Album Notes

Fairfax: That nice young band next door Listen to Fairfax's first CD, Water Cooler Stories, and you'd expect to meet a group of very serious, introspective musicians, struggling to find the meaning in daily life. And you'd be right, sort of. When Nick Pagliari, Jeremy Stephens and Dennis Harris get together they seem more like nice young men than soulful musicians. The reality is they're both - which confuses people - but, say the three, they're used to that. "We met in college" says multi-instrumentalist Stephens, "I don't think we could really pinpoint an exact time when we looked around and 'Hey we're a band!' It just happened. We'd show up at different music clubs and places in Knoxville with all these other musicians and play shows and we really dug each other's playing. So, after a while, we decided we wanted to do something together." After graduation, it looked like the three would go their separate ways. But the ties of music - and friendship - proved stronger than distance. It wasn't long before they found themselves in Nashville and decided to become an official band. The name, Fairfax, came from the street where Pagliari and Harris lived for a couple of years. "I think one thing that was different about us was that we played mostly original stuff right from the start," continues Stephens. "And we have some pretty different musical influences, so we ended up with a really hybrid sound. People always want to know what to call it. We just tell them to call it music." While listeners might not know how to categorize their songs, they knew one thing - they liked what they heard. "People really responded to what we were playing," says Pagliari, Fairfax's guitarist and lead vocalist. "Which was great, because we feel very strongly about keeping our sound unique." And unique it is. It's also aching, yearning, searching and startlingly unaffected. A blending of folk rock, country and roots music, it is clearly a collection of songs and sounds aimed straight at the heart of the listener. Fairfax's lyrics talk of friendships gone sour (Swell) and facing a choice between committing to one's life or choosing death (Intervention.) Sometimes a song is simply about beauty found right in front of you (Angel Down.) For a bunch of guys who credit songwriters as disparate as Bob Dylan and Tom Yorke as influences, you'd expect them to be a little more, well, intense. "Nah," says the blue-eyed Pagliari, chuckling. "We just like writing songs." What's clear is that these are three individuals who obviously respect and admire each other, as both friends and musicians. There is much joking, teasing and laughing between Harris, Pagliari and Stephens whenever they're together. "I think that's one of our strengths,"says Harris, who plays drums and multi-percussion. "We like to hang out together. You're never going to see a documentary about Fairfax hiring a therapist and thrashing out all our interpersonal problems. "Sometimes I think people just expect us to be all tortured and angst-ridden because we're musicians. Sorry to disappoint everyone, but we're actually pretty well adjusted." Since arriving in Nashville in 2002, Fairfax has enjoyed a strong local following, earning Best New Band and Best Unsigned Songwriter in the 2003 Nashville Scene Readers Poll. While they're clear-eyed about the difficulties that face any unsigned band, they are also focused on their goals: make music, become successful, make more music, have a good life and avoid documentary filmmakers. "We're in a competitive field," admits Stephens. "This is Nashville and it's a city full of great bands. We're not in this to be mediocre. That's like a football player being content to warm the bench - heck no... he wants to win the Super Bowl. "We've spent the last two years polishing our sound and working on our craft so we can give this our best effort. Often times people listen to us and say, 'If I could do that I would.' I