Tag: the civil wars

Open Mic: Charlie Peacock Pushes Through Chronic Pain on ‘EVERY KIND OF UH-OH’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With a 40+ year career spanning virtually every aspect of the music business – from performing and songwriting to production, development and even education – Charlie Peacock has battled myriad creative challenges. A standout in the Contemporary Christian format who was also deeply involved in the Americana folk boom of the 2010s (he was even the driving force behind The Civil Wars’ mainstream emergence), no problem seemed too big to handle. But for his new album EVERY KIND OF UH-OH, Peacock had to overcome an obstacle unlike the rest: a rare, debilitating health condition.

Diagnosed with Dysautonomia and Central Sensitization, Peacock has essentially been experiencing a never-ending headache since 2017 – seven grueling years and counting. Needless to say, it has upended the GRAMMY winner’s life, and while some days are better than others, the chronic pain prevented him from music making all together– until a flash of writing in 2023, that is.

Featuring 10 all-new songs penned in a two-week flurry, EVERY KIND OF UH-OH finds Peacock getting back to work, but with fresh appreciation for life’s messy beauty. Co-produced with his son Sam Ashworth, a peaceful mix of dream-folk and gospel match a tender, feathery tenor, as Peacock explores against-the-odds optimism with spirituality, purpose, and humor. In the end, it feels like a veteran songsmith’s statement of revelation; and a set of life lessons delivered with knowledge, not judgement.

Still fighting symptoms on the morning after a party celebrating the album’s arrival, Peacock spoke with BGS about how his life transformed and how it forever changed the way he makes music. Peacock also plans to release his memoir, Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music in February.

We’re really interested in the way things like creativity and mindfulness and health intersect, so I’m fascinated by your story. Can you just tell me how you’re feeling today – both in a micro sense and in terms of the bigger picture with everything you’ve been through?

Charlie Peacock: Well, just for the background, I have a neurological disorder called Central Sensitization, which is a pain management disorder between the brain and the central nervous system about how pain is managed. So, my brain got tricked into thinking I am in trouble, and it’s sending me pain signals. Basically in the same way that if I scratched my arm on something, that scratch pain is there to tell me, “Hey, there’s something wrong with your arm. You might want to take a look at it.” Well, the brain functions in that way for all our pain management throughout our entire body.

So mine, this disorder that I have is that everyday for almost eight years, I’ve had an intractable headache. I’ve had an eight-year headache basically, and it goes up and down in terms of intensity. Sometimes it’s “You’ve got to go to the hospital” intensity. And most of the time it’s just sort of like a three or a four [on a scale of one to 10]. And I’ve learned to function through various methodologies and mindfulness and various kinds of treatments that I’ve done.

I imagine on top of the physical side of things, it has impacted your creativity. How did this change the way you look at making music?

Well, it got me back in some ways. It got me out of the music business and back into music making.

Really? How so?

At the point when I got sick, I was just turning 60 years old. So I was a 60-year-old man who’d been in the music business for 42 years, who was in writing rooms with 20-somethings. And even though part of my whole thing as a songwriter and a producer is that I’ve stayed relatively current, you’re still a person of your time and your generation. It’s like, could I make a trap song? Absolutely. But will I make one that is convincing to people who listen to trap? Maybe not. …

I was functioning more as the older, experienced sage that comes in and cleans up people’s songs. And so what the illness did was it put me back in that more childlike place of working on my own music and experiencing just the joy of creating, rather than coming in as the expert who’s going to be the song doctor or the producer who’s going to give that artist that extra 23% that makes them commercially viable or something like that. So that has been a real joy. And then of course, as I’ve said many times, it’s like you take care of the music and it takes care of you. That’s been the case just in terms of imagination and creativity during this illness, where it’s been a part of my medicine for sure.

Here we are eight years after the illness started and you’ve got a new record. What changed to bring this music out?

Well, [before] this illness period I had gone to Lipscomb University and created their commercial music program, and then became the head of the School of Music for a year. And it was during that time that I got sick. I was already kind of moving out of the producer-for-hire model and kind of had this education piece that was on my bucket list. So I had gone and done that and then I was just here working, making a lot of music, doing a lot of writing, working on a family, a screenplay for a family story from the 1800s, just doing a bunch of different creative things. …

[After the illness], I just had a willingness to say, “If my music career is over at this point, then I will have been really grateful.” And this memoir is kind the period on the end of the sentence. Then all of a sudden it was like I woke up one morning like “Is that an idea for a song?” It was brewing. So I started working on it and then a few more. And then I asked my son, “Hey, you want to help me finish this song?” I go out to his house and we hang and work on this song. We’re both super excited about it. And then he finally, after hearing more of the music, he was like, “Dad, you got to promise me you’ll take this seriously. Don’t just tell everybody, ‘Hey, I have a new record out on Friday and buy a couple ads on Facebook and call it a day.’ I think you need to actually do an old school release and get a distributor and have them set the record up.”

