Tyler Farr on Musical Heartache, Redneck Hate and New Album
“If people don’t hate you, you’re doing something wrong,” says Tyler Farr in his gruff, almost mumbling voice. He’s seated in a corner booth at a restaurant outside Nashville, a glass of brown liquor and a separate glass of Coke, no ice, in front of him. He never mixes his whiskey and sodas.
His music, however, beginning with his breakout hit “Redneck Crazy,” has certainly stirred up country music fans. Some herald Farr and his boisterous style as the second coming of Hank Williams Jr., while others malign him as loutish and overly brazen. Those in the latter camp likely came to that conclusion solely via “Redneck Crazy,” with its aggressive lyrics about driving onto a cheating girlfriend’s lawn and throwing beer cans at her window. As the Garden City, Missouri, native points out, they were empties.
“[Carrie Underwood] keyed a guy’s truck,” he says, citing “Before He Cheats.” “I didn’t even do that. I threw empty beer cans. Empty, not frozen. But keying a truck, that’s okay.”
The reality of “Redneck Crazy,” though, is that the song, written by Josh Kear, Mark Irwin and Chris Tompkins, was a lark. Farr admits that after two failed singles, including the personal ballad “Hello Goodbye,” which he co-wrote, he was looking to make a statement. “I was kind of in a point of devastation. ‘Hello Goodbye’ I thought was the best written song and best country song on the album. But it didn’t do nothing. I was mad, and I was like, ‘I guess the only thing to do now is to stir things up.’ I saw ‘Redneck Crazy’ and I was like, ‘That oughta do it.'”
Arriving atop the wave of bro-country releases, the song was all testosterone and muscled its way to Number One on the Mediabase Country Singles chart.
“It was my first breakthrough hit into country music and now I have to sing it the rest of my life,” says Farr, taking a sip of whiskey and a sip of Coke. “I don’t hate the song, I love the song. I think it’s different, it’s unique, and I’ll stand by that until the day that I die.”
Even so, “Redneck Crazy” would stand out like a hillbilly at a dinner party if it were included on Farr’s superb new album Suffer in Peace, released this week via Columbia Nashville. For all his manly bravado — Farr delights in sharing a video on his iPhone of him calling in a doomed turkey for a friend that morning — the 31-year-old singer and avowed Bocephus disciple has released the feeling-man’s country album. While Suffer in Peace opens with the infectious, Hank Jr.-like anthem “C.O.U.N.T.R.Y.” — and its unfortunate reference to “truck nuts” — the bulk of the album does what few contemporary country releases do today: explore the human condition. Especially in its title track.
“Suffer in Peace,” written by Aaron Barker and Phil O’Donnell, is the sort of hurting song at which country music used to excel. After his woman up and leaves him, the character in the lyrics retreats — in his mind, anyway — to a cabin in the hills, where he loses himself in the wilderness to grieve in solitude.