A Conversation with Joy Lynn White (continued)

JLW: I had graduated a half year early, because I was already recording jingles for radio and TV in high school, that were on radio and TV, locally. I would drive down to Fort Wayne, Indiana and record them. I mean, I just knew I wanted to. So when I came here, I came with reel-to-reel tapes. And I'd say, "Well, here's me singing a song for a burger dairy commercial, or a sandwich shop commercial, or a car dealership." And it was like, "Well, she definitely knows how to sing in the studio." That's how I started doing demos for everybody.

PM: So you went right into singing demos. Did you ever go the jingle route here in town?

JLW: No. I had tried to, but I really was intrigued with the songwriters. And like I say, back in '82, it was really about the songs.

PM: Right.

JLW: You know all those people that were here getting songs cut, Don Schlitz, and people like that.

PM: Sure, right. Schuyler and Knobloch, and Craig Bickhardt.

JLW: Yeah, all that was going on when I came here.

PM: So did you start writing right away, too?

JLW: No. But I always fiddled around with writing at home up in Indiana before I came here. But I always looked at myself first and foremost as a girl singer. As I evolved more here and got older, I soon realized I needed to write more, and take it more seriously, and I need to also be a better guitar player. Because I'm too independent to kiss somebody's ass that much to get them to play guitar for me.

PM: Absolutely.

JLW: And that's the way the musicians were, here. They were like, "Well, is something going to happen with her, then maybe I will. If not, I'll charge her." And I would think, "Screw that. I'd rather play myself." I mean, "My voice will be fine, not like my guitar playing. They're going to listen to the voice anyway." But musicians always still think they're God's gift to everyone--and they are, in a lot of ways, but still, when you go to see somebody play, are you listening to the singer?

PM: Yeah.

JLW: Unless they suck, and then you have to listen to the players.

PM: But writing has become a really big part of your life, and a lot of your friends are co-writers now.

JLW: I really got sick of the craftiness of the writing here in this town. I had to really work on that. I had to really work on making my songs make sense. Because with a new writer, stuff frequently doesn't make sense, though they don't know that sometimes. It would make sense to us, but it wouldn't to anyone else. And I had the opportunity to write with great writers in this town. I owe a lot to the songwriters throughout the years who took the time to write with me.

PM: Who do you feel you learned from along the way?

JLW: Every single songwriter I have ever written with. They were always more prolific than I was. Many were extremely intelligent. I had my voice to lean more on, and a lot of these guys, they just are writers. And they can maybe sing the song a little bit, but they don't claim to be singers, they came here to be songwriters.

PM: And were a lot of the people you were writing with, were they guys, or were you writing with women all the way along, too?

JLW: At first it was guys. It's now gotten to be where I write a lot with women.

PM: Right.

JLW: And I always wanted to find some women, and I finally started finding some who I thought were great. Amy Rigby.

PM: She's one of my favorites.

JLW: Yeah, me too.

PM: I'm crazy about her, as a person and as a writer. [check out our interview with Amy]

JLW: Angelo was a great writer for me to write with. Ted Lindsay, too. I'm thinking of people years and years ago, when they knew that I could--Ted Lindsey wrote for Crystal Gayle. He had a number one, "Too Many Lovers, Not Enough Love These Days." But he's a great writer. He's from Shreveport, and he's back there now. I'm trying to think of a long time ago--Doug Millett.

But I'll tell you, I was starting there to say, "No, I want it like this. I'm not trying to write a Nashville commercial song." Because so many times it's hard once you do that all the time to quit going down that road. And it's like, "I don't want to write that." So I think where my meat and potatoes started coming in was that I really stood up for not trying to write a commercially correct song.

PM: Right. You just wanted to write the kind of song you wanted to write.