I said, “I don’t know if I have the energy for that.” But [Sam] said, “Well, I’ll help you.” And so he did help me. Really, the whole family has been a huge help. Sam came alongside me and he co-produced the record and we co-wrote three songs on it. And literally, it’s a 10-song album. Within 14 days. I had all 10 songs written. And it was just one of those times where it was just time to do that. I didn’t know it was, but it was.

Fortunately, I also had some pretty good windows of health that I could [record]. I had some days when I tried to sing where it’s just like, “Man, it’s just not happening.” But I’d wait a few days and get rested up again and go up to the studio and sing, and it would still be there. I was actually surprised myself, some of the range that I was able to sing at still.

Have the songs taken on a new shape for you or a new dimension, topic-wise and thematically?

Well, my great-grandfather was a fiddler in Louisiana and my grandfather from Oklahoma loved to sing all the Okie songs of the era. And I thought, let me just lean into that a little bit. So I would say this record is a little taste of that, especially the instrumentation is pretty much still the same in terms of rootsy guitars and just simple drums and bass and fiddle and pedal steel. And the only difference between this record is I really leaned into the gospel vocal sound. A lot of my friends that have been dominant in Black gospel music. And so that’s a difference. Narrative-wise, I was really trying to do this kind of literary thing that was a mix of plain-speak American roots, with these literary elements, and then also take a spiritual element, but not make it religious, and try to create a narrative that was uniquely American. I think in its influence, it’s almost like reading some of the classic American novelists.

There’s a wonderful mix of storytelling and deeper spirituality, for sure. Thank you, Charlie. I’ll just leave you with the big picture. What do you hope people take away from this record?

I think for me, even listening to the songs and seeing the reaction from folks, what they said afterwards is, “This is a world that I want to enter into. There’s something about what you’re creating on this record, this musical world, and this invitation to come on in that feels really safe and that I will belong here and I’ll be well loved, cared for, not judged – allowed to just be myself.”

And I think that’s what we want. I mean, I think that’s what makes our heart beat, is that we just want to be known totally. We want to be known like the intricacies of our personalities. We don’t want to be known superficially. And I hope there’s something about this music that sends that signal that, yeah, I do too. Come on in and listen and see if you find some of that here.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Cowart

John Paul White Captures the Countrypolitan Era

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John Paul White, who rose to prominence as half of The Civil Wars, has just delivered his most fully-realized solo set, The Hurting Kind. When he couldn’t find a modern album that gave him the feeling of his favorite countrypolitan recordings of the ‘50s and ‘60s (think Patsy Cline and early Roy Orbison), White set out to make an album that would capture the aesthetic of that era without going full-on retro. He wrote with some legendary songwriters of those decades still working in Nashville, including Country Music Hall of Fame members Bill Anderson and Bobby Braddock. One of those Braddock collaborations, “This Isn’t Gonna End Well,” is included here as a duet with Lee Ann Womack.

Recorded at his own Sun Drop Sound studio in Florence, Alabama, with producer Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes) behind the console, The Hurting Kind finds John Paul White going for broke as a vocalist, flexing his creative muscle as a country songwriter, and speaking his mind about what it means to live and work in Alabama in 2019.

BGS: When you were growing up, your father’s record collection contained a lot of classic country albums, but you didn’t gravitate towards those sounds back then?

White: When I was growing up, I hated those records. It was not my cup of tea. I was more of a rock ‘n’ roll guy. I was listening to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC — stuff like that that. When I got to college I started listening to Steve Earle and Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris. I realized the reason I was digging those records so much is because of all those country records I grew up with. That’s what they grew up with, too, so we had a common DNA. So, I dug back into all those records that I knew by heart and realized how much I loved them. They influenced my decisions musically all the time whether I knew it or not. I finally just fully embraced it.

Over the last few years, you’ve been drawn to music from the countrypolitan era. Why did you want to tap into that for The Hurting Kind?

I think it was just a huge hole in that part of my discography that I was listening to. I was looking for that stuff everywhere. I’d worn those records out, and I knew them backwards and forwards. I was trying to find something in a modern setting that was doing that thing, because that’s just what I craved and what I wanted to listen to.

I then went out and made the record that I was looking for. I decided, “Well, I’m going to find the guys that wrote a lot of those songs.” So I got to write with Whisperin’ Bill Anderson and Bobby Braddock for this album. I got the seal of approval from them that I was on the right track. That’s huge.

You wanted to capture that countrypolitan aesthetic, but you didn’t want The Hurting Kind to sound retro. How did you achieve that?

I didn’t actively do anything to keep it from sounding retro. I wanted it to sound like a modern record, but with those same sensibilities of the string arrangements, vocal harmonies and that country-jazz Chet Atkins-type guitar style. But I wanted to capture it in the way you capture sounds today and not feel like you have to use all old ribbon mics and old RCA microphones that they were forced to use. We have lots more tools at our disposal. If we had finished this record and were just following our guts and it sounded like an old record, then so be it. But I’m glad it sounds like its own thing.

