e8 : James Robert Webb

Courtesy of the Artist

Doctor by day, singer at sundown, James Robert Webb’s passion has always been to help others and enrich their lives. Whether that be in his medical practice performing ground breaking procedures to help his patients or on the stage performing his latest single “Now We’re Gettin’ Somewhere” produced by the legendary Buddy Cannon. Here, the singer-songwriter answered his e8 where he spoke about musical mentors, songwriting, dream collabs, and his surprising musical guilty pleasure.

Did you have a musical mentor? If so, who was it and how did they influence you?
That’s an interesting question, because I’ve been lucky to have a number of musical mentors in my life.  My first was probably my band teacher, Ken Nelson.  He wasn’t from Kellyville, so he brought in this cosmopolitan collection of influences into the students in our little farm town band.  That really opened my eyes to other things that were out there.  Eventually that led me full circle to discover this amazing hotbed of music known as the Tulsa Sound that has really spanned across a century now.  

I didn’t grow up knowing any famous musicians, so I’ve come to use what I call ‘virtual mentors.’  I’ll study songwriters and artists if I draw inspiration from their music.  I try to learn from them.  Like, how does Kris Kristofferson come up with these incredibly complex structures that seem so natural?  How did Willie Nelson or the Beatles or Kurt Cobain write melodies?  What does Garth Brooks do that keeps an audience in the palm of his hand?

The first writers that I really started analyzing their songs, how they put words together, how they approach stories and melodies, that was probably Leon Russell and Ronnie Dunn.  All of those Brooks and Dunn records, there’s just so much great—truly great—writing on those albums.  If you can set aside for a moment and forget that Ronnie Dunn is one of the greatest country vocalists of our lifetimes.  If you do that, you can see that he’s just a truly great writer.   I think he’s under appreciated in that aspect. 

I think having this incredible pool of legendary writers and artists from Tulsa—Ronnie Dunn, Mel McDaniels, Bob Wills, Garth Brooks, Leon Russell, Charlie Wilson, Ryan Tedder—those are some big shoes to fill.  It’s extremely inspiring for me, but at the same time, I also feel like there’s a responsibility—almost an obligation to my hometown to rise to that level as a writer.  Like grandpa would say, if you’re going to do it, do it big.

Do you write about personal experience, the experience of others, observations, made-up stories, something else or a combination?  
Really, I think it has to be all of the above.  As a songwriter, you’re always observing and looking for different ways to view the world.  I’ve been watching Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.  I think it’s interesting that comedians are always looking for ‘bits’ in the same way that songwriters are always looking for ‘hooks’ in a song.  Basically looking at the world and things people say from an unusual perspective.  And sometimes, just coming up with a ridiculous idea or a fantasy that would never happen can lead your imagination to amazing places—like Hotel California or One Piece At A Time.

I’ve found that to make a song come from the heart, there has to be some personal experience tied to it someway.  It may not always come out in the song, but it’s in that process of writing, what they call ‘subtext.’ The part of the story that’s not actually told.  

So, one writing technique that has worked for me is taking a story that’s happened to me.  It can also be someone else’s story—a friend, a lady on the news, a hero in a movie, or a character in a meme.  The important part is to internalize it and focusing more on the feelings and senses it brings up in me.  That way it feels like anyone can relate to it if you can break it down to a level we’ve all felt.  The characters in a song have to seem authentic, real and have to be relatable to people.  

Then you can add back specific, vivid details, but I’ve found that keeping it a little hazy helps.  Writers just starting out tend to get stuck on the details. I’ve found that if you keep the details hazy, the listener fills those blank spaces in with their own experiences.  That way it becomes more personal to them.  A song definitely needs specifics—like a 98 Buick or a blood orange sky—but if you make it too specific a lot of times other folks can’t relate as well.  It’s a fine line.

Who would you love to collaborate with?  
I think there are two guys in country music that I would love to write with—Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks.  Not only do they have two of the best catalogs in country music history, in my opinion, they’re two of the best writers alive in any genre.  They seem 100% comfortable in who they are as writers and that’s what it seems to take to write great songs.  

They are the reason I got into songwriting in the first place.   Plus either of those guys, you know that in a writing session you’re just gonna have a lot of fun or write something that has you crying.

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Is there a professional “bucket list” item you would love to check off?

Three words—Grand. Ole. Opry.  

If you dare to dream as a country artist and writer, there are three places you want to play.  It doesn’t matter what festivals and concerts you play.  You can keep Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden—you want to play the Ryman.  You want to play at  The Bluebird Cafe.  And you hope one day you’ll play the Grand Ole Opry and just get the honor to be able to walk in the footsteps of the greatest country music legends.  To go where Johnny and Garth went.

