The critical success of Wrong-Eyed Jesus turned White into Americana’s most adept backwoods savant. He toured the country for sixteen months with a crackerjack band that included a guitarist now lost to the Wallflowers. They played laundromats, slept on floors, and drove a leaky ’70s Impala from town to town.
White had been pretty much destitute when he made Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and upon its release, things did not immediately improve. He broke up with his girlfriend, who was pregnant with their daughter at the time (they have since reconciled). He lived in a trailer park in southern Florida, in someone else’s trailer.
The record was a critical and, to a much smaller extent, commercial success. “When I was making it I thought, ‘Of course this is gonna be a success.’ And then there were times when I thought, ‘Who’d want to listen to this?'” White says. “I’m glad to see it’s not just this swath of sad people. I’m glad people who aren’t falling off the end of the world like it.”
No Such Place, while not exactly accessible, is as pop-informed as Jesus was Waits-ian. White enlisted the British trip-pop trio Morcheeba to remix several of its tracks, and Sweetback’s Andrew Hale helps out as well, along with several other remix artists. Much of the remixing neither adds nor detracts from what is at heart a folk record, though Morcheeba’s work on the record’s showpiece track, “Ten Miles To Go On A Nine Mile Road” (with its couplet “You got no choice but to learn to glean solace from the pain/Or you’ll end up cynical or dead” aptly summarizing White’s life thus far) is outstanding.
The album feels more assured and less swampy; the religious imagery (with the exception of the tongue-in-cheek twang of “God Was Drunk When He Made Me”) is muted. As with Wrong-Eyed Jesus, there is both a grace and an anger to the record. “I was thinking about dying on the last one,” White says simply. “And on this one I’m thinking about living. This record feels complete to me. It’s got innocence and rage, and they come together just right. I’m trying to dialogue strange feelings without being hostile, a la Papa Roach. It’s the transmutation of rage — like putting coal into the vise of your mind and getting a diamond. That’s what music means to me.”
No Such Place concerns itself more with loops and beats than its predecessor; much of it likely harks back to White’s early, hybrid mixed tapes. It will probably appeal to hipsters in the same way Wrong-Eyed Jesus appealed to the perennially depressed. White’s own label is billing the record as trip-folk, which is as good a tag as any, even if no one seems really sure what it means.
White says he’s just happy the label is thinking about him at all. Indeed, Luaka Bop is encouraged enough to contemplate releasing a single. White, who made music for thirteen years without making a penny, figures he might have some good luck coming. “This record is more mainstream, and I don’t mind that in the least,” he says. “You have to think about that component, about things like sales, because otherwise it’s a hobby. And this is not a hobby. But I could never waltz through the front door of the pop world. There’s a doorman there, and they would never let me in. They can sniff out an impostor.”
Thanks to a publishing deal, respectable sales of his first record, and the placement of a song in the forgettable Drew Barrymore movie Home Fries, White can live comfortably for the first time in his life. He takes his daughter to daycare and watches a fair amount of daytime television, and waits to go back out on the road. He divides his life into the days before Wrong-Eyed Jesus (which coincides roughly with the birth of his child) and after.
“I look at it like I lived two different lives. I have a family now, I have this little sphere of acclaim I live in. I mean, I was a cab driver. I was resigned to being obscure. I look at it this way: The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. I wandered in South Florida. That’s worse.”
Allison Stewart lives and writes in New York City because Michael Jordan’s never coming back to Chicago as a player, so why should she?
