Q&A: Farmer’s Wife Unveil Spellbinding “Season of the Witch” Cover
PICTURE AN INTERSECTION OF DARK FAIRY TALES, HORROR SHOW ROMANCE AND NIGHTMARES – Austin rockers Farmer’s Wife have unleashed their spellbinding cover of “Season of the Witch,” reimagining Donovan’s psychedelic classic just in time for Halloween. This refreshed version pulses with eerie experimentation, bringing the track’s haunting energy to new life. As the band embarks on an extensive U.S. tour supporting Cloud Nothings, their “Season of the Witch” cover sets the stage for the moody and chaotic atmosphere fans can expect.
“Our cover of ‘Season of the Witch’ materialized out of a drum beat and pedal feedback two Halloweens ago,” says lead vocalist Molly Masson. “This creepy classic opened us to more experimentation and allowed us to dive into an eerier side of our sound.”
Since forming in 2021, Farmer’s Wife has become a staple of Austin’s DIY scene, known for their explosive live performances and a distinctive blend of swirling guitar riffs and sludgy soundscapes. Last fall, they dropped their debut EP, There’s a Monster, which showcased their talent for crafting atmospheric, immersive songs. The record drew listeners into a world where dark fairy tales and horror-show romance collide.
Farmer’s Wife thrives in contrasts. Their music is both powerful and frail, ethereal yet raw, offering a delicate interplay between force and vulnerability. This dynamic is what makes their sound so captivating – whether it’s a crashing wall of guitar or a whisper of melody, they maintain a compelling tension that keeps listeners fully engaged. Musically, Farmer’s Wife sits at the crossroads of 90s dirge rock, 60s psychedelia, and a splash of 80s nonchalance. Their songs recall early releases by Smashing Pumpkins, Slowdive and Hole, channeling the raw emotions and vivid imagery associated with 2000s emo pioneers.
If singer Masson’s coquettish onstage performance distracts you from the despair, anger and confusion in her voice, that’s just part of the puzzle. The nuances of their music deliberately creep out at each listen. Lulling, intricate guitar lines traded between Jude Hill, Derek Ivy and bassist Jacob Masson. Hypnotic drumming from Jaelyn Valero that at times, when their live show spirals into free-form abandon and structure is left behind, recalls John Densmore.
With their cover of “Season of the Witch,” Farmer’s Wife plunges deeper into the darker recesses of their musical identity, pushing the boundaries of their already atmospheric sound. By transforming Donovan’s iconic track into a swirling vortex of tension and beauty, the band stretches their creative limits, revealing their knack for blending eerie experimentation with deeply emotional delivery.
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
JAELYN: Definitely influenced by a lot of 90s grunge, whether it's more of the more noisy grunge or the dreamier, softer side of grunge. We get excited about merging those two sounds together and trying to experiment a little bit more with noise.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
MOLLY: We aim to transport our listeners into a dreamy fairyland that is dark and scary.
LUNA: You’re part of Austin’s DIY music scene, so what do you love most about this scene? How would you describe the energy and the people that go to your shows or listen to your music?
MOLLY: We love the community that comes and being involved in the Austin scene, and we love that the people that come are always dressed up. I feel like a typical Farmer's Wife fan is wearing a lingerie top and some Demonia shoes and clown face paint.
JUDE: I also love the support of the community, whether it be from other bands, fans or industry people.
MOLLY: There's just so much love in the scene, and everyone supports each other, and it's really great. Everyone's really excited about music. I think being exposed to new things and listening to new artists is always so exciting and refreshing.
JAELYN: Any night of the week, I think we can go to a friend's show and it's just bound to happen that there's a really cool show going on, and a friend of ours will be on stage that we are going to watch and support.
LUNA: You just released your newest cover single “Season of the Witch.” What inspired or drew you to cover the song and how did you approach reinterpreting such an iconic song while maintaining its original essence?
MOLLY: We started playing this song two years ago, whenever we were playing. We had a bunch of Halloween shows that we were going to play. I think everywhere amongst young people, Halloween is like a month-long event. Everyone is looking for an excuse to go and celebrate and dress up and be in costume. We were like, ‘okay, what, what is going to be our Halloween cover?’ “Season of the Witch” came about because I think there's obviously so many spooky songs that you could do, but we were really interested to cover “Season of the Witch” because it's so different from the stuff that we usually play. Donovan's original one and even other adaptations, like Lana Del Rey's, is still very true to the song, and kind of blues-y. We were really excited to reimagine it and make it spooky and eerie. Jude is a menace and a monster with the pedals in the best way possible. He's like an alchemist of noise. It's starting with that. And Jaelyn was drumming something and her beat was super cool. From there, we created this noisescape, and then the lyrics came about over it, starting a sort of monotone, and wanting it to be really tight and compact
LUNA: You released There’s a Monster EP almost a year ago. How do you feel you’ve matured as artists and storytellers since its release?
