Andrew Farriss hardly needs an introduction to music fans. He is the man behind the songs that saw INXS sell more than 50-million albums throughout their career. Consequently his music has been on welcome and constant radio rotation globally for over 3 decades.
Andrew’s new single, Son Of A Gun remains true to the classic wild west inspired country concept of Andrew Farriss’s self-titled album, a collection of songs traversing roots, blues, Americana and country, released internationally earlier this year BMG.
Andrew explained “
Son Of A Gun is my vision of a tragic tale set in earlier times. It’s about a young gunslinging outlaw , who thinks he can solve all his problems with a gun, even though his father warned him that the devil lies on both ends of a gun. However the law eventually tracks him down to a silver mine where his fate is sealed and he winds up in a grave. Even today this still happens.”
A true cowboy track, Son Of A Gun, was penned towards the end of the recording process, specifically for the album release. Andrew wanted a song about an outlaw, a young man who is always on the other side of the law. It evokes imagery of gun-slinging cowboys and an old-Western mentality. The resulting track is actually one of Andrew’s favourites.
“The music was tracked before I had any lyrics written,” he says. “Then I took it back to my hotel room and worked on the melody and the lyric idea of Son Of A Gun on my own, using the template of the instrumental recording that I’d already tracked in the studio. Ironically, that is a very similar way to the way I used to work when I was working with INXS. I would come up with the music bed first. I thought if you can write a music bed that has no singing, and people still like the music, then that is pretty good. When I tracked the music in Nashville the guys thought it was funny that I had no lyric for it, I said, ‘don’t worry, I will be back’. I sat down and listened to the music bed and realised that I had a lyric idea that I always wanted to write a song about, and here it is – Son Of A Gun.”
The film clip for Son Of A Gun was filmed between two continents; “because of the similarities between our farm, Piedmont Station, in Northern NSW and the ranch in Arizona
where I had shot some other videos, we were able to put together the two locations into this video seamlessly.” The clip features local cowboys who also featured in Andrew’s previous western inspired videos Come Midnight and Good Mama Bad. The clip is a cinematic journey of the outlaw – Farriss added that “in these uncertain times where the entire world is struggling one way or another, I think this track and it’s video are a bit of escapism to a different era, like a short music version of the movie Tombstone.”
Son Of A Gun is the fourth single from Andrew’s self-titled solo album . His previous singles – Run Baby Run, released in early 2021, Good Momma Bad, released at the start of 2020, and Come Midnight, released in 2019 – have already garnered strong radio support.