Pokey LaFarge Built Rent Money Around the Almighty Dollar

“Hambone” is the track that gives the game away. It is fully revved up and still stripped down, which is a difficult combination to arrange and an easy one to miss if you are only counting instruments. There is real energy in it and almost nothing holding the energy up. That balance is the working method across Rent Money, the eleventh-hour argument of a record preoccupied with the almighty dollar.

Pokey LaFarge released it on 10 September through Boxer Boy Records, catalogued BBR002, with eleven tracks and Elliot Bergman producing. Bergman also produced Rhumba Country, and the continuity matters because the two records do not sound alike. One producer, two very different builds, two years apart.

Where the Scaled-Back Sound Came From

Rhumba Country was the expansive one. Rent Money is deliberately smaller: light blues, jazz, easy reggae, folk, country and rock and roll, all handled in a minimalist manner rather than layered up. The same hand shaped both, which rules out the usual explanation that a new producer changed the palette.

What it leaves is a decision. A writer who has made a dozen or so studio releases across two decades has enough catalogue to know what a full arrangement buys him and what it costs. Pulling instruments out of a track is not an economy measure at this stage of a career; it is a choice about what the listener should be able to hear underneath.

On this record what is underneath is usually a groove and a lyric with nothing to hide behind. “Big Boss Man” runs on a slow-rocking groove. “Can’t Take it With You” has a slippery one. “My Baby Loves Me” sits on a slow blues with vibrating guitars doing most of the colouring. None of those need a bigger arrangement, and all three would lose something inside one.

The Title Track Arrives as Reggae

The song the record is named after is played light, in a reggae feel. That is a choice worth pausing on, because the obvious setting for a song called “Rent Money” is a blues, and the blues was available: LaFarge has been making records that could carry it for twenty years.

Reggae does something different with the same subject. It puts the rhythm on the offbeat and takes the weight off the downbeat, so a lyric about not having enough arrives without the self-pity a twelve-bar would supply for free. The tradition is full of songs that carry hard subjects on light rhythms, and this is a version of that, carried across from a Caribbean lineage into an American writer’s catalogue.

It also sets up the record’s range. Once the title track has established that the arrangements will travel, the shadowy sambas and funk-soul passages elsewhere on the album read as part of a plan rather than as genre tourism.

Eleven Songs and Where They Point

The running order is “The Thing”, “Big Boss Man”, “Rent Money”, “Can’t Take it With You”, “Work”, “My Baby Loves Me”, “Hambone”, “On and On”, “Told You No”, “Stick Together” and “Stranger”. Read as a list, the titles do most of the thematic work before a note is played.

“The Thing” opens with backing vocals from Addie Hamilton, who recurs across the record and is the closest thing it has to a second voice. “Told You No” is staged as a late-night noir scene with trumpets used to carry it. “On and On” closes the album accented with horns and organ, which is the fullest the arrangements get and is placed last for that reason.

The one song that has drawn criticism is “Stick Together”, described as a good-hearted but naive call for unity that lands too simply. That is a fair reading of a direct lyric, and it is also the risk a writer takes when the arrangement is this bare: there is no production to soften a line that does not quite carry.

Why the Money Songs Are Not Protest Songs

Records about money in this tradition usually split into two camps. One is protest, which names a system and argues with it. The other is endurance, which describes getting through the week and leaves the argument to the listener.

Rent Money sits in the second camp. Capitalism is the subject in the sense that the bills are the subject, and the songs are about hard work in hard times not always covering what it is supposed to cover, in practical terms and in spiritual ones. The record reaches for the classic country essentials to get through the day rather than for a manifesto.

That places it in a long line. The provenance of the American song about not having enough runs back through honky tonk, through the Depression-era string bands, through gospel, and it has almost always been carried by writers describing their own circumstances rather than by people speaking on behalf of others. LaFarge’s version updates the specifics without changing the stance.

What Two Decades of Catalogue Buys a Writer

The description that has attached itself to this record is kitchen-sink Americana: old-timey meeting newfangled, boogie running into gospel blues. That is accurate as a list of ingredients and it undersells the control, because a dozen or so studio releases teaches a writer which of those ingredients can share a track.

The compositions here are tight and well balanced rather than sprawling, which is the difference between a record that draws on many traditions and one that merely collects them. The result reads as pragmatic and boundless at once, orderly and feverish, which sounds like a contradiction until you hear “Hambone” and understand that the energy and the restraint are doing the same job.

It is a version of the same craft argument running through this year’s roots releases, including the writing that put Ken Pomeroy up for Album and Emerging Act at the Americana Honors: the players who are getting attention are the ones editing hardest.

What a Minimal Arrangement Asks of the Players

A stripped-back record is harder to play than a full one, which is the opposite of how it sounds from the outside. In a dense arrangement a small timing error is covered by whatever else is happening in the bar. In a sparse one there is nothing to cover it, so every entrance is exposed and every player is audibly responsible for their own part.

That is why the grooves on this record are described in terms of feel rather than complexity. A slow-rocking groove, a slippery one, a slow blues: none of those are technically demanding to execute and all of them are demanding to hold. Sitting behind the beat for three minutes without drifting is a skill that does not show up in a transcription.

The same applies to the singer. With the arrangement pulled back there is no doubling, no thickening, nothing to sit the voice inside. Hamilton’s backing vocals are doing structural work rather than decorative work in that setting, because a second voice is one of the few things that can widen a track without adding density to it.

It also changes what a mistake costs. On a record built this way a take either has the feel or it does not, and there is limited scope to fix it afterwards without the repair becoming the most noticeable thing in the mix. Records like this tend to be cut with more of the band playing together and fewer overdubs, because that is the practical way to get parts that breathe with each other rather than parts that merely line up.

Who Carried the Record

Bergman’s production is the through line, and Addie Hamilton’s backing vocals are the recurring colour. Beyond that the record is built on arrangement decisions rather than on personnel: trumpets where a noir scene needs them, horns and organ held back until the closer, guitars left vibrating rather than cleaned up.

For listeners who came to LaFarge through the more expansive records, Rent Money will take a couple of passes. It gives up less on first hearing because there is less happening on the surface. What it gives up on the third and fourth is the writing, which is the part that has to carry a record this bare, and which is why the arrangement was pulled back in the first place.

Reviews are running warm. Glide reads it as keeping the retro spirit alive on a groovy set; No Depression describes it as a softly eccentric concoction and one more present for the present. Both are responses to the same thing: a writer with nothing left to prove making a small record on purpose. The full track-by-track is in Glide’s review, with a second reading at No Depression.