The aesthetic I was going for was really captured in the songwriting process. I arranged all these songs in my head the way that I thought they should sound, and the way they should progress dynamically, before I ever walked into the studio.

“You Lost Me” is such a great cheating song, and one of the most devastating on an album full of heartbreak songs. How are you so good at writing these sad songs?

I’m not meant to write songs to cheer you up. I’d fail miserably because they don’t move me. They don’t make me feel something. My songs aren’t necessarily sad as much as they’ll stir up an emotion. It might be longing or it might be love, but at an angle. Like, “I love you and you’re so horrible for me.” That’s more interesting to me, ‘cause just the straight up love songs, it’s been done. I come at it from a completely different perspective.

Doomed love is also the topic of “This Isn’t Gonna End Well,” a duet with Lee Ann Womack. Why was she the right fit for that song?

I needed a timeless voice — a voice that could straddle genre, but also, I won’t lie, I wanted a voice that would be recognizable. Lee Ann was every one of those boxes checked. She’s really made strides towards creating true, traditional music and sort of separating herself from the typical Music Row stuff. We’ve known each other for a while and have talked about collaborating and never have. I knew, because of Bobby writing it with me, I could be confident enough to walk in the room and ask her out, as it were. She said yes.

You’re singing with a lot of emotion and vulnerability on this album, which isn’t common for a man to do in 2019. Why is that?

Because it’s ain’t cool, I guess. I love Roy Orbison and Marty Robbins — the guys that just put their heart on their sleeve and are not afraid of the drama and bowl you over with it. They make sure you know exactly what they’re feeling with those big notes and the trills and stuff. I think ever since Nirvana came along, so many wonderful things about that whole movement, but it also became so much shoe-gazing. That’s fine, and I like some of that music, but what I really like is a guy up front with confidence putting it all out there and letting you know exactly how he feels and not giving a shit what you think about it.

It’s not easy to pull that singing style off, either. Your voice has really evolved on this album.

I appreciate you saying that. I think it was a confidence thing, too. I think it was a conscious decision to step forward and be counted and give people what I have and not hold back. Not give them 80 or 90 percent. I honestly feel like I’m singing better now than I ever have. I feel like every time I get in front of a microphone or get onstage or am in the studio, I figure something out. I tweak something that makes it a little less hard, a little more comfortable or easier to project — a little better tone, and that’s exciting.

Being an Alabama native like yourself, I’ve found a lot of meaning in the album’s opening song, “The Good Old Days,” with the news coming out of the Alabama state legislature. You’re now performing that song all across the country and overseas and in some ways representing the state to your audience. I have to say, it’s complicated to be from Alabama these days.

It most certainly is. I get it left and right. I’m proud to be known as an Alabamian. I don’t take that lightly. I don’t tend to want to be the preachy guy around here, because I’ve never gravitated towards those sorts of people anyway. The whole proselytizing thing of, “This is what you should believe and this is what you should not believe” does not sit well with me. But at some point around here, it just gets to a fever pitch to where you can’t keep your mouth shut.

That song was definitely a big middle finger to the idea of “Making America Great Again,” because for most people in this country that aren’t white, straight dudes, it wasn’t great. It hasn’t been great. I’m trying every day to teach my children about tolerance and compassion and making sure they know this country was really, really hard on a lot of people that didn’t fit what people considered the norm.

I don’t ever want to see that shit happen again. I don’t want it on their watch. I want to make sure they’ve got their eyes open and that they change things and don’t ever say we should have it back like it used to be. No. I don’t want that for a minute. I want it like it says in the song, “Our best days are in front of us.” I have to believe in that. There are days when I wonder, but I have to have that hope.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Come In, Sit Down: Joy Williams Visits About ‘Front Porch’

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Joy Williams embarked on quite the journey to get to her new solo album Front Porch. On the title track, she sums it up best, singing, “I took the long way looking for the shortcut/ To find out that this place was made of the best stuff.” After the Civil Wars broke up in 2014, she left Nashville and headed west to California with her family. The distance felt necessary: It served, on the one hand, as a chance to clear her head after the dissolution of a creative partnership, and on the other as an opportunity to spend with her dying father.

When she released 2015’s VENUS, her first solo project to follow her duo work, she purposely went for a different sound, as if she wasn’t fully prepared to inhabit the style long circulating around her voice and songwriting. Front Porch is a return to form in more ways than the title implies. She moved back to Nashville, and began writing in a more honest fashion about love, desire, and the flaws that people may try to run from but which make them perfectly imperfect. Partnering with The Milk Carton Kids’ Kenneth Pattengale as producer, Williams burrows into a roots sound that is as sparse as it is reverent, her voice so clear and comfortable it’s an invitation for one and all to gather on the porch.

