Video Premiere | Snarlin’ Yarns: “Don’t Go Fishin’”

by Chet Weise

When I first met the Snarlin’ Yarns, I had smoked a joint, drunk bourbon, and watched the lights turn out from house to house on an Ogden hillside. I don’t drink much anymore, and although I still smoke the hobbit’s weed, I do so as a lightweight. So naturally, we began to talk about Randy Rhoads. The first and best guitar player for Ozzy. As if by some molten-metal-magic-wizardry, the Yarns’ guitarist, William Pollett, produced the rare Quiet Riot record featuring a pre-Ozzy Randy Rhoads on guitar. It’s not an easy record to find. Nor is it a record that many might want, but those of us who do, want it very badly. I was shocked when Pollett insisted I take the record home. You see, I had read poems that day to Yarns’ wordsmith Abraham Smith’s classroom. He’s a poet laureate and teacher. When he plays his voice with the Yarns, improvising in and out of the fiddle lines, banjo, guitar, it’s only right to feel like bluegrass has finally found its lead guitar hero, but instead of dive bombs, Abe announces himself in word bombs and anaconda assonance. Instead of pick slides, it’s the smooth blue long vowels; instead of finger-tapping, it’s an eruption of short, bright boldfaces of alliteration. After watching the valley lights turn off in Utah, the Yarns graciously asked me to pick up a guitar and join in their jam like bluegrass and string bands do, and I did try, but I sounded too selfish for this crew. Mara Brown’s fiddle chose notes so perfectly, and Jason Barrett-Fox’s banjo taught the song. I happily stopped playing and finished a joint that would’ve made Tommy Chong need to play Zep’s Moby Dick, but I just listened and smiled. The Yarns are full of surprises, subtleties, and generosity. Their music makes you feel at home. They’re the kind of band that can tell you to fuck off, and you smile and say, “Cool.” They are subverting their genre. It needed to be done. Thank you, Snarlin’ Yarns.

About the Record

It would be easy to describe the Snarlin’ Yarns as cutting-edge bluegrass with the added edginess of a surreal poet. But that’s a lame sentence with an outdated sense of poetics. Not to mention reductivist. There are four voices and one ghost on the Snarlin’ Yarns debut full-length, Break Your Heart. Jason Barrett-Fox, Abraham Smith, Mara Brown, William Pollett, and one ghost. It’s banjo, fiddle, guitar, poems, “hairspray blowing in a fire,” and one ghost. That haint is truth. It’s there in every word, whether from lyric, poem, or footstompin. The haint is asking why did you do this to me? I’m a sacred American art form! Why am I vanishing? Why am I turning ghost? What will all the Americana fests and venues do? On the third day, the stone will be rolled back and you will come back reborn, walk into the street, wounded, but new, and scare the shit out of some Americana fucker who thought you were dead, buried, and yesterday. Ghost, you’re no longer a ghost, you’re a new truth. Break their hearts and leave them reborn-ing in your wake, but still with an everlasting 4/4 bootheel stomp that has brought rejoice-ments since Darwin walked into the Garden of Eden to join Adam and Eve roasting campfire smores.

About the Video

How do you turn a picnic table into a rowing boat? Never close your eyes and don’t go fishing. “Don’t Go Fishin’” is the new video by Ogden, Utah’s Snarlin’ Yarns. Refusing to stay on dry land, the band recorded in Water Valley, Mississippi. Mara Brown’s vocal is perfect like a summer day on the water, and it doesn’t matter that all the bass are lying deep in the mud instead of biting, when that dark line and wake of a water moccasin appears coming straight at the bow in the voice of poet Abraham Smith, who takes this perfectly balanced work of harmonium and crashes it into the abstraction of our online life:

I should’ve known when my computer grew horns
thank you for the seventeen emails
and that picture of your flip flops
that don’t flip
every time I get an email from you
it’s like a smoke machine fires it up
there’s a little bit of smoke coming out of the sides
I can see it twinkling out of the ampersand.

Why did he bring that wildness into this perfectly rustic fiddle song? Because that’s what the Snarlin’ Yarns are about. Salvador Dali said that surrealism meant “extra real,” and that’s why the Yarns are rowing a picnic table steered by a laptop. This is the real life we all live in these strange days of oxymorons like “new normal.”