One of the great regrets I had about not being able to attend last year’s Newport Folk Festival was missing John Paul White’s set. NPR recorded it and it’s well worth your time (but it might not assuage any feelings of regret for missing it in person). Next week, White opens the American Songbook series at Lincoln Center, which features an incredible line-up this winter and spring. He released Beulah, a truly gorgeous album, in 2016, and is beginning to look toward his next record. We had the chance to talk about how those songs from the last record sit with him now, what he’s learned through collaboration, and what he’s found to be true about people no matter where he goes.
RLR: Beulah came out in August of 2016. Sometimes when you take songs on the road, your relationship with them evolves and you find things in the songs that you didn’t necessarily hear when you wrote them. Has that been true for any of these songs?
JPW: It’s one hundred percent true with this record particularly. When creating this record, the songs just fell out in one fell swoop. In almost a week and a half, everything fell into my lap. There wasn’t that typical woodshedding that you normally do on the road: you play songs and try them out and think, “this didn’t work, that intro’s too long, this feels boring,” all those little things. And the dynamic arc of how you would [usually] produce them as well, there was no learning curve. It was: here they are, let’s capture them as fast as we can. It just felt like that was the way it needed to be. It needed to be documented more than it needed to be produced.
So on the road, they definitely have taken on a completely different vision. It’s partly because I’m learning to live in them as I go, instead of the other way around. But it’s also traveling with a band, which I haven’t done in over ten years. Before The Civil Wars, it was pretty much me and a guitar, or me and one other musician. So, playing with a drummer, it’s almost like I’ve never done it. And learning how to use that as a strength, use that as a weapon, not as a liability where I’m constantly fighting rhythm because I’ve been the “drummer” for so long. I feel like it really took a year to wrap my head around being in lockstep with the band and also lockstep with the songs.
I intend to do my next record the other way around. I’m already playing a few of the songs on the road. But it’s not a right versus wrong thing–it’s just necessity and the way it happened.
RLR: What was that process for getting in lockstep with the band? Are these next-day conversations about what’s working and what’s not?
JPW: It’s mostly by osmosis. I trust these guys enough–we’re all local guys here in The Shoals, we all kinda speak the same language and live on the same wavelength. As you’re on stage, you can feel guys gravitating toward things that seem to work better and away from things that don’t. They’ll just be little subtleties, like, “Why don’t we move this song to here in the set list because it builds better into this song.” It’s very small, little things that happen. It’s just like we’re all kind of doing a dance, and we’ve never done it before at the beginning, so there’s stepping on toes. But we’ve all done it enough that we don’t need to articulate: ”Your guitar part is in the way here,” or “We need to slow this down.” Those sorts of things, we just intuitively know them, it just takes time to settle into the same framework.
RLR: There is always a line, both lyrically and musically, when writing songs that are as vulnerable as the songs on Beulah are, between emotion and sentimentality. What are you listening for to keep the songs emotionally open without crossing into some maudlin territory?
JPW: I won’t say I’m not consciously aware of that. I try not to let that inform the songs too much, because if my gut tells me to go to a certain place, I should go there. I get objective on listen-back or when I’m playing it for my wife. And I listen through her ears as I’m playing it down and I’ll think, “That’s a little over the top,” or “That’s not enough, it’s boring, I should twist the knife a little more.”
But I tell you, I’m really kind of schizophrenic when I write and I learned to do that as a professional writer [in Nashville] for about ten years before anything really artist-driven started clicking for me. I wrote more on the craft side than the inspiration side for a long time. I learned really quickly that all my songs could not be about personal experience, or I would only have a year or two of material. As a married dad living in Alabama, there’s only so many experiences I could pull from [laughs], so I tried to develop a knack of things feeling really personal and things touching a nerve; but it might not be mynerve, it might be yours.
I figured out early on that people’s interpretations of my songs seldom were what the root of it actually was. And I lovedthat. So I tried to keep things slightly vague, where anyone who was listening to the song could put themselves in that position and not feel like they were just standing at the outside of a photograph, looking at it; they could be inside of it and be the actor in the play. That always seemed to be a more powerful experience to me, as a listener to other music, and to people who would relate their story to me after a show and what this song meant to them. Maudlin is definitely a word I’m wary of – I don’t want to be sappy or sad, and I feel like that’s the one bit of radar I have. I know where I have to stop.
RLR: You have recently indicated that you have some new work coming this year. I don’t know how much you want to say at this point, but is there anything you do want to share about that?
JPW: Knowing that I was going to get back into the songwriting game after working this record for a while, I wanted to take advantage of having a publisher up in Nashville. They have been incredibly patient with me, as someone who writes songs for himself, and I know they’ve been chomping at the bit for songs they can use to pitch. So I said, why don’t we kill two birds with one stone: I want to write some songs, but I want break out of the mold. Let’s find all of my old heroes that made me want to write songs, like Bill Anderson and Bobby Braddock and Waylon Holyfield, all these geniuses that probably aren’t getting their doors knocked on very much anymore, even though they wrote songs like, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “Tips of My Fingers.” We did and virtually every person we called, they were into it. So, I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing with the masters of the traditional country craft. It’s been revelatory to say the least. I’ve felt like a pretender; as much as I love country music and grew up on country music, I never felt I had any business writing a country song. I felt like that was just above my head. But getting into this, I’ve found my tendencies are a lot like theirs, and the places I want to go are the same places they want to go. So, I’ve really enjoyed crafting things with them and I’ve been playing some of that stuff on the road. Now, how much of that will be on the next record, time will tell. But it’s definitely pointed me in a direction that I might not have expected, in a good way.