VENUS took you in new directions than what listeners have typically heard from you, while Front Porch feels like a return in many ways. Why was it time to make this project in particular?

VENUS was a by-product of having to cleanse my palate, so to speak. After [the Civil Wars] officially split, I felt a little claustrophobic in Nashville. I realized once I was [in Venice Beach] I was still bringing everything that I was processing with me; the music was an expression of me needing to literally lift out of the space I had inhabited for a while in order to gain some clarity. I left the holler, as it were, to go find a different space for myself in order to clear my mind and heal, because there was a lot to heal from. And I did that.

VENUS certainly felt like a heavy record despite the pop production.

I was also on the West Coast because my dad was dealing with terminal cancer. I wanted to be close to him as he was in the process of passing away. That record, you can hear some heaviness, but there’s a determination to fight and continue on. Once my dad passed away, there was this sense of “Why are we still in Venice Beach?”

So you returned to Nashville?

We came back to the house that never sold and started again. It felt like a whole new chapter. For me, it felt like a return that was really important—to community, and to myself, and to no longer being afraid to make the music that was really inside of me all along, and to actually enjoy and embrace the sound that came from the front porch, which became my guard rails for writing. After everything I’d lost in those past few years, I realized it’s really the simple things that matter the most, to me anyway. I wanted to make a record that reflected that.

In ending VENUS with “Welcome Home,” did you already see yourself pointing in the direction that became Front Porch?

Yes, absolutely. Doesn’t that happen so much in our lives anyhow? We give ourselves away before we move in that direction.

The body knows before the brain does.

Yes, I’m a huge believer of what I call the animal body or the animal instinct. I don’t mean that in the barbaric sense, but in the deepest wisdom.

And what wisdom did you gain?

I felt like in the process of writing this record — which was a slow and steady process — I was also coming to terms with embracing who I am, and learning to love the scars and the bruises and the bumps along the way, realizing that’s what makes people ultimately beautiful and interesting. I’m a recovering perfectionist from a conservative family. Unraveling those things lead to more spaciousness within me, and a deeper gratitude for everything I’ve gone through — the tough shit and the highs as well.

It’s interesting that you say you’ve come to terms with the scars and bruises because you sound so comfortable on Front Porch, like you’ve rediscovered something about yourself.

As I’ve hopefully grown over the years, I’ve become more aware of my coping tricks, and learning to lovingly dismantle those, if I’m able, and also to treat them all with an open curiosity. That rootedness and groundedness within me really began influencing a lot of things in my life, music being one of them. On top of all of that, I was newly pregnant with our daughter Poppy — I knew I was pregnant, but I didn’t know I was having a daughter at the time — and really sick while recording that record. There was a part of me that asked, “Should I postpone the recording?” I thought, “No, this is the prime time to do this because I’m going to sit on this stool and sing.” I don’t care if this comes out perfectly, I just want it to be as honest as it possibly can be. It was the most joyful experience I’ve ever had in the studio, and I’ve been doing this since I was 17.

I’m sure that’s not how any artist would plan that process, but what comes out ends up being its own kind of perfection.

Right. We recorded 15 songs in five days. The process for that was really a product of Anthony da Costa and I on my green velvet couch rehearsing these songs, just guitar and voice. The purity of that and the ability to focus on the performances allowed for an organic experience.

I was particularly taken with the vocal chorus that shows up on “Trouble With Wanting,” and how it plays into that idea of the power in gathering. What prompted the choice to include it?

I really love the idea of the front porch because you can gather out there with yourself — you can commune with yourself out on the front porch — or you can bring a best friend, or at least on my porch you can bring 8 to 10 people. There’s always a beautiful energy with any one of those configurations. With “Trouble,” that song felt like such an open conversation. I wrote it with my friend Natalie Hemby when we were talking about the devastation of desire, and what it’s like to have those moments where you go, “If only that person….”

I’d had a conversation with my best friend who’d had an on-again, off-again relationship with someone for 10 years, and I thought, “God, every one of us has been through some kind of version of this heartache and longing.” The experience of desire and that universal sense that many of us can relate to, it felt like it begged for group vocals. We did that all live. Kenneth is singing harmonies, and Anthony is singing harmonies, and I’m singing harmonies, and it felt like a collective expression of something that felt true, at least to me.

Speaking of desire, one of my favorite things about your songwriting is how raw and honest you’ve been about dealing with desire. How have you seen that shift from project to project?

I was always writing romance and different shades of it. In the Civil Wars, it was like tapping into the destructive, obsessive side of desire. As I’ve grown, I realize that romance has many facets in the same jewel, so if you turn it, you see something completely different. What does it look like to experience the romance of what is present and in front of you? And the romance of learning to love yourself? …

I think in the process of writing this record, I wanted to write about how difficult and challenging and scary and vulnerable it is to love someone a long time, and to love someone without any real sense of knowing what the future holds. No one can foretell what the future will be. The process of making this record, I wanted to dig my hands into the earth even more about the sumptuous and sensual nature of what romance is and what it looks like to love myself, and what it looks like to love someone else, and what it looks like to love my family, and what it looks like to lose, and what it looks like to begin again, and what it looks like to say, “I’m done,” or “Enough.” Whatever it is. I wanted to write in a way that there was no glossing over anything.

