For the last seven years, The Influences has collaborated with the TakeRoot festival in Groningen, and filmed sessions with musicians from the festival’s line up. November 2nd this year, we filmed a record amount of eight sessions in one day. The first to see the light, is this one with non other than John Paul White. The Grammy winner and former The Civil Wars member played his own Once And Future Queen and covers of Dan Seal’s Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold) and Elliott Smith’s Between The Bars. Watch the videos and read a bit from our talk afterwards below.

‘Elliott Smith allowed me to write about things I was self-conscious about’

The first time John Paul White heard anything by Elliott Smith was in a studio, in the middle of a recording session. In the times before The Civil Wars started and before White got a record deal writing songs for Capitol Records. “The producer said: ‘You know what, we need like an Elliott Smith Either/Or snare sound’. I asked: ‘Who’s Elliott Smith?’ The record just scratched, they stopped the session, set me down at the console and started playing me Elliott. And I had to stop it. The first thing they played was Alameda. And I got about halfway through it, and I had to stop it. It was just too much. I thought somebody was punking me or something. Where had this been all my life? It was freaking me out because I felt like I had heard it my whole life. We had the same influences. Somehow, he influenced me, even thought he had never come on my radar. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Alabama so, unless you had those records, there wasn’t really an option to broaden your horizons. So, when I heard it, it was life changing.”

“It didn’t change the way I made art, but it kind of validated what my sensibilities were. To hear somebody that seemed to have the same ones and succeed and succeed in getting to me emotionally. ‘Alright, that’s the blueprints there, and so I just need to keep doing what I’m doing.”

The sensibilities John Paul White recognized were their dynamic range, from little, tiny sounds and then more bombastic and their lyrics. “His lyrics were so dark, you know. They were about his life and things he was going through but the music was so beautiful that he could kind of get away with it. It didn’t sound so ‘woe is me’. And I thought that’s huge. I can get away with saying anything I want to, if I dress it correctly and don’t make it a dirge or something like that. And so it opened up a lot of ideas for me and it allowed me to write about things that maybe I was a little self-conscious about writing about.”Either/Or is still one of White’s favourite albums. “I’ve just worn it out and I never get tired of it. It never fails. If I’m on a long drive and I can’t think of anything I can always put that on and be happy. It’s part of my life.”

Opening up the vein every night

“The more that I got out into the world and played the songs that I was writing, I started noticing that it didn’t matter how dark I got, it didn’t matter how sad I got or how personal I got, people seemed to connect with it and be like: ‘Oh, that’s my story, I feel that too’. And sometimes I’d write a song and I’d think, I need to back off, this is too much. And the opposite is the case.”

“The other thing that I do is I make sure I don’t tell anybody what’s true and what’s not. So I can get stuff off my chest and not have my mom worry about if I’m good or bad. Anything can be the subject at that point, because sometimes it’s your story, sometimes it’s my wife’s or my kid’s, and it all kind of intermingles and I don’t really know. After a while it just becomes mine. The hard part about that is you have to go every night and sing those songs and dig all that trauma back up every single night. I don’t think a lot of people realize that. You go to a show and you listen and you enjoy it and it makes you feel things. Then you go home and go back to your normal life. We just dig it right back up and open the vein again every single night. So you shouldn’t wonder why a lot of us are messed up.”

Playing to his strengths

John Paul White is pretty open talking about his work and his challenges, when I ask if he feels ‘messed up’. “Yeah. But I feel pretty healthy. I feel like I’ve figured out how to navigate it. I had a mentor back in the day. His name was Walt Aldridge. And I told him I was going to therapy. He said: ‘That’s great. If you really want to give yourself to it and really try hard, that’s great. But the sooner you learn that you’re messed up and figure out how to work within those parameters the better off you’ll be’. All right, this is who I am. How do I work with that? It was a turning point for me. At first I was mad, I wanted a pill that just fixed me. But I started figuring out, all right, this is just who I am. What’s the pros and the cons of that, the strengths and the weaknesses? And so, I just started playing to my strengths. So that works for me. It doesn’t make me any more put together than anybody else. But I think that’s part of getting older, is learning how to deal with yourself.”

John Paul White’s dreams have all come true

John Paul White grew up in tiny Loretto, Tennessee, and now lives in Florence, Alabama, not far from Muscle Shoals. He has cultivated a music career in Nashville for two decades, first as a songwriter for a major publisher, then half of The Civil Wars – a duo that won four Grammy Awards before disbanding in 2012.

A year later, White became one of the founders of Single Lock Records. Based in the Florence/Muscle Shoals area of North Alabama, the label is founded by musicians and run by musicians. Among the records released on the label are St. Paul & the Broken Bones’ debut LP, Half the City, Donnie Fritts’ Oh My Goodness, Dylan LeBlanc’s Cautionary Tale, Erin Rae’s Putting On Airs, Cedric Burnside’s GRAMMY-nominated Benton County Relic, Nicole Atkins‘ and Caleb Elliott‘s albums and the Blind Boys of Alabama’s GRAMMY winning LP Echoes of the South.

White has released three solo records, the latest being 2019’s The Hurting Kind. The song The Once And Future Queen, which he performed in his session for The Influences, was featured on his second, 2016’s Beulah.

Photos

Keep watching

Thank you for watching and enjoying this session. You’ll probably like some other sessions from The Influences’ archive too, like these earlier ones we filmed.