also played fiddle for Reba McIntire.
Faris has spent some of the most productive time over the last months writing new songs and recording his second solo album The Next Mountain, produced by Stephen Mougin at his Dark Shadow Recording Studio. Faris wrote or co-wrote all the songs on the project, five with one of his regular writing partners Rick Lang.
Several singles have been released off the new record so far, including some Dark Shadow double releases: both gospel songs were released together, “See You on the Other Side,” written with Lang, and “Can’t Build a Bridge to Glory, co-written with Becky Buller. “Laurel of the Mountains” and “Evil-Hearted You,” were also released together. The first is a love song Faris had in the works for a couple of years before switching it from present day to the end of the Civil War.
He said, “I was trying to make it work, just forcing it. I knew I had a pretty melody, but it never completely came together, so I changed keys and did a drop D tuning, then changed it to Appalachia instead of the mountains of Montana, which was originally in my mind. Everything just fell into place with a change of time and venue.”
The instrumental “Dust on the Royal” is a tribute to his team, Kansas City. “I was always impressed at how hard baseball players work. They have the most games of any sport, and they’re always beating themselves up and diving for plays. They’re constantly covered in dust from sliding into base and dusting themselves off. That’s inspiring.”
He says up until the week of recording, he and Mougin were still narrowing down the list of songs for the The Next Mountain. Faris said sometimes when he felt strongly about a song, he would play it again to fine tune and craft it until it was the best the song could be.
“One was ‘Evil Hearted You.’ I told Stephen, ‘We’ve got to do this song and get the McCourys to record it.’”
Mougin told him, “All right. Convince me. I don’t hate the song but make me thinks it’s better than this other one on the list.” He says after the first chorus, Mougin said, “Yep! You sold me. Let’s do it.”
Faris says that “Evil Hearted You” was actually written for the McCourys. He says, “I wanted to record that song with them. I wanted a Del-esque tune, where there’s no denying it’s their style because I’m such a fan of those boys and Del.” Faris got his wish with Ronnie McCoury featured on the single. He said, “I was floating on cloud nine having them in here. I was grinning like a fool!”
Faris says the order of songs on The Next Mountain was quite intentional. “We always want it to flow well in terms of chord changeups, key change ups, different tempos,” said Faris. “If songs are similar, we want to make sure that they are quite a bit apart. We felt strongly—both Stephen and I—about putting “What I’ve Learned” first. We wanted to set the tone of the record as an humble offering of perspective gained. I know that love is the most important thing we have to offer this world—coming together, being humble, being a good person, being someone who can be a good friend. That has come to the forefront with Covid. It’s made the world a stark contrast. You see the best in people and the worst in people,” he said.
Faris says he learned many important lessons first as a luthier. He credits much of what he learned about life, literature, and history as well as crafting instruments to Jim Baggett, who runs Mass Street Music. “He’s a pre-war afficionado. He was very helpful with literature. Any time he had a guitar part, he’d say, ‘Bring your calipers, grab your notebook and pencil. Come and take notes and measurements.’ Every guitar that I finished I would bring it to him for constructive criticism. And I wanted to have real criticism so I could get better. It takes humbling yourself and saying, ‘What do I need to work on? What is the next step?’ At first it was looks. They sounded good but they were rough.
He says, “Baggett would tell me, ‘Spend a little more time on your pour fill or your scraping.’ Whatever it was. I learned so much those first few years by humbling myself and saying, ‘I don’t know it. I need to find it out.’ I think I’ve gotten to a point in my life when I can approach anything with an amount of humility that is healthy. My faith, building, singing, writing, all of it. I love learning. I think it’s put me in a good spot so far.”