Where Everything’s Connected: A Conversation with Penny and Sparrow

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Sitting in a Philadelphia hotel room, Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke debate their options for lunch. The restaurant needs to be special, because the guys have reason to celebrate. The night before, Penny & Sparrow headlined World Café Live, a hip, roomy venue run by the city’s NPR affiliate. For a duo whose first Philly show — a bar gig somewhere out in Manayunk with seven people in attendance — was only three years ago, Penny & Sparrow have come a long way in a short time. Their rapid climb to headliner status is worthy of commemoration. At the very least, it’s worthy of a killer cheesesteak.

So you’re looking to grab some lunch. When you’re touring through a new town, is it important to eat and shop locally?

Andy Baxter: I look for similar things in most cities we visit — used book stores, comic stores, liquor stores. Those are the things I collect on the road. I have a few wells I always go back to in certain cities, too. I’m looking forward to Ann Arbor, because Vault of Midnight is my favorite comic store in the world.

Which aisle in the liquor store is your favorite?

Kyle Jahnke: We like bourbon. People bring us bourbon at our shows, too.

AB: We started collecting bourbon a few years ago. We usually get a bottle in the green room, and we’ll storehouse it for the entire tour. Then we do a draft at the end of every tour, where we each pick our favorite bottles and take them home. It’s awesome. I’m not gonna lie to you: I’ve replenished my bunker at home many times.

Where did that personal connection with your fans begin?

KJ: For whatever reason, the house show community builds a bed of coals for fans who will travel to come see you. There’s a connectivity there. It’s a really cool environment. We played a lot of those shows at the beginning, when venues weren’t ready to book us. We still play those shows on occasion.

Is that where you began introducing stage banter into your sets? These days, that’s a big part of your show.

AB: It probably started at the house shows, although adding it to our performances wasn’t a concerted thing. Since we want to engage with folks on and off stage, it feels normal to react with the crowd, regardless of how big it is. I love when people talk back. We feed off that interaction as much as we can.

Does the jokes ever fall flat?

KJ: The first time through town, it’s interesting for the crowd. Our songs are pretty weighty, and our banter is not. I think that throws people for a spin. Once they catch the overall pattern of the show, and they realize we’re trying to let people come up for air between heavy songs, they start reacting with us.

How many people are on the road with you these days?

KJ: We’ve got a tour manager who’s a good friend of ours, but we don’t have a front-of-house guy. Especially now that we’re playing bigger rooms, most of the sound guys are really great, and we only have a total of four inputs. It’s not a complex thing. We usually become best friends with the sound engineers, because we only have four channels. They like that.

AB: They’re like, “Oh, thank God. Vocals and an acoustic guitar? This is easy.”

Without drums or electric guitars, you can really hear the natural sound of every place you play, too.

KJ: Definitely. We’ve played all sorts of rooms on this tour. Some are built for acts like us. We show up and get to hear the natural reverb of the space we’re in. Sometimes, you’re playing these boxes that you need to orchestrate and synthetically make it sound the way it needs to. Each one is different.

Before you were headlining your own shows, would you ever find yourselves playing a show with a band that wasn’t nearly as nuanced or quiet as Penny & Sparrow?

KJ: At the beginning of our career, we’d play with local bands. Sometimes it would be in a metal venue, playing with metal bands. That was both bar jarring and very amazing. We got paired once with a world instruments band, too, and there were about 50 instruments onstage.

AB: There was a hammer dulcimer, a rain stick, and a didgeridoo. Like Kyle said, the best pairings are always the metal shows. You’ve got two different groups showing up, and they both tend to like it. We’re the palette cleanser for their group, maybe. We’re happy to be the sherbet for them. We’re just a homemade cucumber water.

Speaking of palette cleaners … are there any non-musical activities that help you clear the noise from your head and make room for new songwriting ideas?

AB: Reading. Just taking in a whole bunch of different voices from other wordsmiths. I love podcasts. I love The Moth. I love audiobooks and short stories. You’re learning different peoples’ word banks and vocabularies. And Kyle’s activity is probably baking.

KJ: No, mine is just being outside or doing non-music things.

 

What led to the creation of your newest album, Wendigo?

AB: We originally started writing this album, thinking we might do a musical of sorts. A dark-themed concert album like Redheaded Stranger, but all from the perspective of Death, like the grim reaper singing the songs. We started doing that and, at the end of the writing, some parts didn’t fit, so we began writing new songs that were inspired by fear. We wanted to figure out if stuff we’re scared of is actually worthy of that fright. I really like comic books and horror stories, so I’m familiar with ideas like the boogeyman and the Loch Ness monster. It’s like immersion therapy. Sometimes, when you a shine a light directly at something that frightens you, you can de-fang it.

