Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice)
Album | John Fahey
Solo acoustic Fahey writ large.
In 1973, John Fahey got dropped from his first and only major label after his two albums for Reprise Records, Of Rivers and Religion and After the Ball, failed to sell in Joni Mitchell-sized numbers. Moving away from the heavily orchestrated, New Orleans jazz-influenced sound of those albums, Fahey reactivated his own Takoma label and recorded the intimate Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice), a small masterpiece of long-form solo guitar composition that Fahey more than once cited as a personal favorite of his own albums. Containing only three songs -- each taking its title from a line in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets -- this album is solo acoustic Fahey writ large, with his trademark finger-picked blend of Charley Patton and Charles Ives stretching out for seven to 24 minutes at a time, occasionally teasing out snatches of folk and blues standards amidst the hypnotic patterns. A line on the back cover dedicates the album's tranquil acoustic explorations to "My guru, Swami Satchidananda." In typical Fahey style, he later claimed his primary interest was in the Swami's fetching young personal secretary.
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