An exclusive track from literally the most prolific songwriter in the world
We're honoured to debut Matt Farley's rendition of "The Death of Queen Jane"
Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every so often, we share a piece of new or gently-used work from an artist who's earned our respect.
There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves with us. This is Fellow Travellers.
The Very Nice Interesting Singer Man—“The Death of Queen Jane”
Play the song now. That’s not a helpful instruction, it’s a directive. Play it! Now!
Like a lot of indie musicians in his age group, Matt Farley started posting his songs online back in the early ‘00s. Unlike any of them, and possibly anyone else in human history, he has now released over 26,000 of said songs.1 366 of them are on the Best Birthday Song Band Ever’s Happy Birthday Songs for Each Day, all of them minor lyrical variations on the same jaunty one-minute Casiotone-sounding backing track (e.g. “It’s May 18 (And It’s Your Birthday”); several hundred concern poop and toilets (his songs as the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee; the Toilet Bowl Cleaners); and so on. This is to say: Matt Farley has range.
We weren’t quite sure what Farley was going to send us when he finally did, but it really could have been just about anything about any subject. What we wound up with was a haunting, deeply-felt rendition of the traditional English ballad “The Death of Queen Jane,” about the death in childbirth of Jane Seymour, famously the only woman King Henry VIII is said to have ever truly loved, which you can listen to above. One of our editors, upon hearing Farley’s version, was moved to tears by its pain and beauty. Followed by laughter upon finding out that it’s going to be on the same album as a cover of “I've Been Working on the Railroad.” It really does seem like there’s nothing the man can’t do—and, inevitably, it seems he eventually will do it all.
“Queen Jane” is a teaser from the upcoming Very Nice Interesting Singer Man release Good Old Folk Songs,2 his first record of traditional tunes. “I'm in the midst of a project in which I put out a ‘No Jokes’ release every month,” says Farley. “‘No Jokes’ is the name for my non-novelty songs. After four months of writing ‘No Jokes’ material, I wasn't feeling particularly inspired. Over the last month or two, I became obsessed with the song ‘The Death of Queen Jane,’ listening to every version of it that I could track down, over and over again. Then, I figured I'd continue doing old folk songs for the rest of the release.”
You can read about the rationale behind Farley’s whole volume-distro streaming conceit (which after many years of grinding now earns him a comfortable living) elsewhere—The New York Times for example, or in Leor Galil’s excellent Freaky 4 Farley zines. The economics don’t matter to us. What matters is that a good percentage of his stuff is legitimately, intentionally hysterical (we have a special soft spot for his spirited Ben Folds Five defence, “Brent Dicrescenzo, You Were Too Harsh On the Reinhold Messner Album,” by the Passionate & Objective Jokerfan), and an even better percentage than that is outsider-tinged indie rock of genuine quality.
Check out the playlist below for some of his finest and funniest, and listen to what he does with “Queen Jane.” Matt Farley is an artist like no other. And we’re honoured to say he’s now a Fellow Traveller.
Matt Farley is best known for releasing over 26,000 songs under dozens of pseudonyms. Stories about Farley have been published by The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and NPR, among many others. He has performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
His movies with Charlie Roxburgh are the subject of the book *Motern on Motern* by Will Sloan and Justin Decloux, as well as Leor Galil's zine series *Freaky 4 Farley*.
Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.
That’s like 26 John Darnielles. Hell, it’s like three-and-a-half Ilaiyaraajas.
Title subject to change, at least until he puts it up at the end of this week.
MORE FELLOW TRAVELLERS
Cathedrals
A photo-essay of the high strange backroads of New Brunswick, and the brain fog of a man suffering partial amnesia.
Lol. I remember first hearing Matt Farley's songs on the Bone Zone Podcast 10 or 15 years ago, and being slightly confused when they played a song that commented on how often one of the hosts (Randy Liedtke) shits every day (eleven times, apparently)