We live in a scary world right now. Do you see any political parallels with your songs? Were you writing about the monsters who rule us?

AB: I won’t say that we don’t exist in a scary time right now — that would be really silly — but I’ll also admit that most of these lyrics were written long before the campaign trail was in full hatred mode. It would be disingenuous to say the album was, in any way, inspired by political ramifications. But looking at 2016 and 2017 through the lens of what we’d written was a really eerie thing. The album is all about looking at things that you’re scared of … and now we’re realizing all those things have been doused in gasoline and set on fire.

 

Your band is often compared to the Civil Wars. You worked with John Paul White on Penny & Sparrow’s previous album, which must’ve been inspiring.

KJ: We worked pretty closely with John, starting with the songwriting and moving on to everything else. We’d take him some songs we really loved, and he’d helped mold them. We co-wrote songs from the very beginning with him, too. He was producing it, and he helped us make every musical step along the way.

I see some similarities in the way Kyle and John Paul play the acoustic guitar, too. It’s a very specific thing, being the main instrumentalist in a folk duo.

KJ: He was a huge influence on the way I was playing guitar, every before I met him. Meeting him and learning techniques and seeing how he played, that just increased his influence. I love the rhythm he puts into a guitar. And before they stopped playing together, I spent a lot of time studying how he and Joy [Williams] interacted as a duo onstage, because it takes a lot for two people to fill a room with nothing else than a guitar and two voices.

Let’s get back to that whole “we wanted to write a musical” thing. Is that something you’ll continue pursuing?

AB: I loved musicals growing up, and I still love them now. Thanks to the Internet, I can now see a bootleg version of Hamilton. Years ago, if you couldn’t get to New York to see a Broadway show, you had to watch the Tonys. Kyle loves Broadway, too, and we both particularly love the narrative of Les Mis. Years ago, we started out writing songs from Valjean’s perspective, then we decided to have one thread that ties every record we do together, which is choosing a different character from that show and writing a song from their perspective. We’ll keep dong that until we run out of characters. We’ve dabbled in the idea of doing a musical for a long time now.

KJ: We love the idea of connecting a story and a song. One day, I’d love to go back to the idea and trying to do something similar to it, where everything’s connected and it has a central theme. We just love writing songs, period. We just really like our job. That’s what it comes down to.

Death Wears a Wedding Ring: Lydia Loveless in Conversation with John Paul White

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Like all of us everywhere, Lydia Loveless and John Paul White are in dire need of coffee. It’s early morning on a weekday, and they’re both out on the road: Loveless en route from Houston to a gig in Birmingham; White biding his time in Charlotte, North Carolina, before a show that evening. They’re both far from home, making do with hotel continental breakfasts and fast-food caffeine.

“It’ll probably take me an hour or so to sound somewhat intelligent,” says White. Loveless agrees. “I’m just waking up. I’ll probably be pretty rambling.”

As caveats go, neither is especially believable. Both White and Loveless have released ambitious albums that are confessional but evasive, musically confident yet emotionally messy. Beulah is White’s second solo album, but his first since the dissolution of the Civil Wars, the duo that helped codify roots music for a mainstream audience. Written and recorded in Muscles Shoals, Alabama, where he lives and runs Single Lock Records, his songs range from cowboy-trail folk to swampy blues to pop songs that recall Elliott Smith, yet his lyrics are single-minded in their darkness.

Loveless’s latest, Real, is a similarly harrowing exorcism. Leaving the alt-country of her early albums far behind, the Ohioan adopts a darker, tougher sound, somewhere between the stuck-in-the-city riffs of prime Strokes and the ‘70s pop-rock flare of the early Heartbreakers (Johnny Thunders or Tom Petty — pick one).

Both albums contain so much wit that you can’t imagine either would be at a loss for words.

So, do you two know each other?

[Awkward Silence]

Lydia Loveless: No. I don’t think so.

John Paul White: I don’t believe so. I was afraid to answer.

LL: [Laughs] I’m always afraid to answer that question.

JPW: I’m always concerned someone’s going to say, "You asshole! We’ve met three times." I think we have mutual friends. We run in a lot of the same circles, but I don’t think we’ve ever met. So it’s nice to meet you, Lydia.

LL: Likewise.

Both of you represent smaller music scenes. Not your Brooklyn or Nashville, but the Shoals and Columbus, Ohio. How have those slightly out-of-the-way places shaped your music?

LL: For me, Columbus is such a bitter and pessimistic town, at least in some of the scenes that I run in. There are the really angry punk kids and smelly metal kids, and then, on the other side, there’s this really uplifting attitude — like we’re really going to develop the city and make it great. I have some journalist friends who are very excited about everything. So there’s a balance. But my music is not the most optimistic or mood-lightening in the world. But I do think it’s about that very Midwestern struggle, that everything-is-so-hard attitude.

