Jim White - fact and myth

One thing that is not obvious from Jim White’s music is if he has a particularly vivid imagination, or if he has actually led a fierce and exotic life. Another thing that isn’t clear to me is whether or not this actually matters.

Of course, the answer to that first question is of immense importance if you are attempting to conjure up some sort of objective analysis of Jim White – the person, the life. But in terms of making some sort of subjective judgement of his music, the roots of the lyrics, the origins of his musical soul, could perhaps be dismissed. More than that, in fact: they must be dismissed. Because with every tale of knowing Jesus, with every lost love described with phlegmatic abandon, White deliberately obscures the truth, blurring the distinction between fact and myth with his imaginative and unstructured lyrics, his other-worldly characters, and his subtle, brittle, space-country music.

White’s influences are so numerous that they literally compete for your attention as they make short, sharp pleas for primacy in each song; once more, the South comes across as that melting pot that Levon Helm so usefully described: the place where blues, gospel, folk, Cajun, show tunes, rockabilly and, of course, country music came together to form rock and roll. The South is relevant in White’s albums in a very tangible sense. With some country music, especially that peddled by alt-country performers, the South is conjured up in the listener’s mind by a process that is somewhat circular: we assume country sounds originate from the South, these guys are singing some kind of country, so it must be based on the South. Well, fair enough, but with Jim White you don’t have to make such a convoluted – if subconscious – leap of musical logic. He actually sings about the South. Not by writing a stanza about the deep waters of the Mississippi, or a rhyming couplet likening Alabama to someone’s mama, but in a manner which is at once less obvious and more definitely rooted in that part of America. This is transient music, taking you from place to place, but always with those touches which define the area – the dust, the motor homes, and an inherited faith in Jesus. While it never touches any specific part of the South, White’s music encompasses the whole place.

Take, for example, Heaven of My Heart. One of the more traditional sounding songs on White’s first album, Wrong-Eyed Jesus (1997), it kicks off with a jaunty Cajun-inflected accordion, immediately conjuring up vivid images of the South’s south – the song is from New Orleans. But is it? The steel guitar which enters soon and contributes comfortable licks throughout the song suggests something more akin to the open country, the campfire. The lyrics, for their part, don’t really tell a specific story – like many of White’s songs, they communicate to the listener via a series of snapshots which, though not quite disjointed, are certainly fragmentary. But the overall picture does have an organic feel to it; it must do, as the more peculiar lines within the song don’t feel out of place:

And the shining stars guiding stars pointing away to the heaven of my heart
And guiding stars pointing away to the heaven of my heaven of my heart
Yeah I got a funny bone laugh like a mule I always did pretty good in school
But still I cannot decipher this girl's arithmetic
Still I walk to the moon I'd lick this spittoon I'd wear woolly underwear in the summer
Just to show her how much I want her your loveable lunatic

But this should be little surprise – one of the lessons you learn from many of Jim White’s songs is that, in his world anyway, there is a fine line between the concrete, certain reality and the ethereal, dreamlike visions that can come to you so easily. White’s songs are awash with fine lines, and also a tangible sense of fragility. The quiet banjo-led introduction of Sleepy Town brings home how much he seems to miss the country-ranch-prairie lifestyle, but equally, there is a seedy quality which suggests a wistfulness for the darker side of life: the brothel behind the bland façade of the sleepy town. But these feelings are so closely meshed that he can really only be saying, there is a fine line. However broad that façade is, it can never be more than paper-thin; and the people living on either side of it are all-knowing.

Tales of loss – avoidable loss? - recur throughout Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Sometimes they are comparatively small-time, though no less tragic for that; at other times the stories are downright awful. But either way, White tells them with a delicate and sensitive touch, both lyrically and sonically. Often his voice sounds like it has been recorded via a tin can, and the words he writes are no less interesting:

I pour whiskey in the honeycomb,
It makes the bees all turn to angels
I watch ’em fly off into heaven...
Disappear where I can’t follow
And I would write Jesus a letter
But I hear that he don’t speak English...
So instead I’ll just throw these cobblestones until I ring that old church bell

Meanwhile, the music itself contributes lines both rhythmic and melodic, sweeping in and out, always based on a warped version of down-home country, counterpointing the lyrics but fitting them well.