JAELYN: I think that was like our first introduction to people as far as the world our music lives in. I think everyone picked up on it really quickly that we are in this fairy tale universe with our music that just naturally happens when we're writing together. I think “Season of the Witch” is a really great example of where our sound is going and how it's evolving since the EP, and we're super excited to release these songs we've been working on just because our music hasn’t changed, but it's really evolved and grown with all of the experimentation and noisiness that we like to do.
JUDE: I think that touching on the experimentation piece, I think that recording There’s a Monster was our first chance at really experimenting because we played those songs for a couple years live basically, and they had changed a lot, but it was our first chance to really sit down with them. When you play the same song, like we were playing a couple of times a week at that point, it's hard to change a song on the fly when you're playing it over and over again. I think that having the time in the studio to sit down with a song and think it through and experiment with it a little bit further than what we do live was really helpful for not just those songs, but our sound in general.
LUNA: Were there any specific breakthroughs or lessons you learned while creating There’s a Monster that have carried over to your future releases and projects?
MOLLY: I think that with There's a Monster, that was the first time that we really were playing around with the difference between a recorded sound and a live sound. Like in the studio, our producer Ernesto was really awesome and helpful in giving suggestions to us that we had never even thought of before. I think that my biggest lesson from that one was that we booked our release show and set our release date before it was fully formed – like the EP was complete – and I realized that in future projects that I just wanted more time and space.
JAELYN: I think because the songs had already been written for a couple of years at that point, to us, maybe mistakenly, we're like, ‘well, the songs are ready. We just have to record them. The songs are finished.’ But flushing them out while writing them for the live shows that we do is very different as far as flushing them out for the studio recordings that we do – and that was limited. We limited ourselves in that way and not realizing it, just because it was our first time putting out a collection of music. This time, we're definitely flushing them out now on tour, as far as just getting them ready for the live setting, and we're going to take our time trying to flush them out for the recording setting.
LUNA: Looking back at There’s a Monster a year later, how do you feel about the project and its impact?
JUDE: The opportunity to sit down with songs and experiment with them was really helpful. I think the exposure of those songs was helpful because our previous three singles are sonically different, both in their production and their processes, and just the overall sound. I think that There's a Monster let us be exposed to more people, because it's an EP and it's more songs available. Having an EP with a smorgasbord of sounds and songs helps to expose you to more people who wouldn't normally listen to just a single from.
MOLLY: I think the project holds a really special place in our hearts, especially now after touring over the summer and seeing how people related to them and loved each song individually for different things. I'm really excited to share these new songs that we've been making and playing.
LUNA: Are there new directions or elements you’re exploring in your current work?
JAELYN: I think song structures are changing with just the way we approach writing a song. I think we are letting our songs unravel more and let them naturally end up where they go. We're letting ourselves not be restricted as much.
MOLLY: I think that There's a Monster is pretty noisy, but these songs are even more so. We have a song that's seven minutes long. It's just exciting to try new things.
JAELYN: When we were putting out our first collection of songs, there's almost like a pressure to be really accessible or very easy on the ears, or just something that might be more widely accepted. We don't want to scare people away right off the bat. Definitely letting go of whatever that is, if it's there at all.
LUNA: I know visual storytelling and darker aesthetics play a huge role in your music. What can listeners expect next from the band in this new era of music?
JUDE: I think that we're not necessarily changing our sound completely, like from the ground up, but we're just expanding on pieces that seem to resonate with us more and resonate with our fans more. We're taking those elements and growing with them, and that's really fun to do, and really special.
JAELYN: I think the visual aspect is really important to us.. We brought a projectionist with us on our summer tour, our friend Tim. We sat with him and went along with each song, and we're pulling clips from old movies that we felt matched like the themes of our music. I think that's something we're also thinking about when we go into songwriting and thinking about our performances is the visual aspects, because we look at everything like it's a story.
MOLLY: We’re drawing a lot of visuals from early experimental filmmaking. We had clips from YouTube videos on how to become a cult leader. We have a music video that we're working on where we're drawing from old YouTube videos, specifically referencing a teddy bear getting surgery. It's a teddy bear getting surgery, and they're pulling out stuffing and putting glitter in and pulling out the organs of a teddy bear, like a heart that's full of cigarettes.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
MOLLY: It's really exciting that I feel like we're on a come up right now, and it's really awesome that people are interested in our music and resonating with it. Throughout the rest of the year, we're gonna be touring with Cloud Nothings. We've got some headline dates in there too, but we're super excited to reach new markets and reach more people in places that aren't super accessible to us. We're excited to really do some grassroots building of audiences and places that we've never been to. We're excited to have the opportunity to go to places that otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see.
JAELYN: You can expect one more single out from us before the end of the year.
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