JLW: I wanted to write a decent song that was crafted well, and you understood what it meant. I think most of my songs you can understand. That's probably because I came up doing all those demos with the way that they craft songs here. But I don't like too much of that. I don't want to be known for that. I'm glad that I let the songwriting evolve instead of getting caught up in that and only learning how to do that. You know what I mean? Because I could have done only that, and I probably could have had a certain success doing those kinds of songs. But it embarrassed me to play the songs for people that I knew didn't like that stuff--

PM: Right.

JLW:--from where I come from. My friends who like Neil Young, for instance, don't like overly crafted Nashville songs. Why is Neil Young still big? Why do people still like that? I mean, wake up, smell the coffee, because you know it's not some contrived here-today-gone-tomorrow so-called hit.

PM: Right. Yeah, it's a real song from a real person.

JLW: And all those songs, like the Burt Bacharach songs, all those cool songs are beautifully crafted but don't feel contrived.

PM: Let's talk about some of the co-writers that you work with today, and that are on this record. I mean, we mentioned Amy Rigby. What's the song with her on this record?

JLW: "One More Time," which is the name of the album.

PM: It's a great song. There's a lyric that I love in that song that's very Amy-esque. And I want to know how it all went down.

JLW: I can tell you which lines were and which lines aren't, because I brought that song to the table. I had that song started. And I just wanted to see--because if you listen to her stuff, it really doesn't sound that much like the songs she and I write together. But she's a huge contributor, I'm not saying she isn't. But if you listen to her stuff that she writes by herself, it blows my mind! [laughs]

PM: Yeah, she's incredibly witty, talented and funny.

JLW: But I'm a little bit more country, and simpler than Amy is.

PM: Because the lyric that came to mind was "I've got everybody's number, but I keep on losing mine."

JLW: Yeah.

PM: To me it sounded like, "Well, Joy is the first half of that, and Amy is the second half of that."

JLW: Well, you were right on the money, there. I know "I'm the queen of wasting time" was mine, because... [laughs] And the very beginning of that song is mine. I had started that years and years ago, snippet of that back when I was just off of Columbia Records, see.

PM: Wow.

JLW: I had started lots of things like that, but I didn't want to give them to those certain type of songwriters, because I feared they would mess them up if I brought those ideas to them.

PM: Right.

JLW: So those were just sitting on a cassette for a long time until I thought, "Now, this chick, I love what she does, and she might really be able to help me finish some of these songs." And we've written quite a few songs together. I have to say, every single song I've written with her is a really cool song, and people like them.

PM: And you sing on each other's records.

JLW: We have yes.

PM: Now, Duane Jarvis is another guy that you've written a lot with.

JLW: Yeah.

PM: And how is he represented on this record? He's got a tune or maybe two.

JLW: He played guitar all over it, and he co-wrote "Girls With Apartments In Nashville." And also, "Love Sometimes."

PM: Oh, those are both really good songs. I didn't really realize at first how good a song "Girls With Apartments In Nashville" was.

JLW: It's a sad kind of song in a way.

PM: Yeah.

JLW: But it's also just a true song about all these people that I have seen. Unfortunately, in the year 2005, I see that "Girls With Apartments in Nashville" has become Girls with Condos bought by Daddy in Nashville and driving Range Rovers and all that, because now they can go to Belmont College and be taught how to be in the music business. And of course, that's another killer to the real essence of this music.

PM: I heard yesterday that they're cooking up a songwriting major at Belmont.

JLW: Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Isn't that lovely. I mean, okay, I was talking to Ellen Crandell, actually, yesterday. She said, "Songs are supposed to be something that come into you and then through you, and you filter them out, and that's how they're written." That's why people like Cat Stevens and James Taylor really touch us. There was no school to go to to learn how to write songs like that.

PM: "Peace Train," for extra credit, yeah.

JLW: It's just so sad. I just wonder why people that are not born with that, why don't they just go on with their life and do what they should be doing, instead of trying to be something that they're not.

PM: Yeah.

JLW: I'm not trying to be anything that I'm not supposed to be.

PM: Yeah. I'm not making believe I'm good astronaut material.

JLW: Yeah. I'm not a runway model, either.

[laughter]

continue

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