After spending an hour with Pokey LaFarge, it’s easy to start questioning reality—including who he really is. If the mob boss nickname wasn’t curious enough, then his retrofitted visage is a total mind trip. You start to wonder if he’s some kind of time traveler and if you should be alerting the appropriate authorities that a portal has been opened. Or, maybe he’s a ghost that’s channeling an innocent journalist instead of the Long Island Medium and her schmuck of a client that’s waiting for a dispatch from the other side.

It’s hard to reconcile that LaFarge lives in 2026 or that we are around the same age and from the same state; in LaFarge’s case, born Andrew Heissler in the thick weeds of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, in 1983. “Pokey” was a nickname his mom gave him for being a slow-poke kind of kid, and LaFarge was the identity he adopted when he started hitchhiking across the country to busk in the streets, figuring the surname matched his jiving jukebox music.

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Nothing about the musician screams “contemporary.” He uses words like “behoove” and “reckon,” wears swing dance attire like pressed tweed shirts and twill pants, slicks back his hair like he’s about to be called up to fight in West Side Story, and makes retro-scooting music that sounds like he just walked out the doors of Sun Records with a contract in hand from Sam Phillips himself.

LaFarge could be the coolest cat I’ve ever interviewed, one who’s surrounded in so much mystery. It’s hard not to be swayed by the conversation.

So, the fact that he’s sitting in front of what looks like an apothecary when we start talking about his new album Rent Money doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, either. What else screams bygone relic than a glass curio cabinet full of bell jars?

“Oh, that’s just some dry goods,” he clarifies, putting the rest of us who still keep our flour and sugar in the shitty dried-out bags they come into shame.

LaFarge is in a room off the kitchen at his home in Maine. He and his wife Addie Hamilton (a co-writer and backup singer in his band) moved there two years ago and are still figuring out the space and what to do with all the rooms, he says. “A house needs time to speak to you. It speaks very slowly,” he says in his poetic way.

At the time, LaFarge had been milling around California and Chicago and decided to follow his then-girlfriend up the Atlantic Coast. They’ve since gotten married and welcomed their baby girl Nina Ruth five months ago.

“[Addie] decided to act on this long-held love for Maine. She thought it was going to be somewhere she’d move to when she got older and retired but just couldn’t resist it anymore. It was still Covid times, early 2021. And I couldn’t tour anyway. So, we made the plunge,” LaFarge explains. 

Except he didn’t really know what to do when he got there. Maine didn’t have the typical music scenes of the Midwest or West Coast and his old-time hobby of busking felt moot with everyone cooped up inside their homes.

“The only thing I could really think of to do was to farm. So, I farmed for a season, and I learned some really cool life skills and immersed myself in the oldest profession in the world.” He sowed flowers—“dianthus, marigolds, nasturtiums, all that kind of good stuff,” he recalls—and vegetables like arugula, carrots, onions, garlic, and squash. “I kind of manned the pumpkins in the fall, which being from Illinois, should come natural to us, right?” he proffers. As he talks, he chomps on a toothpick resting in the corner of his mouth, like any good farmer would.

Much of the experience naturally carried over into his music, starting with 2024’s Rhumba Country where rocksteady-mambo-early rock ‘n roll songs like “You Make My Garden Grow” and “Home Home Home” became near diary retellings of his 12-hour shifts tilling the land and what he took away from going back to the earliest artisans, as he likes to think of them.

“Whether you’re a musician, an artisan, a craftsman, you’re working with tools. … We’re all skilled laborers. I saw it the same with farming. You’re painting with seeds that turn into colors and contours and textures, almost like sculpting. In that way, it’s like the first art form,” he rationalizes, conceding, “It’s something I don’t know that I could do for the rest of my life. I think a lot of people in the last two or three generations have said the same thing, because they didn’t have to. But if I had to do it, I reckon I probably would embrace it because manual labor is a love that I have. And it goes great with song. When I was out there in the field or in the greenhouse, songs would just come, and I’d like to think that that’s kind of how it was for people forever.”

