John
Paul
White
KINDRED SPIRITS
By Tom Lanham
photos by Alysse Gafkjen
I
t’s a morsel of time-tested wisdom —
initially put forward by Mahatma
Gandhi — that just becomes more rele-
vant with each passing day: “Be the change
that you want to see in the world.” As in,
stop kvetching about Donald Trump and
all his horrific misdeeds and get involved
with the grassroots groundswell of fight-
ing back, via every climate-change-con-
cerned organization. And if you’re British
prime minister Theresa May, humbled by
several failed attempts to enact your bum-
bling Brexit legislation? No whining. No
tears. Just walk away. But if you’re classy
ex-Civil Wars crooner John Paul White,
you could hide in the barstool shadows
and snipe potshots at the current sorry
state of country music until closing time.
Or you could shut the hell up and do
something about it. Like he boldly did
with his latest second solo set, the retro-
minded The Hurting Kind.
Dogmatically, the Muscle Shoals-born
artist (who boomeranged back to nearby
Florence where he, his wife and three kids
currently reside) went in search of
Nashville’s streamlined "countrypolitan"
sound; a plusher, more orchestrated take
on traditional C&W, whose practitioners
22 illinoisentertainer.com june 2019
included Jim Reeves, Eddy Arnold, and
Chet Atkins — a clean sonic approach from
the cleaner late ‘60s, early '70s. "I was look-
ing for that sound everywhere, trying to
find it, wanting to hear it in a modern set-
ting, and I’d worn out all my old records,”
recalls the Grammy winner. “I was singing
it around the house, playing it on my gui-
tar and thinking, ‘This is what is pleasing
you. This is what is in your veins right now.
This is something you should follow.’ And
we had some time where I could use my
publishing company’s Rolodex and find
some of these songwriters; sit down with
‘em and ask ‘em about all these stories.
And I just soaked it all up.”
But what began as a simple fact-finding
mission soon turned into something more
— full-blown collaborations with some
countrypolitan greats, who were not only
still alive, but more than eager to work
with a respectful younger musician like
White. And dressy dinner-jacketed materi-
al resulted, like “The Good Old Days,”
“Yesterday’s Love” (with Little Mae), and
“This Isn’t Gonna End Well” (with LeAnn
Womack). The legendary Bill Anderson
was only the first of many to take White’s
call.
IE: So Bill Anderson is still out there?
Amazing.
JPW: Just getting to sit down with these
guys was amazing. I got to ask Bill about
Roger Miller, and other guys about Marty
Robbins and people like that. And I just
soaked it all up. And then I wanted to see
what kind of songs I might end up writing
with these guys. But everything that was
coming out of it? Not only did I love the
songs, but I also loved the whole theme of
it, and it was spurring other songs in me
that I wrote alone, so eventually there were
themes from all the songs that made the
record make a lot of sense to me. I just did-
n’t want to make a record that was ‘raw,’ or
‘organic’ — all those touchstone words
that we use a lot. I wanted to make an
adult record, a nicely arranged record. So
that’s what I did. And Bill was one of the
first ones I called because I knew that he
was still out there, still getting cuts and
having hits. And I had friends who had
written with him who spoke very highly of
him.
IE: So, Bill was cool, then?
JPW: I don’t know exactly how old he is,
maybe in his eighties. But when he walked
into the studio and was bouncing off the
walls —he was so happy just to back be in
his element again. We wrote a couple of
songs for my album, and then one of his
called “Dead to You,” and as soon as I told
him the title, he said, 'Whoa! Are we gonna
kill somebody off? That’s great!’ So I knew
I’d met a kindred spirit.
IE: What do you learn from a guy with so
much history? And does he have any
secrets or tricks?
JPW: You know what? He doesn’t. He’s a
writer just like I am, albeit one that’s more
experienced and renowned as a songwriter
than me. But he comes at it the same way
that I do, and most other songwriters do —
conjure something out of thin air and whit-
tle it here and there. But the lyrics just pop
out of him.
IE: Where did you go for these sessions?
JPW: Bill lives up in Nashville, and he
writes for Sony. So they’ve got that build-
ing, and there are four or five floors of
cubicles, and there’s a room there that’s
called The Bill Anderson Room. They have
a Willie Nelson Room, a Bobby Braddock
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