Jad Fair

Jad Fair stands out among those American rock figures whom reviewers have tagged with the word “primitive,” rising above nearly every other contender in that category. Whether fronting his landmark band Half Japanese or working alone, he has built an extraordinarily productive and distinctive path through music. His compositions convey a straightforward emotional honesty along with an unaffected, sometimes almost corny sense of warmth and delight whose unaffected simplicity defies easy description. Although his more recent work has grown somewhat easier to approach—echoing in certain respects the approach of another quintessential American primitive, Jonathan Richman—Fair’s core strength remains his knack for creating and performing without any traditional mastery of an instrument. He has handled guitar since the mid-’70s yet, as former and current Half Japanese members confirm, still cannot identify a single chord, produces riffs largely by chance, leaves his instrument untuned, and prefers things exactly that way.

Following the 1980 release of Half Japanese’s celebrated triple album 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts, Fair launched his parallel solo career with Everybody Knew...But Me. He has since issued many purely solo projects, among them Greater Expectations in 1989 and His Name Itself Is Music in 2011, while also joining forces with Daniel Johnston, Yo La Tengo, R. Stevie Moore, and numerous additional artists. Beyond music, Fair maintains an active practice as a visual artist working in paint, digital graphics, and especially paper cuttings; his designs appear on the covers of nearly every Half Japanese release and almost all of his solo discs, and he has supplied artwork for recordings by the Residents, Dorothy Wiggin, and the National Jazz Trio of Scotland. Remaining active well into the 2020s, he issued more than 150 albums digitally during the opening years of the decade before teaming with fellow D.I.Y. musician Samuel Locke Ward on the 2023 album Happy Hearts.

Fair’s solo career commenced in 1980 once the sheer volume of his songwriting exceeded what Half Japanese could accommodate. Initial outings such as Zombies of Mora-Tau and Everybody Knew...But Me felt exploratory and, judged by the balance between noise and music, leaned far more toward noise, much like the earliest Half Japanese records. By the middle and later 1980s, however, his solo discs had grown more approachable through partnerships with fellow enthusiasts including Terry Adams of NRBQ, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., Don Fleming of Gumball, Kramer of Bongwater, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground. In subsequent years he recorded full-length albums or singles with Yo La Tengo on 1998’s Strange But True, Teenage Fanclub on 2002’s Words of Wisdom and Hope, the Pastels on 1991’s This Could Be the Night, and the Danielson Famile on 2014’s Solid Gold Heart. He also cut several albums with his brother and Half Japanese co-founder David Fair, among them Best Friends in 1996, Monster Songs for Children in 1998, Six Dozen Cookies in 2006, and Shake, Cackle and Squall in 2016. Together with Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub and the Japanese ensemble Tenniscoats, Fair completed two further albums: How Many Glasgow in 2014 and Raindrops in 2017. Even as the productions gained a measure of polish, they retained Fair’s childlike perspective on the world as well as his exuberant conviction in rock’s liberating force and limitless possibilities. His more instinctive and raw impulses surfaced again in the brief collaboration with fellow primitive songwriter Daniel Johnston under the name the Lucky Sperms.

Given the sheer quantity of Fair’s output as a solo artist, in tandem with others, and within Half Japanese, tracking his complete discography poses difficulties, yet the three-CD anthology Beautiful Songs: The Best of Jad Fair, assembled by Fair himself in 2011, offers a comprehensive entry point to his catalog and a clear expression of his distinctive enthusiasm for life, love, and music. Within a year of that collection’s appearance he had already put out four additional albums, and he continues to accept commissions to write a song on any chosen theme for three hundred dollars. After more than a decade away from the studio, Half Japanese resumed its own run of releases with Overjoyed in 2014, while Fair stayed even busier outside the band through projects such as The History of Crying with Kramer in 2017 and For Everyone with David Liebe Hart and Jason Willett in 2018.

Throughout 2021 Fair set himself the task of recording and digitally self-releasing over one hundred albums of new material, each featuring his characteristic paper-cutout artwork. The first three actually surfaced on the final day of 2020, One Hundred marked the hundredth installment in September 2021, and the series extended well into 2022, ultimately reaching 160 titles with Now It’s Back in May. The recordings encompass instrumental synthesizer explorations and a cappella pieces alike, with lyrics centered on his favored themes of monsters, sweets, and unrestrained joy. Once that extended project concluded, he began creating one song per week alongside Iowa-based home taper and performance artist Samuel Locke Ward, their initial joint effort, Happy Hearts, appearing on Kill Rock Stars in 2023.