LaFarge has been thinking a lot about the “old times” lately—more than usual. He’s always been obsessed with historic epochs like the Civil War and World War II and fascinated with the post-war boom and the sojourns of Route 66. A book that forever changed him was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. “I remember at that time I read it, it was exactly what I was looking for, basically an approval to say, leave and go travel. Go west,” he says, as curious about American road-tripping freedom as he is the music that soundtracked it. But those interests have gone deeper lately, especially as LaFarge holds up the past like a mirror to our current times.

“I wonder what people were saying in the ’50s and ’60s. Surely they thought the world was coming to an end then too,” he ponders. Thinking about that dichotomy laid the groundwork for the honest-to-goodness songwriting on Rent Money. It’s an album that’s as much a commentary on the current way of American life as it is a love letter to a time that was altruistically simpler and more of a slow cooker than the eternal hustle bus we find ourselves in now, to make “rent money” no one can afford.

“Life is seemingly moving so fast we can’t even keep up with our own advancements. AI being the perfect example. We can’t even keep up with it. I’ve been saying this for a long time. We’re evolving ourselves out of existence in a way. We’re not having kids and we’re making technology, generation after generation, that makes us completely indispensable in the workforce,” LaFarge laments, directly correlating his thoughts to the pastoral farm life he experienced.

“At the end of the day, it kind of comes back to so many people saying, I want to live a simpler life. Well, maybe that’s a rhetorical statement. But I’m answering this myself, though,” he adds with the firmness of someone taking a vow. “I want to live a simpler life. Have less stuff. And less stuff means the less pursuit of stuff, because the more stuff you have, the more you want. The more money you have, the more money you want. It’s always been that way and it will never change.”

You can hear this lesson on Rent Money’s opening track “The Thing,” in which LaFarge dissects that age-old obsession of keeping up with the Joneses. “The thing that I got ain’t the thing that I thought that I wanted,” he sings in the surf rock swing number.

Admittedly, LaFarge had to “unlearn some of these things over time” himself, and the modern world was a great teacher. The wealth disparity and little guy syndrome comes across in the obvious commentary of rock ‘n roller “Can’t Take It with You,” followed by the raconteur ramble of “Big Boss Man” (co-written with his wife), and the thigh-slapping jingle-jangle of the title track that debunks the 9-5 = American dream equation.

“I think a lot of people in the face of struggle or seeing other people prospering, they’re going to be like, what the heck? Why am I not? And it causes all kinds of feelings of covetousness, like, I want that or to hell with that person who has more,” LaFarge opines. “But we should still love our neighbor. If we loved our neighbor, maybe there wouldn’t be wealth disparity.”

Tucked in between the social commentary, though, there’s also an abundance of joy on the album, wrapped tightly with the bows of real values, like community (heard on the electric doo-wop of “Stick Together”) and family (the street blues of “My Baby Loves Me”).

Rent Money is the first release on LaFarge’s newly launched record imprint Boxer Boy Records, and it comes 20 years after the musician/singer professionally debuted in 2006 with Marmalade, kicking off a lucrative career. It’s one that nabbed him Independent Music Awards for Best Americana Album for 2010’s Riverboat Soul and 2011’s Middle of Everywhere, an entrance into the Top 30 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart for 2015’s Something in the Water, a Best New Band accolade at Newport Folk Fest in 2010 and, at one point, a spot on Third Man Records’ roster at the behest of fellow audiophile and Midwestern Jack White. After White worked on LaFarge’s Chittlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County in 2011, he signed LaFarge and his band and had them work on his solo debut Blunderbuss and open the accompanying tour in 2012.

That level of exposure eventually led LaFarge to Hollywood’s doorstep where his period piece perfection earned him bit parts as a saloon singer in Disney’s The Lone Ranger in 2013, portraying country artist Hank Snow in CMT’s Sun Records series in 2017, and a guitar-playing preacher sidekick in Netflix’s 2020 thriller The Devil All the Time.

