Pokey LaFarge (left) and his band at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. (Crummy cellphone pic by J. Allen)

Last week I saw Pokey LaFarge perform at the Empty Bottle (originally booked for Thalia Hall) and it was great — his stage presence was everything I expected and the musicianship of both him and his band was top notch. The first indoor concert I’ve been to since Covid, I’d been looking forward to it for awhile, since doing a deep dive on his music and interviewing him in October for a feature I did for Riff Magazine: Pokey LaFarge shows his lighter side on ‘Blossom of Their Shade.’

There was quite a bit more to our conversation, as Pokey was super generous with his time and open to questions, of which I had a lot. I always tend to over-prepare, as much because I enjoy the research process as because of my anxiety to justice to what I’m writing about, and I consider Pokey LaFarge to be the real deal: a true artist who follows in the footsteps of the likes of Tom Waits.

Here’s how I characterized his arc in a segment I ended up cutting from the profile:

“Pokey LaFarge is an American original. His already prolific career has taken him through several turns and iterations, from his start in the mid 00’s as a firmly acoustic custodian of Depression-era sounds with a popular touch and a romantic air. Sort of a new Woody Guthrie with a dash of Django Reinhardt – the mid-aughts were a time where bluegrass and gypsy jazz trended, though LaFarge didn’t fit right into either one of these slots, but could delight fans of either one.

“You can imagine some of his early fans felt conflicted when, like his fellow Midwestern bard Bob Dylan, LaFarge went electric, bringing in soul, rock and country sounds that evoked the golden ages of both Nashville and Motown. Today, LaFarge is pivoting again, drawing from an even broader canvas of sounds that include the Caribbean and South America.”

Pokey LaFarge press photo, 2021.

And here’s an excerpt from the published piece introducing the context of his latest release:

“On his seventh album, In the Blossom of their Shade, Pokey LaFarge and his band deescalate the intensity of his last two albums. The emotional highs of 2017’s Manic Revelations and 2020’s Rock Bottom Rhapsody came at a cost to the songwriter, who was hitting personal lows at the time.

“’Rock Bottom Rhapsody was very much written from a place of a person sort of perishing in darkness,’ LaFarge said. ‘Having come out of that, since the writing of that record and ultimately the recording of the record, I was in a much different state of mind once that record was released.'”

What I didn’t want to overstate, for obvious reasons given what Pokey has said about the personal turmoil of creating the two albums before this newest one, is that they’re really very good. I don’t want to uphold hackneyed, even damaging cliche’s about pain creating great art or something, and at the same time there is definitely some power in channeling intense feeling into one’s work that is evident on Manic Revelations and Rock Bottom Rhapsody.

I’m really happy for Pokey that sobriety, groundedness and spirituality were what he was able to find during the pandemic; when a lot of people were finding their rock bottom, provoked by circumstances, he was coming back from his. I’ll close here with another snippet that got cut for length and style from the Riff piece.

“In conclusion, LaFarge talked about staying hopeful despite the uncertainty of seeing another season of shows cancelled and tours cut short.

“‘If we just stay open to every day, maybe there’s one person that can touch. Maybe in this pandemic where we’re being called to rest for months and months and months, all those things that we’ve been learning while in seclusion will be a benefit to us and to others.’”