Americana musician Pokey LaFarge found home for the first time in Maine
ROCKLAND — Pokey LaFarge is a Midwestern bard from Normal, Illinois, who belies his hometown’s name.
“I’m a freak everywhere I go, man,” LaFarge said. “I stand out. I’m different.”
That much he makes clear in “Stranger,” the seventh track off LaFarge’s forthcoming album: “I’m a stranger to everyone I meet,” he sings. “I’m a stranger in every town I see.”
Now 43, married and with an infant daughter, LaFarge is at home for the first time, unexpectedly, in Maine.
“It makes absolutely no sense, but it’s starting to make more sense,” he told a crowd simmering with excitement at Waldoboro’s Waldo Theater in March.
LaFarge is a connoisseur of the authentic.
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He dresses in tune with the sensibilities of yesteryear — coiffed hair, tortoise-shell spectacles, pressed woolen trousers, pocket squares and glistening loafers — and fosters a passion for the things people make by hand.
“I mean craftsmen, architecture, food that they grow, clothes that they make, music that they make. It’s just… it’s beautiful,” he said.
Take a beef bourguignon, LaFarge suggests. Anyone can make it, but prepare it with love?
“There’s something about it,” he says, slowly, gleefully, shaking a hand curled into a sloppy chef’s kiss.
LaFarge’s Maine homecoming, if you can call it that, is the culmination of a journey he’d rather not romanticize.
Maine based musician Pokey LaFarge spends time in the corner at Rock Harbor Pub & Brewery in downtown Rockland. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image
Andrew Heissler — LaFarge’s offstage name — says he lost himself after a move to St. Louis in the late aughts through the mid 2010s. He won back-to-back Independent Music Awards for best Americana album in 2010 and 2011, and, in his own words, went from a nobody to a somebody in that time.
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“But you can never hide who you are,” he said.
What followed was a period of demon-fighting, consumption and struggle that LaFarge references in sparse terms. As the narrator puts it in “The Thing,” the second single off “Rent Money,”_“_I had money, and I had gold. But women and fame, yeah, they soon got old.”
“The lifestyle of ‘sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll’ kills people,” LaFarge wrote on social media in 2024. “As a person who overcame the lies of ‘sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll’, I say — ‘long live Life, Love, and Rock ’n’ Roll.’”
It all came to a head on the coast of California on Jan. 12, 2019. He and his love had broken up and he asked God for a sign.
It was his “Gideon’s fleece” moment — a biblical reference to the Israelite leader Gideon testing God using a fleece, the kind to which LaFarge is now predisposed. A rainbow started to form and LaFarge became a follower of Christ that day.
By early 2021, LaFarge reunited with his love (and now-wife), Addie Hamilton, and she told him that she had fallen for Maine.
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Inside of a year, the couple settled in the Midcoast.
Perhaps the most readily available window into that dark period of LaFarge’s life is “F— Me Up,” one of his more well-known tunes from his 2020 album “Rock Bottom Rhapsody.” It’s a personal jeremiad of sorts in which LaFarge debuted his on-record use of the F-word not once but 15 times.
“So stupid,” he said, shaking his head with a chuckle. “Ruined a good song.”
Now, he doesn’t say the song’s full title, much less play it live. Its message is overly indulgent of self-destructive behaviors, he said, and doesn’t resonate with his current state of contentment or values.
Instead, LaFarge’s new music is largely a repudiation of consumption.
“Rent Money,” which drops Sept. 11, is a set of 11 original songs that rumble, croon, bop and jive.
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The lilting title track excoriates the landlord, foe of the working man: “He’s not a giver, he’s a taker,” the narrator tells us, with the refrain, “The good Lord giveth, the landlord taketh away.”
Much of the album is in a similar vein, blending biblical invocation with nods to classic bluegrass and Americana standards, all wrapped around the notion of hard work. LaFarge strings it together with his rich, often plunky electric guitar riffs.
Hamilton, his wife, sings backup on all but three tracks.
Neither contemptuous nor jingoistic, the album probes what it means to be an American.
“I’m rarely going to be a person who’s going to make declarations in my music — that’s not my stance,” LaFarge said. “My stance in music is 100% not to be divisive. Not that I’m necessarily not going to speak the truth, but I’m going to do it poetically.”
Though Maine lacks the bombastic vibrancy of southern California, and the Midcoast is bereft of musical collaborators, LaFarge insists he can live anywhere.
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“I can find inspiration if they put me in solitary confinement,” he said.
Having marshalled his creativity, wit and now, redemption into some commercial success, LaFarge is navigating his work commitments alongside his rather newfound identity of family man.
He’s taken the whole family on a nationwide tour that began July 23, including an Aug. 27 show in Arundel and a Nov. 14 performance in Camden.
Musician Pokey LaFarge has found his way to Midcoast Maine after making a name for himself in Chicago and LA. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image
At the Waldo Theater in March, LaFarge ended his set with “Something in the Water,” a jazzy, upbeat ballad about being with a woman who’s boorish and mean and just plain wrong.
“You need them just the same, boys, need them just the same,” the semi-autobiographical song, released in 2015, concludes.
“It’s one of those songs that I still play because, you know, people want to hear it,” LaFarge said.
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So he introduced a subtle lyrical revision.
“I don’t need that woman anymore,” he belted the song’s closing lines, his then-pregnant wife waiting backstage with Monty, the family dog.
IF YOU GO
8 p.m. Aug. 27, Vinegar Hill Music Theatre, 53 Old Post Road, Arundel, $35-$50. vinhillmusic.com
7:30 p.m. Nov. 14, Camden Opera House, 29 Elm St., Camden, $38-45. camdenoperahouse.com.
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Tagged: live music, music, music and performance
Reuben, a Bowdoin College graduate and former Press Herald intern, returned to our newsroom in July 2025 to cover Indigenous communities in Maine as part of a Report for America partnership. Reuben was. More by Reuben M. Schafir