JPW: My dad used to live up there. He and all of his brothers moved up in the ‘60s to work in the auto plants, and he brought back a lot of stories about that. I won’t say he disliked it or liked it, but he definitely felt that struggle. It didn’t feel uncommon to him, being from the South. In some ways, it was a different kind of struggle, but in other ways, it was the same. You’re just trying to put food on your table. Down here, there’s more an attitude that you shouldn’t have an identity; you should just fit in. Put your head down, nose to the grindstone, hoe your row, and then move on to the next one.

I grew up around a lot of that, but at the same time, in the Muscle Shoals community, you had this sense that you could accomplish something great. You saw a lot of people who were heroes and you heard the great music they made. They made a small-town kid from the Tennessee Valley feel like he could do it, too. So I think that there was a lot of hope when I was growing up: "They did it, so why can’t I?"

Music remains an industry in the Shoals, but it’s less so in Columbus. Did it offer something like escape for you, Lydia?

LL: I think so. I’m a very shy person, and was even more shy as a kid. If you spend a lot of time sitting alone in the woods or walking by yourself lost in thought, music can be a good way to filter a very overactive brain. It also gave me an opportunity to perform with someone else. Any time I was onstage, I had to go to a very different headspace and get outside of my own personality.

JPW: I always hear people talk about playing music or writing songs as a cathartic experience, and I guess that can be true. But it’s such a strange existence we share: We write these songs and we feel them so personally — we open these veins so publicly, and that can be cathartic. But then you have to sing it again the next night and the next night and the next night. So you get to exorcise those demons, but then you have to live with them every single day and night. It’s a weird existence.

LL: It’s definitely not normal. I’ve been thinking about it a lot because our record was made a long time before we started doing this tour. I’m like, "Damn, I feel like I’m as depressed as I was when I was writing these songs," and I realize maybe it’s because I have to sing them every night. You can’t just go through the motions. You have to really feel it, and you’re never going to get over that.

JPW: And people want to see it. They want to feel it, too.

LL: What’s wrong with them?

JPW: They pay to be bummed out. What the hell? But thank God for them. I wouldn’t have a career, if it weren’t for people who are as screwed up as I am.

How do you psych yourself up to sing such harrowing songs?

LL: I don’t know. I get really tired.

JPW: Amen. I have an out for me, at least. I don’t know about you, Lydia — I don’t know how intensely personal everything is that you write. But I tend to make it where it’s not 100 percent about me. There are parts of me in there. I like to get down in there and get as close to the bone as I can, but it isn’t always autobiography. And so I can step into a character and step back out of it sometimes. Otherwise, I don’t know how long I could do it, if it was just a constant shedding of skin every night. I’d be pretty raw after a while.

LL: There’s definitely an element of character to my songs, but I guess, for this particular record, it was more personal. It’s been a new touring experience, especially with the world being so insane and with the political climate so crazy. After a while you’re like, "God, why am I up here screaming about personal things right now?"

It definitely seems like listeners conflate the songwriter with the song.

JPW: Most of my favorite songwriters and artists were always talking through characters — like John Prine, Kris Kristofferson … folks like that. I grew up with a lot of country music, and a lot of the time those artists didn’t write the songs. They lived through them, so it wasn’t necessarily their story, but you believed every word that came out of their mouths. We don’t force our fiction writers to only write about their own personal lives. If they did, they’d run out of stories pretty soon. I feel like what we do is not that far removed.

LL: It’s the difference between doing something with shades of you in it and doing something completely autobiographical. And, I guess, doing something that’s obviously totally phony.

Does that change from one night to the next? Do you find more or less of yourself in these characters over time?

LL: I would say yes. And that’s why I really hate when people are like, "What’s this song about?" And you have to come up with some seven-second explanation. Not only does it change every night for me, but people come up to you every night and say, "Oh, this really helped me through this time." Or, "This has this meaning to me." I don’t want to ruin it for them or myself.

JPW: I agree 1,000 percent. I need to start writing down what people think my songs are about, because that’s so much better than what some of them actually are. And they tell me these elaborate situations they were in and how this song was a perfect way to deal with that trauma. If I had been in that headspace, I would have never written that song. I’d just write something that was too on the nose. I try to write everything vague and blurry so that anybody can step in and be the screwed-up character in the middle of it.

That seems like something that both of you are doing in your songs. Lydia, I read an interview with you about the song “Longer,” which I heard as a break-up song, but which you said was inspired by the death of a friend.

LL: Honestly, it could go either way for me. I don’t want people to be forced to listen to that song and think about death. I’ve broken my rule on a couple of these songs in interviews, just because I get nervous and flustered and said, "IT’S ABOUT THIS!!!!"

