Jim White, an artist who has been described as an idiosyncratic Southern Gothic singer-songwriter, may have cornered the market on unconventionality. But all signs indicate he will be going a few steps further when he embarks on a European tour beginning Feb. 2.
White has a way with words, so I will let him tell us the unique story that triggered his upcoming European jaunt with 13 shows in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
“It’s a side project with a quite extraordinary autistic woman who lives in great poverty in the United Kingdom,” he says. “She’s an artist of the highest degree, writes songs that would make Patti Smith jealous, takes photos that are suffused with beauty and pathos, and has written a memoir about her years as a lost soul drug addict before she finally got a diagnosis of autism and connected a tsunami of life dots. She’s now a practicing Buddhist and off drugs.”
White, who lives in Winterville, Georgia, and grew up in Pensacola, Florida, met Tret Blake after one of his performances about a decade ago, when she came to the merch table. She gifted him an old book, Precious Bane.
“Books are not my favorite gift on the road, as they are heavy and most times not compelling enough to read through, but this one was quite different,” recalls White, who first made his mark on the music scene in 1997 with his debut album, Wrong-Eyed Jesus! (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted), on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. “Written in the 19th Century by a woman masquerading as a male author, it’s a totally weird semi-erotic farm thriller from the midlands of England. Deeply compelling, both for the content and the context in which it arrived into the literary world.”
Blake wrote her email address in the back of the book, so White wrote back and thanked her.
“When she wrote back, well, the words kind of jumped off the page,” White recalls. “It was like they do when Cormac McCarthy writes — like it’s his language, and we’re just borrowing it to crudely mangle with our mere mortal skills and sensibilities.”
About five years ago, Blake sent to White some songs she’d written and sung with a friend playing guitar.
“I told her the singing was unbearable, but the lyrics were amazing, and I asked if she could re-sing them,” White says. “Five years later, she told me she’d written some new songs that she could sing in a relatively normal voice. The one catch was that she had no way of recording them and doesn’t own a cell phone. I told her to see if she could find someone local with a recorder of some kind.”
A few weeks later, White says, Blake excitedly wrote to him that she’d been introduced to “some bloke” in a hometown coffee shop in Brighton, England. The bloke had a home studio and agreed to let her record the basic tracks there.
“A week later, the MP3s arrived and I braced for more Yoko Ono style singing, but, quite the contrary, the vocals were, well, not normal, but very palatable,” White says. “The songs were spellbinding, and the recordings were stellar — so much so that I asked who that bloke in the coffee shop was. And, Trey being Trey, said, ‘His name is Joe. He’s apparently in a proper band and even plays gigs sometimes.’”
“Joe” was Joe Watson, the keyboard player for Stereolab, an innovative 1990s indie band that influenced a lot of critically acclaimed groups, including 21st Century hip-hop artists.
White says he shelved his half-done new record — “10 songs dealing with death” —and suggested a collaboration with Blake with each writing an equal number of songs.
“I started trying to write songs to match the intensity of hers,” White says. “The tone is anachronistic and deeply mystical, so my task was formidable, but, in the end, I feel like the two batches of songs complement each other. It’s kind of a doomed lovers’ song cycle. I then took all 11 songs and did my usual weird orchestration on them, working for months getting them just right and then mixing the whole shebang with John Keane.”
White’s U.S. label, Fluff & Gravy, “was so excited by the material that they agreed to release a double album,” he says. “That was a lovely validation.”
The new double vinyl album, Precious Bane, will be presented live to European audiences with Blake on vocals and White on vocals, guitar, melodica, flute, harmonica and percussion. White also enlisted two friends from Antwerp, Belgium: Nicolas Rombouts on bass guitar and vocals and Geert Hellings on guitar and vocals.
White arrives in Antwerp Jan. 31, and the four musicians will have their first and only rehearsal the following day.
“Trey and I have not played a note together yet, so I have no idea what the chemistry will be like,” White says. “It’s just a big fucking roll of the dice, to be honest. My other bandmates are extremely in demand, some the best sidemen in Belgium.
With lesser musicians I might be worried, but Geert Hellings and Nicolas Rombouts are phenomenal players and quick studies.”
For readers unfamiliar with White’s eclectic catalog, I ask him which album represents his best work.
“When I finished my third record, Drill A Hole In That Substrate and Tell Me What You See, I felt like I’d done as good a bit of work as I was capable of,” he says. “The core songs felt right, centered and on point, and, in the studio, I was surrounded by a supporting cast of near-genius-level musicians, most recruited by producer Joe Henry.”
Part of the album’s opening track, “Static on the Radio,” was written for Rickie Lee Jones to sing.
“She’d once told me at a show in L.A. that she was a fan of my music,” White explains. “You could have knocked me over with a feather … Rickie Lee Jones.”
When White was recording “Static on the Radio,” however, Jones had moved away from Los Angeles, and White needed another suitable female voice to sing on the track.
“The label head suggested I just sing the part in a falsetto, which, well, sucked as an idea,” he says. “My kind, amazing manager Paul Dalen then told me he’d find a backup singer, and, an hour later called, saying he’d found one, Aimee Mann. I thought about it, and, still hearing Ricki Lee Jones’ voice in my head, I told him, ‘Naw, she’s not right for the part.’ There was a brief pause, then he said, ‘I’m going to say this again. I just found a singer for you, and that singer is Aimee Mann. Aimee Mann. Got it?’ Of course, he was right. Aimee Mann walked in and totally redefined the song.”
I try to coax White to identify the best album he has heard by another artist.
“I don’t have that kind of mind,” he responds. “I can’t recall data when asked specific questions like that and can’t really lay hands on a favorite. I have many favored records, from landmark efforts like the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers album to totally obscure releases like Terri Binion’s Fool or Anouar Brahem’s L’Cour Incroyable. Shivkumar Sharma’s When Time Stood Still! comes to mind, as do dozens of others. As you can hear in my records, I have a surplus of divergent musical worlds bouncing around my psyche, interweaving and mutating. So, settling on one would be like being asked to name your favorite meal but only being able to answer with one food, like peas or baked potatoes. Basically, that’s too big a question for my convoluted brain to answer in a satisfactory manner.”
So, how does a convoluted brain describe White’s own music?
“It’s been called a crazy quilt of sounds and influences,” he says. “My original label referred to it as Okie on acid music, while at times, I called it hick hop. I’m probably on the spectrum, like ADHD or mild autism, so it makes sense that my music jumps around a lot.”