JD Souther, American Songwriter
Singer, songwriter and instrumentalist JD Souther is best known for co-writing with The Eagles on some of their biggest hits– “Heartache Tonight”, “Best of My Love” and “New Kid in Town” are just a few. He also worked with Linda Rondstadt, James Taylor, and Bonnie Raitt, among others, and he’s a tremendously talented solo artist. He recently stopped in to the SiriusXM studios to sit down with Ron Bennington and talk about his career, and his new solo album, “Midnight in Tokyo.” Excerpts of the interview appear below.
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Ron Bennington: This is good times for you because not only do you have these albums out, you’ve got a TV show – and this is incredibly impressive – the Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Songwriters Hall of Fame.
JD Souther: I know. It’s funny, I’m humbled by it. At first, when Paul Williams called me and told me, I was on the set shooting in Nashville and I came out and went, “Oh, that’s great!” Told a couple people and then they told everybody, like it’s a big deal. It just kind of sunk in a couple days ago that it’s a big deal and now I’m actually nervous about it. The last week, we were home on my little farm outside Nashville bringing in the hay. I grow winter wheat and fescues, so I wasn’t really thinking about this. I was just trying not to sneeze, and watching these big, round bails grow around the pasture. But, yeah. I’m really thrilled about it. It’s cool.
Ron Bennington: Well, there’s only a couple of people a year that they give the honor to, and it is forever, and you are in there with the greatest people who ever sit down and try to do this.
JD Souther: I’m in Johnny Mercer’s club. It’s the guy that wrote “Dream,” for god’s sake.
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JD Souther Talks About Writing Songs
Ron Bennington: No one really understands the craft of songwriter. You know what I mean? No matter how many songs that people write, it’s still the most mysterious thing I think that we have. What is it, how to actually make a popular song?
JD Souther: Well, it’s no less mysterious to songwriters. We’re all like just sort of fishing. It’s like trying to make love to somebody that’s moodier than you but has restless leg syndrome. You’re just like chasing the thing all over the place. Now and then it locks and it’s beautiful, but I have to say, it’s usually just a long walk in pursuit of an idea.
Ron Bennington: Well, you look at the greatest songwriters of all time – it could be Lennon and McCartney, or Paul Simon or Cole Porter – and they always have songs where you just go, “What? What the fuck was that, man?”
JD Souther: You know what? This is the awesome part of it, is that you put your whole heart in it, and now and then you just – you finish it, and like a few weeks later you hear it, or two years later you hear somebody’s record of it and you go, “What a piece of shit! Wow, was that the best I could do?” Well, on that day, I guess it was. You know?
Ron Bennington: Yeah. But they do end up taking on a life of their own, right?
JD Souther: More so than you could ever imagine, yeah. They do, and some that you just feel – not ambivalent, because I probably wouldn’t let them out of the house, I’m too OCD for that – but some of the ones that you feel, “Well, that’s a pretty good workman – that’s a good journeyman song.” And then it does take on sometimes a life of its own. And then 20 years later, people are still singing it, and playing it, and recording it, and talking to you about it and coming up at gigs and saying, “Oh, this song saw me through my marriage” or my divorce, or our courtship, or something like that.
Ron Bennington: That is the strange thing, that it stops being yours, it starts to belong to other people. I go over the list of songs that you’ve written, and it’s always – I’m going to a period in my life every single time. It has very little to do with, “OK, here’s the record that I sat and listened to” – and I know that happened at least first – but later on it becomes about everything else.
JD Souther: It does. It becomes a subconscious river, a theme for that period of time in your life. It does for me, too. I mean, I can say with some degree of completeness and honesty that there was a period of about two years when I was really young – god, I must’ve been 11 or 12, maybe? I have no sense of time. But I just listened to “Kind of Blue” and the two crazy Brubeck albums – “Time Out” and “Time Further Out” and Ray Charles – always Ray Charles and Sinatra too, because my dad was a big band singer, he was a crooner. So, actually the first song I ever heard him sing around the house was a Johnny Mercer song, was “Dream.”
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JD Talks About Writing Songs for Other Artists
Ron Bennington: We’re talking about the mysteries of songwriting, but you’ve written with so many people, and that’s got to be even – sometimes easier, but sometimes more difficult, I would imagine.
