Download The Farm
This. Is hilarious. The A side has an old geezer, who occasionally doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, having a conversation with a young farm owner from Vermont, Charles Dana, about all of the animals wandering around the farm. The dialog is SO awkward. The old guy asks the most obvious questions and says things like, “Well, I see you have a cat here” and “What’s that thing out in the barn there bawling like a lamb?” (answer: goat). He’s basically the worst person to just shoot the shit with. And the farmer sounds like he’d rather die than explain what the animals are up to.
Of course, while this whole conversation is going on, there’s all sorts of animal sounds. So not only are two guys uncomfortably chatting about farm life but they’re surrounded by peeping chicks, cows, horses, pigs, turkeys, and some other guy calling the sheep & cows from the fields. They went for the ultimate in realism over here. It’s like you’re actually ON A FARM. Except they clearly recorded all of the animals separately and tried to string it together with a single conversation afterwards. “Oh, look what’s here. Pigs!” Yeah, good segue there buddy.
The B side is the exact same as the A side, except it’s just the animals. The interview is gone and you’re left with a strange array of farm sounds. In other words, way less entertaining. Clearly the meat of this album is listening to these two dudes talking about the automatic milking of cows and the problems of raccoons.
Droll Yankees looks like an amazing label. They put out a bunch of records like this, all with great album art, but about all sorts of things. Grave diggers, tug boats, bird songs, all aspected of New England life they tried to document. Some guy got kind of obsessed with the label for a bit and did a fair amount of research and independent cataloging, picking up as many copies as he could find. Definitely a worthwhile little page he has set up. Hope it helps me find some more Droll Yankees records.