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It's a side project soundtrack with Jim's next official record to follow.
The Sounds Of The Americans is a side project with local guitar wizard Dan Nettles and will likely be released digitally sometime this fall. The album emerged out of a big pile of songs me and Dan wrote for a Julliard Drama School staging based on the works of Sam Shepherd. Like the good old US of A itself the bulk of the material here is a melting pot of divergent sonic influences; there are some catchy straight ahead numbers to keep things lively, some story telling set to soundtracky backdrops, and a scattering of lovely instrumental interludes.
The second project is Kickstarter, my next official record. The crazy quilt line-up for this endeavor includes some familiar names like Olabelle, Terri Binion, and Mike Ferrio (from Steve Earle's favorite New York band, Tandy) as well as some new faces like the Athens blues stompers The Heap, and Australia's emerging indie darlings Otouto, (fronted by the sublime Hazel Brown). Still to be recorded is a duet with folk songbird Caroline Herring and possibly a few other collaboration with artists I admire and think would help the songs become what they need to be.[/i]
Jim's No Such Place is on my listmania Top 100 of all time.
Brilliant songwriter.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR : JIM WHITE
I'm ashamed to admit that there was a time when I used to listen to Dan Fogelberg songs and cry. The year was 1979 and my compass was broken; I was a 22 year old fundamentalist Christian lost in a mysterious cloud of mental entanglements, a swirling miasma of love and hope and rage that had metastasised into a potent and utterly misdirected life force.
I saw no conflict whatsoever in the fact that I was daily fervently praying for the world to end by way of the second coming of Christ, while simultaneously dreaming of becoming a Zen master of the realm of weepy male romantic love so keenly represented in Dan Fogelberg's songs. I guess I wanted to be somewhere else…somewhere important; if not heaven then some devastated emotional landscape where, showing great presence of mind (as Dan Fogelberg did) I would take eagle eyed notes of the endemic shapes and forms of that lovely sad terrain, then turn those notes into heartbreaking musical poetry and relay these creations from the romantic front lines back to the world of lesser men by way of recordings that would appear on convenient, consumer friendly cassette tapes.
For a couple of years prior to this I had been utterly devoted to preparing for the much-anticipated upcoming apocalypse and so seldom entertained my suppressed romantic inclinations. In church each week I watched with awe and wonder as my Pastor anxiously paced the length and breadth of the pulpit, working up a godly froth, vehemently promising the small congregation that the rapture was nigh upon us. "Hold on tight!" He would instruct us, "'Cause God's elevator's fixing to go UP!" We held our breath and waited.
After the first year of God's elevator not going up, we began to question our faith. We were stuck on the ground floor and desired to reside in God's penthouse! What was wrong? Our prayers were flaccid, the preacher reported. We simply needed to work our knees harder. We redoubled our prayers, held shut-ins in our church, pleading ad nauseum with sweet Jesus to return to this sorry earth and in the blink of an eye spirit us off to heaven. We prostrated ourselves before God in heaven, and waited, and waited and waited, but weeks stretched to months and months to years, eyes blinked and blinked and blinked, but our earthly departure never materialized, our savior remained MIA.
The end of the world never comes. The end of the world never comes. The end of the world never comes. Forget heaven. Learn how to live on earth. This is the first lesson they should teach children in school.
I grew weary of waiting for Jesus. My attentions gradually defected from the notion of a universal apocalypse to one of a more intimate, personal disposition. I began to find myself increasingly drawn toward a worrisome realm inhabited by damaged, self-destructive women. I took a job as a lifeguard at a beach that was popular with strippers. I fooled myself into believing that my purpose there was Godly--- I was only interested in leading them to Christ, I told concerned Christian friends. That was the PR campaign my brain was running to cover up the egregious straying of my heart. Beneath my composed, spirit filled surface, a deeper part of me pined and hankered to be utterly undone by some doomed love---a love sufficient to transport me to a magical land where the choking chaff of the tepid thing I had become would burn away, revealing that shining kernel of truth buried within.
But in the conflagration, would Jesus burn away too? If so what would be left? This question had recently been wafting like a small white cloud up there in the blue sky of my mind around the time I first began to hear of this singer/poet, this Dan Fogelberg. I bought his cassette at Camelot Records and instantly became fixated on one song called Stars. I listened to it over and over and over, weeping gently, making mental notes of the subtle emotional nuances this tender man so gently nudged into the light of day. I promised myself that one day I too would chronicle love in such a manner. I just needed the right woman…or was it the wrong woman…to help me along my way…
It never worked out with the strippers. Nothing fatalistic ever happened. They'd come sidling up in their risqué bikinis and ask me to rub suntan oil on them and I would…but that's all I'd do. Once, after I'd carefully applied a clean, even coat of Panama Jack to the stubbly legs of a big flirt named Kitten, she sighed and muttered, "Honey, you could fall In a bucket of tits and come up sucking your thumb.”
I was undaunted. I began to search the horizon, patiently waiting…and every few years I would encounter one. The first was a fundamentalist Christian beauty secretly hooked on PCP. The next was the raven-haired, mentally ill secretary to the governor of Louisiana. To add volatility to the mix, these were no hags. No, they were nothing short of great beauties (In fact some years later one of them was actually named to People Magazines list of 50 most beautiful people in the world! I shit you not!). I fell madly in love with each and every one and agonized over the purity within them that Satan had co-opted for his own dark purposes and devoted myself to the liberation of their very souls.
As I said, my compass was broken. I was doomed. You can imagine the life I lead. No need to go into the sordid details. Let's just say that things got worse…and worse…and worse. Decades passed and the Dan Fogelberg-esque magically haunted romantic forest I imagined finding myself building lovelorn tree houses in degenerated into something that more resembled a stinking gas station toilet overflowing with the soiled toilet paper of poorly defined feelings. The world never ends when you need it to. Or does it?
It's now 40 years later and, ah, I am free. Having run of the gauntlet of myself, done with hacking my way through infinite permutations of hubris and self-serving naiveté, I have come out the other side a different person. I no longer listen to Dan Fogleberg's songs and cry, or even sigh for that matter. In fact, although I now write songs for a living, unlike 99.99% of my colleagues, including Dan Fogelberg, I write no romantic love songs.
Have I been cured of my affliction? No. I still yearn for representations from the beyond of magical transportative love. Just not normal representations---no Dan Fogelberg permutations, please. No magical forests of mopey love. The poetry of the heart as represented in popular song these days leaves me feeling skittish and out of sorts, not unlike how I felt all those years in church, impatiently awaiting the rapture of the church. No, something went wrong in my brain.
The missives of love that now touch my heart must inspire in accidental, round about ways. For example some years back I found a love note lying on a sidewalk in New York City. It was from a woman who was begging her husband to come home. They'd had a fight, apparently about there not being any cold milk for him to have with his dinner. She told him she was so sorry and promised to always have cold milk ready for his supper and to give him a hot kiss every night when he came in the door from work. I wish I could convey the poetry of her exact words to you, but sadly, I gave that letter to one of those shadow women that I used to love. She read it and looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.
- Jim White
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"I would shoot a man if he put me through autotune"
- Charlie Louvin
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