JD Souther: It’s less mysterious, because you have – I mean, I’ve always written with my friends, pretty much. And we’re not particularly – we’re not like rubbing maple syrup all over ourselves until the record’s done. It’s always critical and – I’ve spent most of my time writing alone. Most of it’s just staying up at night wondering what the fuck’s going on. But when I would be in the room with Jackson Browne, who really, I have to say, taught me clarity more than anybody else. He was just – he was so precise. He would do things a hundred times to get just one line, one phrase the way he wanted it. But when he and I, and particularly when Glenn Frey and Don Henley and I were writing together, whether it was just us or with Kootch or with Seger, whoever – Danny Kortchmar is who I’m referring to, or Mike Campbell, or whoever – we were merciless with each other. The best you’d get – if you had a great idea, and you said it – and we’re all three sitting there with legal tablets and a piano, and guitars – if you said something you thought was really cool, you’d start with, “Hey how about” – and you’d sing or say this line – and if it was great, maybe one of the other guys would go, “Hmm, yeah. I think we can say that.” It was very critical, so by the time it was done, you had a consensus of all of us going, “All right, are we sure?” It’s like, “Man, I’ll kick your ass if this line is bad.” (laughs)
Ron Bennington: Right, because everybody is a gunslinger. Everybody is that strong. But it’s interesting that you take a guy like Jackson who has this thing for being live – kind of has that reputation, like, “Oh, he’s laid back and has the California sound” – but it’s all craft. It’s just so much craft there, and when it’s really good craft we don’t notice it, you know?
JD Souther: That’s the idea. It’s supposed to be invisible. And to tell you the truth, the funny thing is, none of us are particularly laid back. We’re all pretty like alpha male, “Try this motherfucker.”
Ron Bennington: Yeah. Well, I saw the Eagles thing. That documentary.
JD Souther: Yeah, we weren’t – we were coming up when Graham Parsons and Chris Hillman, and (Roger) McGuinn and (Richie) Furay and Neil Young and Stills, and all those guys were sort of playing around this edge of country music, which I didn’t know anything about. But my girlfriend was Linda Ronstadt then. She knew everything about it. So, she’s playing me that stuff. I’m finding out who the Louvin Brothers are, and the Stanley Brothers, and Jim and Jesse, and all the stuff I didn’t grow up with because my parents were swing kids. They didn’t like country music. And Hank Williams, man, I discovered that one. That’s the most haunting thing I’d ever heard in my life.
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JD Talks About When He Knew He Was a Songwriter
Ron Bennington: So, what is it like for you when everyone wants to put you into that California sound of the ‘70s that you helped create, but it doesn’t seem like to me like that’s where you want to live your whole life in that one place.
JD Souther: Yeah, it’s a drag. It’s a drag. But, I’m grateful that things went as well as they did. It’s nice to have these kind of huge numbers of sales on songs that you wrote. But the truth is, everything changes all the time. I think of like someone like Artie Shaw, everybody knows him for two songs. And he went on to write classical music, and write symphonies. I think it’s just part of being a musician. Sometimes the public is looking at you, sometimes they’re not, but if you really love music, if that’s your life is to follow that muse around, man, it goes in a lot of directions. Also, Linda Ronstadt said something – let me put a plug in for her – I just read the galleys to her new book. Fantastic.
Ron Bennington: Is that right?
JD Souther: Fantastic. She’s a natural story teller. Just beautiful, and smooth, and – she says at one point, which she had said to me when we were together – she said, “I think the deepest music that people make has its roots in the music they heard before they were ten years old.” And I think it’s true, because she and I would listen to this weird stuff that was so much older than us. And we always closed our listening sessions at night with Sinatra, “Songs For Only the Lonely,” with those great Nelson Riddle charts.
Ron Bennington: And then she went on to record a lot of that music, and everyone thought, “Oh, that’s strange.”
JD Souther: Wait until you see the book. She treats the end of that chapter absolutely beautifully. Everybody at the record company and management and all her people that worked with her were against it, and I said, “Do it.” I insisted on it. “Go, get Nelson. Sing these songs.”
Ron Bennington: And everybody in that scene ended up playing with her at one time or another.
