But that doesn’t stop the Massachusetts native from writing a song about those towns or over 3,000 other places across the country. It’s a massive project he plans to finish up by sometime in July when he records his 50th state album.
“It’s always just been my instinct to create a lot,” Farley told HuffPost earlier this month, “I generally feel guilty if I’m not being creative. I just feel like I’m wasting time. I’m wasting time if I’m not in the midst of a project.”
The musician has made tracks under his “The Guy Who Sings About Cities & Towns” moniker for over a decade, and, as of late, he’s growing a new audience on TikTok, where users can’t get enough of his music.
Farley’s inspirations include Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. He said the more he listens to music, the more he finds the comedy burrowed in it ― noting The Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” as an example of humor from some of his favorite singer-songwriters.
Farley crafts his albums starting with a visit to Wikipedia, where he heads to a state’s municipalities pages, sorts places by population from highest to lowest, and proceeds to get to work penning songs about at least 50 different places.
“I think there’s a cumulative effect if you’re just listening to one after the other. Where you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, this guy thinks every place is wonderful. He’s out of his mind,’” Farley said.
Farley’s massive creative output isn’t anything new, either. However, he cites his songwriting with his friend Tom Scalzo in the 2000s as a testament to his productivity, adding that the duo forced themselves to record an album every day in 2006.
“Just under this belief that if you put this athletic approach to creativity, if you just force yourself to create something ― fight through the bad songs, finish the bad songs ― that will free you up to write the good songs,” Farley said.
“People worry about perfectionism so much it’s like they get frozen and they can’t finish a project. They say, ‘I’ve worked on this song for a year,’ but the truth is they worked on it for two hours in January, and then they worked on it for 30 minutes in December,” he said.
This content was originally published here.
