It’s quite an honor having Jim White participate in our continuing 5 Questions With Muzzle of Bees feature. Jim sits amongst the greatest songwriters and storytellers recording and touring these days and I can’t recommend his albums or his live show enough.

Could you lend some information on the recording process of Transnormal Skipperoo? Where and how was it recorded, and were there any lessons learned that you’ll apply towards future recording sessions?

It was helter skelterish, as usual. I wanted to work with Joe Pernice and since his wife and my wife were both about to have babies, there was only a brief window of opportunity to record. I also wanted to work with Olabelle, and, as fate would have it, they happened to be available at that time, which was just a few weeks away, so we raced into the studio and, even though some of the songs were unfinished, we just had at it.

The second phase involved Tucker Martine. He likewise had a tiny window of availability between his work with The Decemberists and Bill Frisell. It was exactly two days. I flew to Seattle and Tucker rounded up Steve Moore and Karl Blau and once again we just threw ourselves into it hard and heavy. At the end of the first day I began to feel strange, and before thee night was done I was terribly terribly sick with either salmonilla or e-coli poisoning, probably from that tainted spinach that was floating around. Tucker took over and arranged the horn sections and did what he was good at while I laid in his guest room hallucinating. If you listen to my voice it sounds really raspy, in a good way, this was due to the projectile vomiting I’d been doing for several hours prior to recording the vocals. It proved effective, but isn’t really a technique I’d recommend.

After that I took took all the tracks home and started deciphering them, taking the songs apart and putting them back together in Pro Tools, looking for interesting incarnations of the essential ideas of the songs. I recorded tracks several myself, enlisting local musicians from Athens to fill them out.

Then I had to do the vocals, which is always really challenging for me, as I’m not by nature a singer. Some songs I did hundreds of vocal takes before I found a way to let the vocals mesh with the music.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus was brilliant, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Do you have any plans or ideas for another film project and, if so, what?

I’m working on writing a feature film for the same director. It’s based on real life events in a swamp down near Pensacola, where I’m from. Once this album’s activity dies down I’ll get back at that.

I’ve got a degree in film making, made a near feature length film myself back in the 90′s and was involved behind the scenes in another film called Muleskinner Blues some years back that explores similar ideas as Searching, albeit in a completely different approach. Sundance Channel played that film pretty regularly and it’s developed a bit of a cult following. You can read about it on my website.

I’ve always been fascinated by the following claims of previous occupations as “a fashion model, a boxer, a preacher, a professional surfer and a New York cab driver.” Sounds like a full life – are all of them true and do you miss spending time in any of those incarnations?

I’m not much of a fighter, so that one is completely false and I have no idea where that rumor originated I was never a preacher proper, but certainly was involved in the church, led singing at times and witnessed a lot to strangers and what have you.

[Editors note: Watch Jim discuss Cab Driving, Jimmy Tuck, and The Count.]

What was the last concert you went to see as a fan?

I don’t really go see much music. I went to see the Drive By Truckers, as Patterson Hood is a friend of a friend, and the opening band was a wonderful surprise. They’re called Don Chambers and Goat and I ended up coaxing them into doing a track called Fruit Of The Vine on the latest album, then stealing their guitar player, Pat Hargon, for session work and then touring duties. He’s sitting in the next room as I write this, at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto Canada.

The internet has dramatically altered the way artists can reach an audience. With things like blogs/myspace/etc, what are your thoughts on the power of the internet in terms of helping (or hurting) your music?

Well, illegal downloading has about killed lots of great little labels. My label can no longer offer tour support and so my live shows are now greatly limited. We’re in a huge paradigm shift right now and of course during times of upheaval those on the fringes are most affected. There’s also been a tremendous glut of new bands and artists rushing in from all directions and that’s great if there’s some organizing principle to help them find their place in the scheme of things but right now all the chaos is making it hard for artists like me to make any headway in the business end of things. Eventually organizing schematics will arrive, either by design of just natural evolution and hopefully stabilize things. That’s the negative side of the equation. On the positive side, artists are now able to bypass the arbiters of taste at labels who used to control what was heard and what wasn’t. That’s extraordinarily empowering and a wonderful boon to artists unwilling or unable to play the corporate/self promotion game that you almost have to play to move forward in this field of endeavoring.

Okay, now I go do a show.

Photos: Daniel Brielmaier
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Myspace: Jim White
MP3: Jim White – “Crash Into The Sun”

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