Two’s Company
Lou Barlow and Bobby Bare, Jr. swap songs at The Rockwell on Sunday, 4 May 2025.
Apparently this is a “Nashville tradition”?
Folk artists from everywhere do it all the time too.
Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️
Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️
It was an intimate evening of songs and stories as two veterans of above- and underground music shared a stage at The Rockwell. The date was part of a mini-tour finding the point of intersection between the emo-forward indie strumming of Lou Barlow and Bobby Bare, Jr.’s alt take on Nashville.
Barlow played the role of local yokel. Sure enough, he came of age in (western) Massachusetts (after moving from Michigan?). Not really “Boston” Boston, though he did share an anecdote about briefly apartment dwelling somewhere in Back Bay.
There were probably not too many souls in the Somerville theatre who could relate these days to real estate musings from the toniest part of Boston. But twenty or thirty years ago? Sure, you could find a garden apartment share within a reasonable price range.
I think I looked at an apartment share in Back Bay around 2003. The prospective roommates wouldn’t have had a room for me – instead, there was a cubby with a curtain for about $450/month. That didn’t scare me off, but they must have found a better cubby dweller, because I never heard back.
Bobby Bare, Jr.
Bobby Bare, Jr.
Bobby Bare, Jr. has had a long and illustrious career in music, but if you don’t recognize the name, you’ll at least recognize the name of the band that he’s been a longtime member in, Guided By Voices. The guy has got indie rock royalty stories pouring out of every orifice. So he makes a nice pick for a storytelling type of evening. One major takeaway: I didn’t realize that scene did so much blow (not Bobby so much, the scene in general), but I guess they were all coming out of the go-go ‘80s with a strong tailwind.
Lou Barlow
Lou Barlow
Barlow brought two instruments: an acoustic six-string and what I took to be a bass ukulele. He took a few song requests, but otherwise plowed through material of his own choosing. Some classics, some deeper cuts I didn’t recognize.
I paid particular attention to his strum pattern, which had a tremendous amount of influence on my own playing when I was a kid. It’s a feathery, quasi twee, limpwrist strum that I took to be synonymous with indie rock as I understood it in the 90s. Watch the recap for some closeups of the style. I make no claims that Barlow invented this style – he might have absorbed it from his musical surroundings and influences.
If there were earlier representatives of the strum in popular music, I’d be interested in finding that out. Maybe somewhere in the annals of folk? You don’t really hear young bands reproducing it these days, so it continues to stand out to me as a signature sound associated with Lou Barlow, Sebadoh, Folk Implosion, what have you, and that indie rock era in general.
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Lou Barlow and Bobby Bare, Jr. swap songs at The Rockwell.