Zac Farro Announces Solo Album

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Zac Farro of Paramore will release Operator on July 18th. Today he’s shared “My My.”

Zac Farro today announces Operator, his first album under his own name – after years working under the moniker Halfnoise, in addition to his work in Paramore. The album is due out July 18 via Congrats Records, a label founded by Farro. Along with the album announcement, comes “My My,” an ambling country-folk song about dealing with a family member’s sickness. It’s one of the songs on the record that was the hardest for Farro to make, but it’s the track’s raw, openly emotional feeling that gives it its magic. 

Farro spoke on the track and said, “‘My My’ is a personal song about witnessing a loved one try to let go of someone they care for deeply. That kind of silent pain. This song holds a lot of weight and captures those moments of reflection and processing that run throughout the album.” 

Operator explores timeless, but endlessly fascinating, questions: What goes on in those heads of ours? Why can the simplest interactions lead to a total freakout? Is someone else at the controls, a tiny person flicking a switch to “anxiety” every time we get a paragraph-long text? Across the record, Farro interrogates anxieties, family issues and communication breakdowns in hope of working out, fundamentally, why we’re all like that. 

In Farro’s hands, what could have been all doom and gloom becomes a thoroughly celebratory affair: Operator is an odyssey of sumptuous ‘70s rock and light-touch psychedelia inspired by the classic records that have held Farro through hard times. Working with close friends Josh Gilligan and Chancey Pierce  – linchpins of the Nashville scene that Farro has found himself embedded in in recent years – Farro, for the first time in his life, let vibe and intuition guide him, without an overarching influence or theme in mind. “We said, let’s show up at the studio and see what happens. I’ve always had such a vision, even sometimes the name of an album, before I go in,” he says. “This one was like, if we’re together, the magic will reveal itself. And it did.” 

At its core, Operator’s central idea is universal: how can we better connect with other people? The album’s opener and title track sets the tone: “Finally got the message / You’ve been trying to send me / But I keep on missing the point,” sings Farro, over lush production that splits the difference between Laurel Canyon and exotica. Operator is an album length quest to engage in a stronger, deeper way, and the title track acts like its mission statement, finding Farro wishing he could stop all the noise rattling in his head and just focus on the people around him. 

In a sense, Operator is a love letter to the community that exists around Farro: his partner and his family, of course, but also the community in Nashville that chipped in to make the album and the musicians who have inspired him on the way. 

That, in essence, is what Operator does, too, highlighting the unique aesthetic sensibilities, heartfelt lyricism and unrivalled technical chops of Farro, a veteran musician who is only now, twenty-plus years into his career, stepping out under his own name. A contemporary record with a healthy investment in the classics, Operator is a testament to understanding yourself through music and finding meaning in its creation. For listeners, it might act as a salve – something to put on to quiet the rattling that goes on up there, to allow a moment of calm in order to search for the kind of peace Farro’s found too.

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