Jay Farrar recently hammered yet another nail in the Uncle Tupelo coffin in a Q&A with Metromix Greenville, saying, “I don’t ever want to see [an Uncle Tupelo reunion] happen, and I don’t think even what Perry Ferrell suggests will make it happen.” What Perry Ferrell had suggested was that a Jane’s Addiction reunion would happen “when the sky rains money.” So the bad news is that money can’t buy a Jeff Tweedy/Farrar reunion, but the good news is that his Kerouac-inspired collaboration with Ben Gibbard makes a pretty good replacement in the interim.

The pair enlisted Nick Harmer, Mark Spencer, and Jon Wurster for a 6-night jaunt through a few major U.S. cities and they even branched out a bit from their album One Fast Move or I’m Gone. Watch here or embedded below as Gibbard and Farrar perform a duet version of Tom Waits’ Closing Time classic “Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards).”

Don’t these guys look like they could be brothers?

Sorry to bombard everyone with tour date news today, but this one’s too cool to pass up. Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Son Volt’s Jay Farrar are taking their upcoming batch of Jack Kerouac-inspired songs, One Fast Move or I’m Gone, on a brief road (plane) trip for four gigs in LA, New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago later this month, PlugInMusic reports.

What’s more, their backup band will include Death Cab bassist Nick Harmer, Son Volt’s Mark Spencer, and Jon Wurster of Mountain Goats and Superchunk. Tickets for these concerts supposedly already went on sale, but I can only find a link for the LA concert here. Based on our first listen from the album, I’d say these gigs will be epic.

Check out the Gibbard/Farrar pseudo supergroup’s 4-city trek below:

10/23 - El Rey Theatre - Los Angeles, CA
10/24 - Bimbo’s 365 Club - San Francisco, CA
10/26 - Lincoln Hall - Chicago, IL
10/28 - Webster Hall - New York, NY

I mentioned this last week, before TwentyFourBit took off on our road trip, but a story that involves Woody Guthrie, Wilco, and Jay Farrar certainly deserves its own post. In an interview with the Austin Chronicle (via The Daily Swarm), Centro-matic’s Will Johnson revealed some huge news about his involvement in the next installment of unreleased Woody Guthrie lyrics set to music composed by a living artist: Jay Farrar, of Son Volt and formerly of Uncle Tupelo, has taken the torch from Wilco and Billy Bragg, helming the recording of the next volume in the Mermaid Avenue series.

What’s more, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James is also performing on the album, according to Johnson. There’s no release date set yet, but the songs have already been put to tape and are currently in the mixing stage.

My initial reaction to this news was that Farrar trying his hand at the same Guthrie project as his former estranged band mate and songwriting partner Jeff Tweedy could permanently burn the Uncle Tupelo bridge, but now I’m thinking the promotion of this volume could make for a pretty awesome reunion tour. I suppose it’s going to take a few more chance encounters in Mexico for that to happen though.

The future of the Postal Service may be uncertain, as Ben Gibbard said recently that it isn’t really a priority and could end up being the indie Chinese Democracy, but it looks like we’ll be getting a different Death Cab for Cutie side project this fall. Son Volt’s Jay Farrar has revealed that a short session with Gibbard turned into a larger project that will possibly be announced later this year.

“I did work with Ben on this recording project, which started out as each of us contributing songs to a documentary about Jack Kerouac,” Farrar told Riverfront Times’ Annie Zaleski. “We both wound up in the studio together, just sort of decided to take a step further and record a whole batch of songs. It’s kind of evolved into a real project. I guess there aren’t a whole lot of details about it yet, but it’s in the works, and it could possibly come out in the fall, like around October — which I think is a Jack Kerouac anniversary of sorts.”

Photos from the recording sessions for the documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur can be seen on the film’s official site here, including the publicist’s claim that “Farrar and Gibbard’s partnership seems to have been ordained.” Tom Waits and Sage Francis also contributed to the documentary, which makes me kind of wish they had joined the Gibbard/Farrar collaboration as well, giving all these supergroups of late a run for their money.