JD Souther: Oh yeah. Well, she and Bonnie Raitt were the gals. They just cooked. They were both serious musicians. They sang the right things. And also, I have to say, in some ways, Linda was my greatest collaborator. I mean, she ended up doing ten songs of mine, I think. But when she sort of tiptoed down the hall at night and heard me writing “Faithless Love” and said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Well, I don’t know.” I had just gotten to the bridge, where it’s got this little weird – it only modulates for two bars, then it goes back to the original key. I said, “I have no idea, but it’s something. Something kind of different,” and she goes, “Oh, it’s beautiful. I’d love to sing it.” I was like, “Yeah, okay.” I finished it, and that song – frankly, within a year and half or two, Smokey Robinson and Dorothy Fields, who was one of the great lyricists of the ‘40s and ‘50s, told me they loved that song. I felt like I had arrived as a songwriter, I felt like a grown up songwriter then.
Ron Bennington: That was the point for you? That you’re like, okay.
JD Souther: That’s the song, yeah. I was sitting backstage at the Universal Amphitheatre. I think it was Linda’s show. There was a bunch of people back there, all sorts of like celebs, and a lot of music people – I think Jagger was there, and Smokey Robinson came in. Well, everybody is thrilled to meet Smokey Robinson. He’s like a god of music. And he just turned to me at some point after we’d been introduced, and says, “You know, that ‘Faceless Love’ is a beautiful song.”
Ron Bennington: Wow.
JD Souther: I went, “Man, I’m a songwriter.” And then Dorothy Fields told me that, too. And Dorothy was much older than me. She had a little kitchen shop at Sunset Plaza. Like a sort of forerunner of Williams-Sonoma, only small. We’d go in there and get kitchen stuff for our house. I knew who she was, of course. She wrote, [sings] “Get your coat and grab your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep, just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.” That’s still a song – to try to write something as well as that – that’s beautiful. So, I knew who she was, had no idea she knew who I was. I was in there one day, and we were talking about songwriters – Matt Dennis and Harold Arlen, and all these guys she worked with. I said to her, I said, “You know, I write songs too,” really haltingly. And she said, “Oh my goodness, I know. She said, ‘Faithless Love’ is perfect.” I just went, “Oh, my god.” I called my girlfriend at the mall. I said, “Guess what Dorothy Fields just said to me?!” (laughs)
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JD Talks About Singing
Ron Bennington: You get to do this stuff now, and record it, like the “Midnight in Tokyo,” that stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do years ago, put out an album like that.
JD Souther: You know what? Well, I didn’t play well enough to play that stuff then. But also, I think I never thought of myself as a singer, I was a really lazy singer. I got busted for it over and over, particularly by women I knew. Linda and Joni just slammed me once at a party for not really working hard at it. And then I realized, I was sort of working hard in some way, but I was just trying to sing as well as everybody else was singing at the time in kind of that heartache style, and you just deliver the songs. But if you listen to the very first album, there’s almost no vibrato in it,. It’s really lean and clean, and I realized what I was listening to before I made my first solo album was George Jones and Miles Davis. Both these very lean – not much vibrato – and Chet Baker. Smooth, cool lines. So, even though the stuff – it’s definitely, I guess a country rock album. I don’t know, it’s just music to me. But there’s not a lot of fancy stuff on it.
Ron Bennington: That stuff that you were following without even being conscious of it, just because you happen to have been into it. Well, “Midnight and Tokyo” in stores and online. All the other albums, including “Natural History,” also available online.
JD Souther: Yup, Amazon. Everybody’s got them. iTunes…
Ron Bennington: Soon, something with you and Burt Bacharach. We’ll be looking forward to that.
JD Souther: Well, we’ll see how many of these songs end up on my album, or somebody else’s. I don’t know, I’m still – I haven’t played him my demos of them with – I mean, just at my house with my piano with all the lyrics on it. And I told him, I said, “I think some of these lyrics might be not what you expect.” And he said, “Hey man, this was my idea. I expect you to write your lyrics on this.” So, we will see.
Ron Bennington: And into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Congratulations for that, and let’s do this again sometime, alright?
JD Souther: I would love it, man. I dig the show, and it’s like, you might as well be at my house. It’s so cool and casual in here.
Ron Bennington: All right, thanks man. Talk to you soon.
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Order “Midnight In Tokyo
” off Amazon.com and follow JD on Twitter @JDSouther
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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? Click here for a free trial subscription.
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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.
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