But even with all the early career wins, going indie and writing Rent Money is admittedly one of LaFarge’s proudest moments. “I feel like with this record, I’ve come to a good place. I’m finally content with a record and pleased with a record for maybe the first time in my life. Because I think it’s a simple dish and it’s a quality dish,” he says, bringing the conversation back around to food and fresh from-the-land ingredients. “It’s not striving and it doesn’t have a bunch of spices and flavors that don’t belong there.”

He was helped in this pursuit by his go-to producer Elliot Bergman (of Wild Belle and La Lom fame). The album was recorded in Bergman’s suburban Chicago studio, where sister Natalie Bergman (another Third Man signee) provided extra backup vocals. “With Elliott, we have a lot of kinship … he’s into the weird old, what I’d just call soul music. And folk music from around the world. All different forms of African and Latin American music and Jamaican music, especially rocksteady stuff. Music that, at least in America’s modern culture, nobody really knows about or cares about,” LaFarge laments. “Until they do.”

The musician pokes fun at this kind of trend chasing on the solemn new track “Told You No,” a song that is inherently autobiographical, about staying true to who you are no matter what’s hot to trot. “A guy like me, I’ve been around for a long time, reintroducing myself to new audiences all the time,” he says, winding up his gears. “You really have to get used to rejection. That whole song is just basically about doing that thing, going your own way, plowing your own field. … a Renaissance man or a counterculture guy who’s always existed on the fringes of every single clique and norm of society. And everybody’s just sort of looking at the freak until, if somebody just gives him a chance and puts him on a platform, then all of a sudden it’s cool.”

LaFarge has always been a staunch one-of-one. Where he grew up in central Illinois, “there was nothing going on,” he says. “Maybe like a punk show in a basement or something. …Go to the Salvation Army, find some old dead drunk guy’s clothing,” he says with a laugh.

Unlike the alt rock and pop his friends were listening to, LaFarge got into bluegrass. It was a gateway from his grandfather who played in the St. Louis Banjo Club and gifted the budding talent with his first guitar, which he subsequently traded in for a mandolin.

At the moment LaFarge starts talking about family, his wife Addie brings out their baby girl, almost like it was scripted. “You want to meet her?” LaFarge asks, as if there’s any possible answer besides “yes.” Precious isn’t sufficient enough to describe Nina Ruth, with her rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, and tuft of blonde hair. She’s wearing a retro-looking sailor dress her parents picked up on a recent trip to Nantucket that altogether makes her look like a total Gerber or Life magazine baby, which makes you start to wonder again just what year it is and where the Heissler family came from. In a few moments, LaFarge gives his daughter back to Addie, who carries the tot offscreen as he carries on with his thoughts about his own childhood. “But yeah, kids, they’re like sponges,” he begins.

Beyond absorbing his elders’ influences, LaFarge’s schoolmates were also impactful. They were into classic rock like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grateful Dead, and the Allman Brothers Band. LaFarge liked that too, but what he really wanted to know was who those guys were influenced by. 

“I researched them, especially by going to the library. I’d go check out 10 CDs at a time and come home and burn them and I just was listening to music all the time. I’d see a record label and research it and find all the stuff that they had out. Or, I’d be like, this guitar player is sick, what other records is he on?” he explains, offering a wisp of advice. “You’ve got to be curious. Your own curiosity will cause you to search things out and when you search things out, you’re going to find what you’re looking for. Although it can get me in trouble sometimes, because you can’t shut the thinker off.”

But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we aren’t supposed to turn off the curiosity. Maybe searching and finding the hallmarks of American culture and pastimes like LaFarge did will give us a pathway to the future, if we can acknowledge and admire what came before and want to keep it going.

“We invented the blues here. We invented jazz. We invented country, rockabilly, Western swing. Disco. Hip-hop. I mean, you could go on forever. We should be grateful for that,” says LaFarge, talking like the true audio archivist that he is. “I think Jamaica would be proud of reggae. I think Colombia would be proud of cumbia. I think we should be proud of what we created. I mean that because I think it’s our greatest export. No matter what people want to say about our politics or about our people … music is the best voice for a culture. And our music is, well it’s the best. It’s changed the world.”

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