The songs have their own kind of momentum – they never explode but they do build to a pinnacle, a point of the utmost extreme of whatever emotion White wishes to convey. But there is a feeling of unfulfilled anguish, as if White is still holding something back, and it is this which gives all of his work that sense of fragility. That first album seems to hold everything together – just – very well. By the time of his second album, No Such Place (2001), the results are rather more mixed. The high-points of this record are better than anything found on Wrong-Eyed Jesus. By now he is constantly pushing his own sense of vulnerability to the limit, and on Christmas Day he pulls it off, telling an astonishing story of a loss to which he is already perfectly resigned:

When the words you must utter are hopelessly tangled
In the memories and scars you show no one
So seldom a door…so seldom a key
So seldom a hit like the hurt you put on me
But seldom comes happiness without the pain of the devil in the details
Since I saw the smile on your face as I was crying
In a Greyhound station on Christmas Day…in 1998

This story is at once both uniquely personal and universal. The name of year, 1998, is sung repeatedly, but while for many songwriters this device would be used if there were some broader historical importance to the date, for Jim White this is not necessary. Every person has had years of their lives which were particularly significant, memorable or momentous, years which to most other people seem unimportant; for the narrator in Christmas Day, 1998 was such a year. But what happened on Christmas Day that year? He saw her face in a Greyhound Station – one of the most quintessentially and everyday American settings imaginable. And that is the beauty of Jim White’s songwriting – it makes you believe, or at least imagine, that however mundane the practical details of the life being described, its stories can nonetheless be full of the most extreme emotions and earth-shattering events and relationships.

But therein lies the risk that White is taking. Because while Christmas Day is a fine composition and a perfectly-realised performance, on other songs the marriage of lyrics and music isn’t quite sufficient to deliver a similar narrative and emotional message while still making for enjoyable listening. At some points on the album, the gaps between lyrics and music, and between his inner-most thoughts and more general palatability, become almost too much to take. In The Wrong Kind of Love, these tensions are stretched beyond what is sensible, and the result is a degeneration into some sort of electronic-country incidental music. The centrepiece of the song is White’s gentle description of a girl or woman who wants the sort of love that he says is the wrong kind, and his inability to break free of it:

Come beg, borrow, steal, or fight
'Cause you never felt nothing so real or right as this wrong...wrong kind of love

Unfortunately, the melody White uses is rather too familiar. When White’s songwriting comes together, the result is flawless songs which resist all criticism; at other times, it seems that the melody was the last thing he put his mind to, and the outcome is often a re-hashed tune of limited range. In The Wrong Kind of Love, his standard vocal is supported by a mock tinny radio voice contributing its view on the song’s subject. Meanwhile, the instrumental accompaniment produces a pleasing enough representation of a wild, mystical night on the prairie – but it bears little relation to the words.

Towards the end of No Such Place, White finds safer ground in his more geographical music – his road music. The story of Hey! You Going My Way??? is less meaty and substantial than some of his other efforts: he brings his extremities closer to familiar ground, and the result is more successful (perhaps there is only room for one Christmas Day on an album). His evocation of “the geeks and the freaks and the crooks and the hookers” is reminiscent of the Velvet Underground – this must be deliberate, as White’s vocal at this point seems to be a tribute to Lou Reed – and the song certainly has the Velvets’ sense of subtle urgency. But the song also contains the more natural, less forced, power of, say, Alejandro Escovedo.

