Interview: The Camino Side Project carves globetrotting new album, ‘Of Movement & Music’

Somewhere down deep, we all have a thirst for the wild. It’s an instinctual, perhaps even lustful, inclination for the unknown, but it is safeguarded behind walls of tradition and mundane conventions. When we dare to deconstruct such rigidly unfortunate circumstances, it’s like unwinding a spool of thread that acts as a makeshift dream catcher, subsequently netting other tent pole dreams. Alt-rock craftsman Paul Farran is such a revolutionary, if only for the sake of sanity in his humanity. But his new record, aptly titled Of Movement & Music, dismantles the system and penetrates the outer layer of noise. It’s 12 songs of connective tissue that loosely works as a snapshot of the world in this moment.

Having traveled the globe, weaving in and out of various countries, peoples and cultures, Farran, known as The Camino Side Project for this particular release, found a much greater purpose in his life. The music is a living and breathing entity, as demonstrably illustrated with such genre-defying standouts as “Jam in the Bus Lane,” the coolly-lit “A Taste for Change” and “Human Faces,” a Middle Eastern-adorned rip-chord session. Farran flies full-face into stormy weather and emerges far more enlightened than he could have anticipated. “My wife and I packed up and sold most of our belongings after six years in Zimbabwe working on international development issues with the United Nations. I had taken a few months off prior to that to plan the journey, plan our phase out from Zimbabwe and to hang out with the kids,” Farran tells B-Sides & Badlands about the album, which only found an existence in Farran’s fearlessness and proclivity for unruly adventure.

“We flew from Zimbabwe to Dubai to visit friends living there and then onwards to Bali, where our journey really started,” he continues, further describing his transformation as a side-lined observer to an active, unchained participant. “We felt, at that moment in our lives, that we needed to take a step back, detach ourselves from our comfort, throw ourselves into the wild and seriously bond as a family.”

From start to finish, the album is stacked in the order of the exact “itinerary of our trip,” he says. “If you look at the album art, you will see which country each song is connected to. While musically, for the most part, the songs are not inspired by the music of those countries, the songs are very much about the ‘feel’ and the inspirations we had in those places. You will see that track one is on Zimbabwe and track 11 is on Egypt (our last stop). The [last] track is an extra outro that is derived from track four (Singapore).”

Beneath the swelling guitar chords and frantically glued percussion, there lies Farran’s heart and soul. Through such a behemoth undertaking, risking everything and sacrificing parts of himself in each uncertain moment, Of Movement & Music uncovers the truth of music’s healing power. And in exposing himself for the sake of art and intimacy, Farran manages to allow the listener to soldier the pathways, too, and shed a former life in considerable ways. “This project has completely changed me. I had been out of the music scene since 2005, when I lived in Montreal and played in an alternative rock band. This half year journey gave me unintended clarity and space to create.,” he says. “When we got to Singapore (our second stop), I bought a travel size guitar, and a few weeks later had composed a few tracks, after which I decided to hit a studio when we got to Thailand.”

More importantly, the record “fundamentally altered my priorities and the ‘musts’ of my life,” he says, citing that a follow-up is already in the works. “I have learned an incredible amount, from composing to leading the recording process from beginning to end to working with amazing people and bearing witness to how dramatically different the ‘music scene’ is today.”

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