A Chat with Kevin Farge (19.05.26)
With his ambitious new 27-track album Country Love Song, Kevin Farge invites listeners into a rich, genre-defying world shaped by life in the Costa Rican jungle. Blending folk, jazz, alt-country, Brazilian rhythms and orchestral textures, the record explores themes of belonging, memory, and connection with striking warmth and intimacy. We chat with Kevin Farge to discuss the inspirations behind the album, his collaborative approach, and how living between cultures has shaped his music.
OSR: Country Love Song feels deeply tied to place. How did living and recording in Costa Rica shape the way these songs came together?
Farge: Being in Costa Rica helped me contextualize my life experiences within a broader context. It opened me up even more to culture from around the world and to my own humanity. Living in the countryside in Latin America, it feels like everything is an impossible distance across hostile terrain, intense tropical nature trying to grow over everything, and that brings with it a feeling of solitude. There’s a relaxed pace. I won’t say it’s “quiet” because my little country lane was actually pretty noisy most of the time. Chickens, motorcycles, dogs, flocks of parrots, downpours, but there’s a relaxed pace. What this meant for my music is that I had time to play, explore ideas fully, and follow them to their conclusion. I also had time to go surfing and experience the raw power of nature. Being so remote meant that when things broke, as they often did from the salt air, tropical heat, and humidity, I had to fix them or make do with the tools I had. But I think that some constraints are good for art. It helps you realize that the only real limitation is your ideas.
OSR: Did the natural environment around the cabin actively influence specific tracks, or was it more of a subconscious backdrop?
Farge: People talk about how painters like the Fauvists and Van Gogh moved to the South of France for the light. I wonder what those painters would have made of the amount of sunlight in my neighborhood. The natural landscape is absolutely flooded with light, and it makes all the colors brighter, more vivid. You can see that intensity of light in my music videos for Country Love Song. A lot of the sounds around my cabin got into the recordings – offshore wind through the mango trees, a mama horse and baby horse that lived around the cabin, a melodious blackbird. I tried hard to get clean recordings, but these sounds got in anyway. What the surf was doing would influence songs. On good surfing days, the ocean is serenely beautiful and organized. Coming off an amazing day- or week-long run of surf with perfect sunny weather and strong, cool breezes totally affects you. You work all of the tension out of your body. You’re immersed in water. You’re flying between air and water. These weeks were something really special. I tried to record music at these times to capture that feeling. In order to ride a wave, you have to match its speed and timing. You put your face close to its face. You feel its vibration. It vibrates your feet. This totally wild ocean wave. You sync up your thought wave to the ocean wave. It has a very calming effect.
OSR: With 27 tracks, how did you decide what belonged on the record and what didn’t?
Farge: I made 624 demos in the process of making this album. I would periodically go through and listen to them and see which ones made me feel something I liked. The 27 songs that made the final cut were the ones that I found the most interesting to listen to.
OSR: Was there ever a point where the album’s scale felt overwhelming, and how did you navigate that creatively?
Farge: Yes, definitely. In the early stages, I was just some guy alone in a cabin, sweating, trying to make something that inspired me. To navigate this, I just took one step at a time. Over time, it all adds up. All those versions of you that show up every day, that give their attention, their desire to make something beautiful, all those versions of you add up to a super you that can be more powerful than the single you. Broader, deeper, wiser than the single you.
OSR: You move between folk, slowcore, Brazilian jazz, and alt-country. Do you think of genre as something you actively blend, or something you ignore entirely?
Farge: I didn’t really notice how unusual the combination of like country, Latin, and indie music was until the time came to talk about the record with people. That was the point at which I noticed. I like to listen to lots of different styles of music – classic contemporary folk singer-songwriters – Georges Moustaki, Caetano Veloso, Donovan, Andrés Landero. I got really into this compilation, Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music, while I was working on the album. It has such a diversity of melodies. I like classical music. Jazz. I basically love it when anybody can play an instrument really well – this Greek clarinet player, Tassos Chalkias. I see listening to music as a means of exploring the human experience in different times and different places. Given that I listen to these things, that I’m surrounded by country and Latin music, and that I came up in the emo-punk-hardcore-indie scene as a teenager – listening to Texas bands like Explosions in the Sky, The American Analog Set, Bedhead – it feels natural to me that all of these things would influence my sound. I think of combining your cultural influences into a new style or scene as moving culture forward. Something that’s always been going on. Art forms can’t stand still. If they do, they die.
OSR: ‘Coastal Fog’ and ‘Frijoles’ feel like opposites in mood. Were those contrasts intentional when sequencing the album?
Farge: Yes, they were. Sometimes when I explore something fully, I incline to explore its opposite next. I wonder what I’m missing. I want to question my assumptions and try to pose a better question. Sometimes when you write a song for the girls, by the time you’ve finished it, you want to write a song for the boys. By the time you explore the dark, you want to explore the light.
OSR: Collaboration plays a big role here. What do you look for in a musical collaborator?
Farge: Someone whose art I love. When you love someone’s art, it’s amazing to see them at work in a new context.
OSR: How did working with artists like Little Wings shift your original ideas for certain songs?
Farge: Strangely enough, I kind of always had Kyle in mind for the songs he played on when I started writing them. In terms of shifting the ideas for certain songs, I mostly came to my collaborators on this album with already finished songs and with a specific space I had carved out for them. In a few cases, I brought in musicians whose playing I really like, like Pedro Alvide, and gave them sheet music for a part I had written, the clarinet part in ‘Night Bicycle’.
OSR: Do you approach instrumental tracks like ‘Pastoral’ differently from lyrical songs in your writing process?
Farge: ‘Pastoral’ is kind of a funny one because it’s a song I heard playing in a dream. It’s very strange the way it uses 11 of the 12 musical notes. It’s an 11-tone poem. It’s only missing F natural, and that missing F is maybe even part of the tension that propels it, an aspect of how the composition functions. I come to them both with a different need to communicate. When you really want to connect with someone, the more direct way is best. Sometimes talk is cheap. Sometimes, “use your words.” I use the medium that feels like the most direct method of communication.
OSR: If Country Love Song is a ‘world’, what kind of emotional landscape is it meant to inhabit?
Farge: I think Country Love Song is a tapestry of life. By showing lots of different facets of feelings, reframing characters in new contexts, the whole adds up to a fuller, richer experience, more reflective of life.
Many thanks to Kevin Farge for speaking with us. Find out more about Kevin Farge on his Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Spotify.
