Rat Farm

Album: Rat Farm (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the title track of Arizona alternative rock three-piece Meat Puppets' fourteenth full-length studio album. The band's singer/guitarist and primary songwriter, Curt Kirkwood described the record to Songfacts as "real blown-up folk music." He elaborated: "I tried to write stuff that would be easy to learn and easy to play, just try and make it stand on its own that way with just the chords and the melodies. And then just play it kind of straight. That was the guiding boundaries that I gave myself, I didn't want to get too complicated. In the past, Cris [Kirkwood, bass] would go, 'That's all this is? Let's put a prog rock part in the middle,' but I tried to hold it off as much as I could."

    "I'm always trying to do that, just be as simple as possible," he continued. "It tends to make something stick for me a little bit better, because I don't have to think about it that much when I'm playing it. And then I might actually wind up playing it live at some point. I make a lot of records and then it never sees the light of day at gigs. Just turns out to be something that doesn't feel that natural to play."

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