JPW: A friend of mine, a mentor of sorts as a songwriter, used to tell me not to put a wedding ring in a song. What he meant is what you’re talking about. If you paint that picture in too much detail, then the song doesn’t leave any room for interpretation. The moment you mention somebody has on a ring, then it’s about a married person or a person who was married or getting married. And you’ve just alienated every single person on earth from the song. All I have to do is take that ring out and now this song works for everyone that hears it. It could be about love and it could be about death.

LL: Death wearing a wedding ring.

JPW: [Laughs] That’s the next album title.

I would think that would make these songs fresh every night. You can live with them long-term and maybe not feel like you’re going through the motions.

LL: For me personally, you have to think about that, but it’s important to not think about those things while you’re writing. Certainly it comes up when you’re touring.

JPW: I tend to just go with whatever feels right at the moment. What I have a problem with is looking at the page and thinking, "Oh God, what are people going to think this means? How much therapy am I going to be offered?" I could go back and change it, but then it just feels watered down. If you’re trying to write the best song you can, then you have to be okay with putting a part of yourself out there. I just hope that people are still listening to those songs by the end of the year.

LL: Or by the end of the song.

JPW: Amen. I don’t sing any songs that I wrote that long ago, to be honest. The stuff I was writing then was completely different. I was pretty obsessed with Jeff Buckley at the time, and that’s probably obvious. Everybody has been obsessed with Jeff Buckley, at some point. I reserve the right not to play songs I don’t want to play.

LL: There are certain songs that I wrote five years ago that I don’t want to play. It’s a different situation because I was learning to write songs when I started making records. That was always what I wanted to do and I just started to do it. So there’s certainly some cringe-worthy material in my catalog. Not everybody puts their 19-year-old decisions out there. You mellow out as a human when you get older.

JPW: I’m older than you are, so I don’t have to worry about the 19-year-old-me stuff. Nobody knows about it and nobody will ever hear it. Thank God.

Do you ever have a chance to go back to those songs?

LL: I try not to revisit too much. Sometimes I’m subjected to it somehow, or sometimes it just comes up. You’re making a record or whatever. Someone will put it on in the room and you just melt into the floor and die of embarrassment.

JPW: In a really small town like the Shoals, I can walk into Best Buy or some place like that and sometimes somebody will think it’s a clever idea to put my music on the stereo. I just turn on my heel and walk right back out. That’s probably not a good sales ploy. For this recent record, I was doing an interview, and they were playing tracks during the interview. It was a weird out-of-body experience, because we’ve been playing them live for so long and we do them so differently. They keep morphing every single night, and there are even lyrics that change. So the album versions sound so innocent now. When I recorded them, I hadn’t been touring for three or four years, so they were all super fresh. They didn’t go through their paces of growing. They were just documented. I’m proud of them, but they’re completely different songs now.

Does that happen to you in Columbus? Can you be a celebrity of sorts in a small city?

LL: I think they know better than to do that. There’s certainly much less anonymity in a smaller town. I would never refer to myself as a celebrity, but there’s definitely some recognition there. I think you get more shit than accolades, when you live in a small town.

JPW: That’s how I grew up. The other side of that is that you have a lot of people pinning their hopes on you. Every time you talk to them, they’re like, "Man, we’re all rooting for you. We’re all living through you. We’re watching and you’re making us proud." Which is awesome, but it’s a lot of accountability.

LL: Yeah, it’s scary. You forget how to have a normal conversation.

JPW: It’s true. You get so laser focused on your career and your job that you have hard time being that small town guy again. Can we just talk about football?

LL: People are like, "You probably don’t want to talk about anything small." But I’d like to talk about anything but how the tour went. "There was beer … We played shows … No one died …"

JPW: I have a really hard time listening to music. I’ve been doing it for so long that I have such a hard time letting go and immersing myself in music like I did when I was younger. I’ve seen how the hotdog gets made. I see all the cracks and I also have a hard time not wondering why they chose to do it like that. "Why didn’t you do this?" It’s hard not to second-guess everything. I do a whole lot more reading and watching movies than I do listening to music.

LL: I think that’s why I like to listen to music that I sound nothing like. People will ask me what I’m listening to and, when I tell them, they’re like, "You don’t sound like that." Yeah, because I don’t want it to get in my head or really ruin music for me.

What kind of stuff are you listening to?

LL: Right now, I’ve been really enjoying that Mitski record. And the Angel Olsen. But I just covered a Justin Bieber song, if that tells you anything about my taste in music.

JPW: My 14-year-old is a huge metal head. I am an extremely proud father because of that. He’s constantly turning me on to new bands, which are all pretty much the same, but still it’s so much fun watching him get so excited about music. It’s amazing to see it meaning so much to him. It’s good for me, as a father, to see that. And I think it’s good for me, as a creator of music, to see how people react to music that’s not their own. That makes me want to do this a whole lot more.

 

To get into more Deep Sh!t, read Jewly Hight's conversation with Erin McKeown and Chastity Brown.

John Paul White photo courtesy of the artist. Lydia Loveless photo by David T. Kindler.