The last original song on the album is The Love That Never Fails, and it sees White returning once more to those traditional aspects of the South for his inspiration. Country sounds forms the basis for the song’s music (although, typically, sitars play their part). He sings gently of a an enduring love which is clearly based on some sort of religious tenet – once again, the message is a personal one, but he relates the tale to the “Angels of Death” and, along the way, gives us a massive clue as to his inspiration:

There ain't no room for dreamers in heaven
Silver linings seldom appear-except in horrible storms

Jim White’s advice to us, suggested by his music and made explicit in this song: get your dreams in now. Such clarity is rare in White’s music, and the result is surprising. At the end of The Love That Never Fails, a string ensemble plays out gentle songs, White’s (sometimes over-used) tinny alter-ego vocal recalls lines from God Was Drunk When He Made Me – apparently a message whose importance he feels warrants reiterating – and the album comes together. Finally, fragility is forgotten. After this, the reprise of Corvair comes as a fond memory and nothing more, and in this context its excessively romantic and idealised lyrics are almost palatable.

White’s third album, Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See (2004), follows on directly from the closing section of No Such Place. The stories continue in a similar vein (sometimes too similar – If Jesus Drove a Motor Home is rather too reminiscent of earlier efforts), the music is rooted in country and the South while bringing in fresh and surprising elements, and the vocals alternate between the swamp and the clouds. But White doesn’t push things to the limit quite so much, and the result, if less radical, is certainly easier to listen to.

The ambivalence White – formerly a man of the cloth – holds towards his god is even more blatant on this album. The number of mentions of God and Jesus throughout his records suggests that he is still convinced of their existence – surely he can’t be making some cute point along the lines of Dylan’s With God On Our Side every time? But in The Girl From Brownsville Texas, he makes it clear that although he believes in God, his faith in God’s ability (or desire) to be of much use to him is shaky at best:

I say "God, if you ain't smiling on me, then you ain't no friend of mine." It's late at night and this motel room's drunk, I been listening to the lonesome wind crying. My best friend once said, "Jim, what you cling to, that's the thing that you had best forget

But despite this advice, White cannot quite seem to shake God from his mind. The lyrics are far too personal for White to be making a point to the listener, along the lines of “See, how can he exist?”. White feels the need to refer many of his feelings and actions to a God he doesn’t have much time for any more – almost in the way that a person might privately continue to desire a former lover’s approval for their actions, long after that relationship has broken down. White has shattered any internal myths he held in his mind about God’s power, but he’s not sure what to fill that mental gap with. Ultimately, he suggests to God that the two of them broker a deal: if God will convince the girl from Brownsville that White is a better man than he is, then White in turn will submit to God’s will and become the “religious fool” that God desires – submitting finally to blind faith.

Ultimately, Drill a Hole… suggests only that White’s travels – in both space and time – will just carry on. As an African-sounding percussion section collides pleasingly with a tinkly piano and a country-tinged vocal from the singer, the album’s last song, Land Called Home, is probably White’s most psychedelic song thus far – he certainly sings with more than a hint of that sixties sense of abandon. And what is he singing of?

Even when he is home, White seems himself as being on the move; but that is irrelevant for the moment, as he is not there, he can only sing of it – whether he is hoping for it is unclear. Overall, the simple perspective coming out of Jim White’s music is that life is tough, but you can make it okay. Life is a journey where you encounter whatever happens to be there, and the search for some grander sense of freedom may well be a waste of time. As he sings in Handcuffed to a Fence in Mississippi (from No Such Place):

You know freedom's just a stupid superstition,
'Cause life's a highway that you travel blind.
It's true that having fun's a terminal addiction.
What good is happiness, when it's just a state of mind?
For in the prison of perpetual emotion,
We're all shackled to the millstone of our dreams.
Me, I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi,
Where things is always better than they seem

But don’t be fooled into thinking that White thinks you should just accept your lot in life, or that there is nothing to be done about where you find yourself. For Jim White, freedom is deeply personal, and is achieved in the journey itself. The South, he accepts, is no great bastion of freedom. But broaden your horizons, dream your dreams, and keep moving from harsh reality to imagined fantasy, and you will, at least while you make that journey, be free.