TAYLOR, Miss. — Trying
to pinpoint the musical proclivities of Jimbo Mathus
is a bit like trying to predict the path of lightning. You never
know where his seemingly limitless creative energy might take him
next. But you can bet those bolts of inspiration will produce
something you need to hear.
His latest project, the
nine-song EP Band of Storms, out May 6,
2016 on the Big Legal Mess
label (via Fat Possum),
is a brilliant collection of what he characterizes as “just some
odds and ends … you know, folk music.”
Well, that depends on
your definition of folk music. If it includes Stonesy
R&B grooves, straight-outta-Nuggets
rawk, deep blues, barrelhouse honky-tonk, a string-laden murder
ballad and Louisiana-accented bluegrass, then yeah, we could call
it folk. As filtered through the fertile mind of a diehard
Southerner, born and raised in
Oxford, Miss., not
much more than a stone’s throw from Tupelo,
Holly Springs and Clarksdale.
That is, right in the birthplace of American roots music.
“It’s just a
continuation of the work I’ve been doing for, shoot, the past 20
years,” Mathus says. “There’s no big overall, arching thing. It’s
just random notes out of my brain.”
But then he reveals that
there is a theme of sorts, and that most of the subject matter is
reflected right in Erika Jane Amerika’s
cover art. It features a maniacal-looking Mathus standing near a
cypress swamp, holding his lightning-struck
Epiphone guitar
in one hand and a fiery bible in the other. A lightning-zapped Econoline
van hovers above him; gathered at his feet are an alligator, his
Catahoula dog and a snake-handling Yemayá (the
“great mother” of Santeria religion).
All his writing has
basically the same theme, Mathus says. “It’s dealing with nature
— forces beyond us — and trying to sum it up in my little cave
paintings that we call recorded songs.”
Those “little cave
paintings” were created at Dial
Back Sound, the Water
Valley, Miss., studio
owned by Fat Possum Records
partner Bruce Watson.
Mathus has birthed loads of material there; he’s able to jump
into the studio just about whenever motivation strikes. The
situation is so ideal, Mathus closed his own successful studio a
few years back; he was no longer interested in running it after
finding so many fulfilling opportunities at Dial Back, including
producing and accompanying other artists.
He uses the winding
eight-mile drive from his home in the tiny artist enclave of
Taylor, Miss., to think about projects. “If it’s me or if it’s
somebody else, it’s all the same,” he says. “We just study on it,
trying to make it as great as we can.”
Mathus doesn’t even list
individual credits on his albums because, he says, they’re so
collaborative. But he plays just about all the instruments,
augmented by helpful friends. In this case, they include Watson
as executive producer; Mathus produced. Bronson Tew engineered,
mixed and mastered — and played many instruments, too. Also
contributing are Ryan Rogers, Eric
Carlton, Will McCarley, Jamison Hollister, Jim Spake, Mark
Franklin and Stu
Cole, who
plays bass in Mathus’ most renowned musical endeavor, the
Squirrel Nut Zippers. (He’s
also a member of pal Luther
Dickinson’s South
Memphis String Band with Alvin
Youngblood Hart, and
credits Luther’s late dad, famed pianist/producer Jim Dickinson,
as the source of much of his musical mojo.)
The result is an ode to
what Mathus calls the “primal Southern groove.”
There’s only one co-write — the twangy
“Play with Fire,” also credited to his late friend Robert Earl
Reed. “He and I were pretty close collaborators,” Mathus
reflects. “This was one he wrote right before he passed. He left
me all his music to carry on with, and every so often, I’ll just
pull out one of his sheets and cut one of his songs. He had never
recorded this one. I just showed the band and we did one take.”
Mathus says he loves its
almost desperate imagery, and when he sings, “Yes, let’s play
with fire/Let’s cross in front of trains in the darkness, feel
the flames/oh, yes, let’s play with fire,” he draws each “yes”
into a long hiss.
Of those sibilant s's, he
says, laughing, “I’m getting into character. If you wanna sing
like the devil, you gotta hiss like a snake.” Then he adds, “The
way you say the words is very important. If it’s a rock ’n’ roll
song, you maybe got 20 words. You gotta squeeze the most out of
’em.”
He does exactly that in
“Massive Confusion,” the garage-rocker that serves as a
straight-up homage to the
Replacements, Bobby Fuller Four and
the Ramones —
and contains what he’s sure is the first-ever rhyme of “yemayá” and “FBI.”
“I wrote it when I was
getting audited by the IRS and I was trying to save my fuckin’
ass,” Mathus explains. “It’s just super-punk rock. I came up in
the ’80s and the Replacements turned me on to songwriting. They
showed me that I could actually write songs. I’m 48, but I’m
still a punk rocker.”
Mathus has stories about
every song, starting with the rollicking, horn-pumped rock of the
opener, “Gringo Man.” He wrote it on a cheap guitar rig he picked
up at a Christian supply shop in Jackson,
Tenn.
“Sometimes a guitar will
write its own song,” Mathus says. “It was like a little cardboard
amp with a plastic cord going to it; I made that almost clichéd
little rock ’n’ roll riff. But it’s like Keith
Richards said
about Jimmy Reed: He wrote the same song over and over, but he
never did the same thing twice. It’s about celebrating the
groove.”
The honky-tonk blooz of
“Can’t Get Much Higher” was one for the piano player, Mathus
says. He borrowed some of its lyrics from one of his heroes, Charley
Patton —
father of his nanny, Rosetta
Patton.
Dramatic pedal steel and
strings give “Stop Your Crying” a Southern gothic turn, with
Mathus’ voice going from big and angry to almost plaintive as the
song reaches its murderous climax.
“I think it’s one of my
best vocals I’ve ever done. But it’s extremely personal. I wrote
it for someone very special,” he says, not mentioning who.
“Wayward Wind,” inspired
by an Emmylou Harris
lyric, has elements of an Irish/English/Scottish drinking song —
and was, indeed, written while Mathus was playing U.K. beer halls
with his “brother from another mother overseas,” Ian
Siegal. “With
songwriting, you just pick up scraps and try to turn ’em into a
whole page. This one kind of fits in with the theme of
desperation, of somebody leaving,” Mathus says. “The blues is all
about movin’ on down the line.”
Resonator echoes convey
the more elemental blues of “Slow Down Sun,” on which he
beseeches the sun, the wind and the rain not to hurt his true
love with lines like, “Hold up rain/don’t let your waters
down/I’m afraid my baby might slip in and drown.”
“Keep It Together” sounds as if George Harrison might have written it, but Mathus says it came
to him after watching the documentary about fellow Southerners Big Star.
“I listen to blues,
jazz, country and gospel, but I’ve never listened to rock bands
at all, since the Replacements
and the Ramones
— since the ’80s,” he says. “But I was really touched by the
sounds, the chords, the layering of the guitars and the melodies
that they brought.”
He leaves us with the mandolin
plucks, boot-heel stomps and yowlin’ yelps of “Catahoula” —
written, like many of these tunes, in the dog days of summer.
“You’d be surprised how much rhymes with Catahoula,” he says,
laughing again. “It’s going back to the old balladry days where
you state your case right at the top of the song; you give the
geography and the whole synopsis right there at the top.”
Speaking of synopses, we
should mention Mathus’ career credits include working with Buddy
Guy and Elvis
Costello, among
other luminaries. He says he’s also getting ready to fire up the
Vaudeville-meets-swing band Zippers, who had a platinum-selling
album and played President Clinton’s
second inaugural, among other high-profile gigs. But in the
meantime, he remains ready to catch those bolts of “rambunctious
creativity” whenever they strike.
|
