St. Louisan Jay Farrar is a busy man these days. He and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard just released "One Fast Move or I'm Gone," an album that also serves as the soundtrack for director Curt Worden's documentary film of the same name, which explores Jack Kerouac's novel "Big Sur."

For their songs, Farrar and Gibbard "collaborated" with the late Beat writer, selecting passages from the novel and setting them to music. The pair toured briefly to promote the record, and Farrar is just now kicking off a tour with his own band, Son Volt, whose latest album, "American Central Dust," was released earlier this year.

The Post-Dispatch spoke with Farrar from his home in St. Louis.

Have you finished with the tour with Ben Gibbard? Yeah, we just did a handful of shows. This is probably more juggling tours than I've ever been involved with. It went well, and we're talking about doing some more early next year.

You and Gibbard didn't really know each other when you began to collaborate on songs for the film. How did you wind up recording a full album together? That's right. We knew of each other, but we had never met. We met the night before going in to record. It was just a process of getting to know each other in the studio. I think probably our interest in the work of Jack Kerouac is what brought us together and that pretty much sustained it. As well as the fact that we realized we had a lot in common.

That all had to happen pretty fast, and with cameras rolling, too. That's the truth. The cameras weren't rolling all the time, but the audio was being recorded the whole time. The cameras came in, I think, the second day. So it was definitely a do-or-die situation. I think it made both Ben and I dig deep. Ultimately, I think it enhanced the project, the fact that we were working under those circumstances.

How did you come to this to begin with? Who brought you into the project? Jim Sampas. He is the nephew of Stella Sampas, who was Jack Kerouac's wife when he died. I'd worked with Jim on one previous record that Jim had put out, the tribute to Springsteen's "Nebraska" record. He just asked me to contribute a couple songs and I kind of got caught up in the spirit of working with Kerouac's lyrics, or in this case, his ideas in the book. I wound up bringing more songs to the project than were really needed, and the idea of Ben and I putting out a record, that idea just sort of evolved over the course of a couple years.

Have you always been a fan of Kerouac's work? I have. I read him at a pretty early age. I was working at a bookstore, so I probably read "On the Road" when I was 14 or 15. "Big Sur" I didn't come across until I was around 40, which made the book leave more of an impression and perhaps resonate in a way that it wouldn't have (earlier), because I was at a similar age that Jack Kerouac was when he was writing about the experience he was going through in the book.

Fourteen is a dangerous age to connect with "On the Road." (Laughs) Ah, it is. But you know, I had already been playing out, playing music out at parties and things for a couple years at that point.

"On the Road" is one thing, but "Big Sur" is a far different trip. What kind of things jumped out at you from that book? It's a cautionary tale, because Jack is slowly cognizant of the fact that he's suffering from alcoholism. But I think the amazing thing about the book is that he's still able to chronicle that. But it's something that anyone who reaches the age of 40 has probably struggled with — or something similar — along the way.

What did you have to do to turn his words into songs, in terms of selecting passages and editing and so forth? I started out with a poem at the end of the book called "Sea." So those lines were pretty lyrical, since they were in a poem already and they were relatively conducive to putting in a song, although he's almost reciting scat at that point — it's just anything off the top of his head. Eventually I did sort of move into the text of the book itself. That's where I was able to come up with themes like "California Zephyr" and "San Francisco" and "Big Sur." And at that point, I just got immersed in the book. The familiarity with Kerouac's work and the idea of working with Jack Kerouac, in a sense, I just kind of got caught up in the spirit. And once again, showed up with more songs than I was supposed to.

How did they react to you showing up with too much material? I don't think they knew what to do initially. It was kind of like, "Oh, great. OK." But then it was just a matter of recording as many (songs) as could be recorded in the time frame that we had. Gradually the idea of putting a whole recording out became the goal. Later, Ben and I met up here in St. Louis to finish the bulk of it up and we did the last song in Los Angeles. It was three sessions: The first one was in San Francisco, the second one here in St. Louis and the third in Los Angeles. I think in total it was 10 or 11 days.

You were sort of working in the fast, spontaneous mode of Kerouac, huh? It did turn out that way. Normally, Ben and I would probably spend longer in the studio on either of our respective projects. But the fact that we really didn't have a whole lot of the budget or any kind of master plan going into this, it sort of deconstructed the process both Ben and I normally work in, and I think that was a good thing. It gave a spontaneous energy to the whole project.

The music of Kerouac's era was jazz. Was it daunting to try to set his words to a different kind of sound? Yeah, I was aware of the fact that Jack is pretty much synonymous with jazz and a lot of his writing and his prose is very much like jazz — the spontaneous aspect of it, improvisation. I did some thinking. I was a little reluctant to dive right in. But the more I looked into the idea, even in the text of the book, "Big Sur" itself, there are passages where Jack is singing folk songs in a car or around a campfire or something. When I also came across the fact that Jack had hung around Ramblin' Jack Elliott a bit in New York, who was kind of a cowboy folk singer, it sort of allowed me to go forward with the project with the feeling that it's OK if I have no background in jazz.

You haven't been assaulted by a guy with a goatee and a beret because you did this? (Laughs) That sounds a lot like the Guardian Angels. The Guardian Angels of jazz, throwing me into the back of an old Buick Le Sabre.

Working in film is a lot more collaborative than music. You have less control. And with this project, your contribution is just a part of the whole. Are you satisfied with how the film turned out? The film turned out well. They only used a few songs in it, ultimately. It sort of became two different entities after a while. Even though the impetus was to contribute to the documentary, the record, "One Fast Move," sort of took on a life of its own.

I want to ask you a few things about Son Volt. The latest album, "American Central Dust," is a very simple, clean-sounding record, as opposed to past efforts that were a lot busier sonically. Was that a conscious choice? I think it was a result of coming off the experience of the previous record, "The Search," where it was more of … expanding the scope. There were a lot of songs recorded on that record, the song structures were a little different. It seemed like a natural course to go back to more standard guitar tunings and austere song structures (this time).

One song that got a lot of notice when the record came out was "Cocaine and Ashes," which refers to Keith Richards allegedly snorting his dad's remains. Do you think he really did it? When I first heard that, I sort of took it at face value. I felt like he was being honest. Keith has always been one of those guys that doesn't really seem to be afraid to say what he wants to say. And he's also the kind of guy that doesn't have to make things up, 'cause he doesn't have to. He's Keith Richards. But I think ultimately he did kind of get in trouble for it.

Is there some sort of project that you've got coming up with the Woody Guthrie Archives? It's in the works, but it's not really at a point where … I don't really want to say it's one thing and have it become something else later.

Is it easier collaborating with the dead? (Laughs) I think it's, to some degree, it's easy to be inspired to write music using someone else's lines. There's less of a tendency from my perspective, to be self-conscious or overly introspective. It's more about getting caught up in the moment of inspiration. Ultimately, there's sort of a weird collaboration there.