Before White began dealing with physically relocating himself to the south, he made a similar shift in his songwriting. “For a long time I just babbled about what was in my mind,” he explains. “A smart friend of mine when I was in film school listened to a couple of my songs and said, ‘There’s no time and place in this song. It would be a lot more meaningful if there was a time and a place in it.'”
On that advice, White wrote “A Perfect Day To Chase Tornadoes”. It has a highway, a city, a blind girl and a preacher. “I put it in a place and suddenly everything made sense,” he says. “All of the weird philosophical ramblings that I had indulged myself in all those years had context. If you make a place and a time seem magical, then it’s bound to be more meaningful than if you talk about the magic in your mind that no one has an index for.”
Wrong-Eyed Jesus and the two albums White made after shoe-horning himself back into Pensacola were shot through with wanderlust. They had restless songs such as “Burn The River Dry”, “The Road That Leads To Heaven”, “Bound To Forget” and “10 Miles To Go On A 9 Mile Road”.
Skiperoo is the first album White has made that doesn’t have a single song on it with “God” or “Jesus” in the title. While that may seem like a superficial observation, it says a lot about where White’s currently at — namely, at home and more or less at peace, the existential wounds still there, but salved. “Blindly We Go” takes up a subtler theological critique, but several others suggest contentment.
White’s music is itself a paradoxical merging of the free-floating and the tangible. His albums aren’t the place to look for firecracker melodies or propulsive chord progressions any more than a bottle of bourbon is the place to turn for an instant energy boost. They’re all about enveloping moods and expansive soundscapes — and they’re surreal. White washes his off-kilter imagery in an ebb and flow of abstract sound, the kind that can’t easily be traced back to its instrument of origin.
White liberally used layering on past tracks such as “Corvair” (with a sighing chorus submerged beneath what sounds like a graceful spaceship landing) and “Objects In Motion” (with drifting cloud of tiny pings, swooshes and bleeps), but the first two tracks on Skiperoo seem strikingly simple: “A Town Called Amen” and “Blindly We Go” are untouched by White’s usual nocturnal tinkering.
The album is bookended by songs (“A Town Called Amen” and “It’s Been A Long Long Day”) that savor the sense of being settled at home amid White’s intimate, grainy murmuring, the soft-edged harmonies of four members of the New York band Ollabelle, and Bryan Isaacs’ coolly salving dobro licks. “Diamonds To Coal” delivers the clearest description of the change in White’s experience: “A day will come when you will know/Which way you must choose to go/To travel on and live alone/Or turn yourself around/And try to get back home.”
The ghostly, music-box waltz of “Pieces Of Heaven” offers a further clue that White has found some small part of what he’s been looking for in his daughters. “I’m not real good at writing intimate songs depicting my love for those around me,” White says. “This album I tried again and felt like I did a better job speaking about my love for my kids and what I hope for them.
“My songs aren’t real to life, but they’re getting more real to life as time goes on,” he offers. “I’m trying to build a bridge back to the human condition by way of this musical-artistic path that I have chosen. And it’s working — I’ve got a house and I have a car and I have a baby and a wife. I’m just as connected as a person can be, especially one as disconnected as I was ten years ago.”
But considering how often people at shows ask him to play “Christmas Day” — a deeply sad song about a relationship in ruin — he’s well aware that not everyone will dig the new, happier Jim White. “It may be the death knell for my musical career,” he says. “If you have become a convenient conduit for sorrow and you suddenly are happy, that doesn’t necessarily make the people who are listening likewise so happy, because they still have their struggles that they’re dealing with.”
If audience expectations don’t dissuade him from advancing further down the path of making peace, neither does harsh criticism about the way he portrays the south.
Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus — a 2004 BBC film with vivid, gritty visuals and a southern gothic musical imagination loosely inspired by the short story from White’s debut — has been a lightning rod for attention of all sorts. The film blends White’s musings on region and religion with the perspectives of a British screenwriter and director, musicians such as Johnny Dowd, David Eugene Edwards and the Handsome Family, and southerners the filmmakers came across as White guided them through small towns and swamps in a 1970 Chevy Impala — with a statue of Jesus sticking out of the trunk.
J.D. Wilkes, frontman of the Legendary Shackshakers — a band that deals more viscerally with some of the same themes White addresses — didn’t like what White did with the film. “He had sort of vociferously and publicly called me a fraud, and I think I agree with him and it doesn’t really bother me,” says White. “If you pay attention in the movie I’m not saying I’m a southerner. I regret saying, ‘If you want to see the real south’ — that’s something in the movie that I said. What I should have said was, ‘If you want to see the south that I love,’ or something like that.
“One of the things that astonished me when we were making the film was that this idea of a dualistic south that I had assumed was particular to me was pervasive,” marvels White. “Working-class people [in the film] — from the prisoners to the lady working the bar — they all talk about the church people and the sinners. And I always thought that was just sort of a hyper memory of the south that I had dramatically made. But it wasn’t.”
Nashville writer Jewly Hight’s first album, Darlin’ Understand, came out January 29. She, too, comes from Florida.