When I started out, I was just doing this for fun—for the love of the game.  I never really thought I’d get to that level.  But then you keep plugging along. You write hundreds of songs.  You eventually have other artists cutting your songs.  You get your own songs on the charts, you get in the top 40.  I could never have imagined all of the success I’ve had so far and that fans would respond to my music like they do.

Since I have been at this,  I’ve made that first step.  I had the honor of playing at the Ryman Auditorium, the mother church.  And just a few months back, my 2nd dream came true—I made my debut at the Bluebird Cafe in a sold out round with Anthony Smith AND I got to play with some of my best friends, Daniel Kleindienst, and Alex Dooley.

So, now the only thing left on that bucket list, that holy trinity of country music is the Grand Ole Opry.  It’s the biggest and I hope that some day soon, I’m up playing for all of those people.

When/where do you do your best writing?
If I’m writing alone, it’s usually at the dining room table.  We have these windows that look out on the woods and let this wonderful natural light in.  If I wake up before the sunrise while everyone else in the house is still asleep, those quiet moments are the best times.  Or late at night after the kids have gone to bed and I can hear the cicadas and see the moonlight through the leaves.  

If find inspiration often comes from nature, even if it’s not a song about nature.  There’s just something about being out in the woods and getting your mind off of things.  That’s when the your the noggin usually gives you a humdinger—like Party In The Barn.

Please choose one song and tell the story behind it.
Okfuskee Whiskey is a song that I wrote with Matt Shannon that’s on my upcoming record.  Matt’s a writer whose family is from Okfuskee, Oklahoma.  He came to my house to write and one of the first things we bonded over was that we had great-grandfathers who were blacksmiths.  Mine was my grandmother’s grandfather and he was a smithy in Wister, Oklahoma.  I always thought that was cool.  

Matt was working on a song called “Outlaw Whiskey” and had these great opening lines.  We were sitting on my back porch, which is in the middle of the woods and he reads those lines “halfway between deep fork and the Buckeye Creek, amongst the briar thickets and the blackjack trees.”  And that just kind of transported me to this magical place from my childhood in those Oklahoma hills—and we were staring right out into those woods. 

He said that that his grandfather had a still under the floorboards of his forge where he made moonshine.   He only ran the still when the forge was fired up, so that provided the perfect cover.  They would feed all the mash to pigs they had in a pen right in the back, so they’d have drunk pigs, but it kind of hid all the evidence.  

As he’s talking I connect the dots of that being in Okfuskee and that internal rhyme of “Okfuskee Whiskey” came.  Once we got the hook, the story he was telling, I just started seeing all of these details come into shape for this song and it all really just fell out in about 20 minutes once we started writing it. 

Buddy thought this was a cool song, but wasn’t sold on the hook at first.  But every time I played it out it got a huge response, so I knew it was special.  We ended up cutting it on the record and it’s one of my all time favorite songs.  Harmonically, there’s a little Foo Fighters, a little early Miranda and it’s just a really cool story, kind of like Copperhead Road.   Until the album’s out, you’ll have to come to a show to hear it, or watch on my next Facebook Live.  But I don’t think you’ll forget it.


Is there a recent release you cannot stop listening to?
The new Pistol Annies album, particularly “Best Years Of My Life.”  That song is just like you took Willie and Waylon and Kristofferson with some old rock and roll and the Annies and just baked a homemade pumpkin pie.  It’s an earworm for me.  

Do you have a guilty pleasure song/artist?  
Maybe ABBA?  I don’t really feel guilty about ABBA or Queen anymore.  I think everyone says ABBA.  But both of those bands are before my time, like the Beatles.  But you can’t help but be influenced by them as a writer.  What’s wrong with a band that sold 40 million albums?  

Both of those bands—they’re amazing composers.  They’ve written multiple songs that have stood the test of time—what now we’re like 40 50 years after some other their stuff?  They’re well crafted songs and that are both interesting and relatable to the common person.  What I love the most about them is that every song is so dramatically different—especially Queen.  It makes it interesting and I think that’s why their so popular.  I think the only people close to that in modern music are Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift. And that’s what I aspire to do—write relatable songs with smart lyrics that appeal to everyday people like me—that can stand the test of time.

So, guilty pleasure?  Maybe Iggy Azalea.  I think Reclassified was brilliant, novel and I can relate to those themes of growing up in poverty and rising to the top.  But she lost me on her last EP, lol.  

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