Essential 8: Jim White

Courtesy: Conqueroo

Jim White’s sixth solo studio album, the intriguingly titled Waffles, Triangles & Jesus, is a joy ride of sonic influences featuring a bevy of Athens, Ga. roots musicians, as well as West Coast darlings Dead Rock West and rock ’n’ roll maverick Holly Golightly. Due on February 9th, the unpredictable and engaging album opens with the moody strains of opener “Drift Away” and includes a nod to the golden age of American theater (“Long Long Day"), an ’80s indie pop inspired break-up song (“Silver Threads”), and  the jazz-tinged “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” In advance of the album's release, White took the time to thoughtfully answer his Essential 8 and talk about songwriting, relay an impactful story of gratitude, and more.

Did you have a musical mentor? If so, who was it and how did they influence you? 
Back in my late teens when I was first learning guitar there was this flat picker ace in town who I revered.  He was the exemplification of creativity, being a crack musician and world class visual artist to boot.  He taught me how to play half of Stairway to Heaven and half of Fire & Rain before I got frustrated and gave up, deciding it would be easier just to write my own damn songs—I never was  any good at following instructions. Over the years I would bring him songs I’d written to critique and he was always kind and encouraging.  His name’s Jem Sullivan and if that names sounds familiar you’ve probably seen it on a greeting card.  These days he’s the top illustrator at Hallmark Cards and regularly wins big awards for the cards he draws, which are every bit a skewed as my story songs—who knows, maybe some of our mutual weirdness rubbed off on each other.  He still plays guitar, and better than most I might add.  Here’s a link to his flat picking cover of a Beatles tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DbD-Lxz1hE
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With any particular song, was there an “a-ha” moment when you knew the song was completed and perfect?
My general practice when I’m at an impasse with a lyric is to work on it until the very thought of it generates a pretty good charge of existential nausea, then put it down and do some physical work; chop firewood, build a shed, clean out the attic or the rain gutters.  While engaged in noncreative tasks usually some remote hidden gears deep in the core of my brain kick in and suddenly the solution to the impasse will present itself.  As for aha moments that made a song on this record perfect, there ain’t none.  I wish I could write a perfect song, but being a polisher type I’m forever dissatisfied with my output.  

What’s the story behind your album’s title?
Legendary film director Mike Nichols once said of film making that at a certain point the film becomes an animate entity and starts to make demands of you, rather than vice versa and as such the outcome of the creative process is no longer simply a function of your own will.  You have to compromise and listen to your creation, then give it what it needs to survive.  That happens to me with records.  When this one was about halfway though it spoke to me in a clear audible voice saying, “I want to be called Waffles Triangles & Jesus”.  When I asked why, I got no response.  So it goes.  I figure one day the answer will surface, but at present it’s a mystery.  Such is the life of navigating by intuitive stars. 

Where do you draw inspiration from when writing? 
I listen to real people having real conversations.  So when the lady at the flea market says, “We would’ve been hereabouts earlier, but we got lost as billy goats.” I write that down in my journal. I have piles of journals with such comments in them, and when I’m writing a song, I come up with a chord progression I like then go flipping through those books until I find words that hum with a similar intensity.  I’ll do that until I have several pages full of disparate comments and observations then I’ll start cobbling together the song from said fragments.  It’s very labor intensive.  I admire those folks who can have an idea, then simply illustrate that idea with words.  Sam Baker comes to mind as being an exemplar in that context.  Johnny Dowd too.

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When/where do you do your best writing?
Well, there’s all manner of writing isn’t there?  I write my best gimmick songs at the flea market.  On this record there’s that song about Earnest T Bass that starts with the line, “I don’t hold with no blue eyed girls..” That line was lifted from a ET Bass lookalike at the flea market who commented to me about a female vendor who had died her hair bright blue.  He scowled, glanced at me, who he hardly knows and said, “I don’t hold with that blue hair deal”.  I swapped some words and a few minutes later had most of the song written in my head.  But for my big songs, it’s always a breech birth.  I need to be isolated with my quarry and we need to wrestle long and hard into the night, like Jacob wrestling the angel.  Hips need to be broken in the process and usually a month or two into the process either I give up on the song, or it surrenders.  