RLR: I didn’t know about those collaborations, but you’ve had the chance to work on some other folks’ projects recently – like singing on the latest Hiss Golden Messenger album, and recorded “It Ain’t Over Yet” with Rodney Crowell and Roseanne Cash. What has that taught you about your own process?
JPW: [The collaborations are] completely liberating me from constraints that I thought I had. I am always the guy that thinks that I’m a charlatan, that I’m fooling everybody, that this is smoke and mirrors and at some point, people are going to say, “Oh wait. He’s not very good at what he does.” The more I collaborate, the more I realize we all have confidence issues. You know, you see Bob Dylan talk about it on 60 Minutes, and think, “OK, it’s not just me.”
But every time I am with Roseanne, who is incredibly selfless and welcoming and encouraging–and Rodney is the exact same way, and Emmylou Harris, and every one of these master writers I’ve been working with…it’s a common thread throughout the people that I want to be. Those are the people who are my heroes and idols, and I want to fill their shoes one day. And I realize that we’re all kind of wading through this in the same way, and I love that they’re all so collaborative in spirit, it’s something that they enjoy as much as anything else, and that’s not necessarily been my forte. You know, I was in a duo for a long time, but outside of that, I’ve never wanted to kiss a lot of frogs. That was not my thing, I was always very controlling about the situations I would be in.
Now, Michael Taylor, from Hiss Golden Messenger, he inspired me because he just called me out of the blue and said, “Hey, I just want to tell you, I really love your work. I love this Donnie Fritts record you did and I just thought you should know.” Who does that? I would never think to do that. I would just listen to the record and think, “This is great. They do really good work,” and then I’d move on. Because I’d think, “What do they care what I think?” So I’m definitely starting to reach out and tether myself to other folks, because it makes me a much better artist and makes our whole musical community better that we’re all kind of linking arms.
RLR: Your music is sometimes described as “southern Gothic.” It’s always interesting to think about the regional definitions of music; Mike Taylor has said that he moved to the south because he felt like he needed to be there to create the kind of music that he wanted to make. And this kind of makes me think about what you said about the guys in your band “speaking the same language” because you’re all from The Shoals. How would you describe that language and what makes it “southern”?
JPW: I understand what you’re asking. I wrote a song on this last record, “What’s So,” and that song is really my meditation on what it’s like growing up in the south, as a male in the south, specifically. The whole mentality of: keep your head down, do good work, work hard; you don’t need to aspire to being better than anyone else, because you’re not; don’t put on airs; who the hell do you think you are, kind of thing. That would be around you all the time. The most noble thing would be to do good work and pass that on to your children. So that was always hanging over my head and it informed what I did, but it also sometimes hampered what I did. I dreamt, but didn’t aspire to the things I’ve been able to do.
I’ve always had a kind of “aww, shucks,” mentality to everything; I’ve always discounted everything positive that’s happened for me, like who the hell am I? I read this interview with Mark McGwire when he passed Babe Ruth for the single season home run record. He said he had this existential breakdown, thinking, “Does that make me better than him? Does that make me on par with him?” He said, “I couldn’t wrap my head around achieving something that was achieved by a god.” I get to those places, when I collaborate with someone like Roseanne–I walk out of there thinking, “Who the hell am I to be doing this? I’m just a country boy from out in the middle of nowhere off of a chicken farm. How does this happen for me? Do I deserve this?” My whole band, we all drank that same water, ate that same food, and have been shaped by that same mentality.
But outside of that, we’ve had the same sort of relationships with the more conservative side of our state. We’ve watched people’s lack of tolerance, and we’ve watched people thrive within that framework. And that informs everything we do. Sometimes we document it and sometimes it’s just part of who we are and we don’t even think about it and it comes out in our music.
But the more I travel and the more I talk to people, I realize we’re all a hell of a lot more alike than we are different. A lot of people from the midwest and northeast, all had the same childhood. They ate different food, and drank different water, but they had a lot of the same background. I’ve realized it’s all coming from the same font. We have a different accent that we sing it in, but if we really peel it back, we’re all struggling and we’re all thriving.
RLR: You’ve had opportunities–including the Newport performance last summer and the upcoming American Songbook performance–to play in really iconic settings. As someone connecting with an audience in those settings, how does it impact how you think about the performance?
JPW: More often than not, I’ve learned not to try to connect to the crowd. No matter what room I’m in, I’m really trying to connect with me and with the band. I’ve noticed that when I do that, when I really get down in it, and I’m really connected to what I’m doing, people automatically connect. I can sense it. If I feel like I’ve really hit home, you know, right in the gut of what I’m trying to do, it resonates. So it doesn’t matter if I’m in New York City in an affluent part of town or playing a bar in Mobile, Alabama, I hope that I have crafted something that resonates, no matter where I am.
If you’re heading to Lincoln Center next week, you’re in for a treat. Tickets are here.
Photo credit: Rock Candy Photo