Do you write about personal experience, the experience of others, observations, made-up stories, something else or a combination?
It’s a jumble of all of the above.  But mostly it’s confabulated or transposed personal experiences.  Reason to Cry on this new album is an example.  The main character suffers a crisis of faith after catching the contagion of sorrow from a stranger in the woods.  That’s essentially my story in regards to religion, just reframed in a somewhat mythic context.  In my songs it’s always hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins.  In that sense the work I do might be called Southern Gothic Magical Realism.

What’s the best advice you have ever gotten from another musician?
It was visual, not verbal.  When I lived in Amsterdam in the 1980’s I was sort of like a ghost there.  I knew no one and struggled with psychological issues.  To pass the hours I wandered the streets nightly, sort of like that Harry Dean Stanton character in the film Paris Texas only in a city instead of the desert.  It was as if I was trying to walk away from my own shadow.  

One snowy night wandering the maze of streets in the central shopping area around Dam Square I heard little snatches of this astonishing Southern blues music carried on the wind.  I felt an irresistible compulsion to locate the source, as I was uncertain if it was a recording or someone actually playing live. 

Because it was blustery, freezing night and the empty streets were a maze of brick and stone, finding the source proved elusive.  For an hour or more I’d follow the sounds as they disappeared, then reappeared.  I’d think I was close to the source, only to turn a corner and find myself in a dead end with that music sailing over the surrounding walls.  

If nothing else I am stubborn, so I persisted.  Eventually I turned a corner and, in a shut down storefront I beheld the wreck of a human form wailing out a blues song and playing slide guitar as he perched atop a pile of rags.  He was a busker with a small amp next to him. In his lap was a lap steel guitar which he was playing with such a passion as I have seldom heard in all my subsequent years of being a professional musician.  

His arms were severely foreshortened, his fingers nonexistent.  I’d seen others like him in text books that chronicled the sad tale of a so called breakthrough nutrient offered to pregnant mothers in the 1950’s via a miracle chemical known as Thalidomide.  

Soon after becoming a popular prenatal craze the first babies arrived bearing significant birth defects, foreshortened arms and legs, at times no more than flippers like you’d find on a seal.  Heartbreaking.  

The man who sat before me on that snowy night, that phenomenal delta blues musician was a Thalodimide baby. On one flipper he had a slide duct taped, on the other a pick.  He was hunched over that slide guitar, playing the high holy hell out of it while wailing the most heartbreaking song about being lost and alone.  It was like something from a dream.

I was spellbound.  Although the streets were empty there he was busking.  Not a soul around.  He didn’t seem to notice me.  After a few songs I approached and put some money in his cup, then walked away without sharing a word.  I made no eye contact with him, as I feared the contagion of my own sorrows would do him no favors.   But the scene was imprinted on my psyche in the most powerful of ways.

Flash ahead to a few years later. It’s now moments after my fretting hand has just been shredded in the spinning blades of a high powered dado saw—used for cutting deep grooves in wood.  I’d made and error with a cut and my fingers were sucked into the saw and mangled badly.  

On my way to the hospital I despaired, thinking I would never play guitar again, but then suddenly the image of the Thalidomide blues singer flew into my mind, and I understood I faced only a minor obstacle.  The vision of him playing that slide guitar guided me as, through a series of surgeries and setbacks I tried to regain use of those fingers.   

For about two months I had one functional finger, the pinky, then my index finger healed enough to start using again.  I started writing what I called “Two Finger Etudes” using open tunings to compensate for my lack of ability to make true chords. Right away I noticed that without the previous facility my guitar playing exhibited, the songs I wrote were much more integral to my vision as a songwriter.  Prior to the accident I was just showing off how many chords I could play.  Afterward I was on a more essential trajectory.  Sitting in the ER as the surgeon studied what was left of my fingers I never would have thought such a thing possible—were it not for that Thalidomide blues man.  It was as if he was calling out to me, saying “You can do it.  Nothing is impossible.”

I never learned his name, but that man saved my music, and so I feel a powerful sense of gratitude toward that courageous soul.

What’s the best advice to give to a musician just starting out?
Plan on being poor.  Plan on suffering for your art.  Plan on taking back roads to distant locations and arriving bruised and battered.  Plan on others not understanding the value of the gift you have to offer and listen—really listen—to why the gift doesn’t make sense the them.  Then make whatever adjustments you are capable of making, according to your best internal compass.  Plan on music saving your life somehow but do not—ever—impose a narrative of how that salvation will come to be.  Ride the wave of telling your story, the story of others, the story of being, and rejoice when you tell it well, whether that lands you a Grammy or a slot at the local open mic.  

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