For Southern-fried folk singer Jim White, it all revolves around the bluebirds. Five of the brightly plumed harbingers of happiness that he noticed on a telephone wire outside his new home, on the first warm day of a recent spring. With his daughter Sadie and new wife, he’d left his native Pensacola, Fla., after Hurricane Ivan hit for the calmer climes of Athens, Ga. “And there I was, with the woman that I loved, living in this beautiful house, and everything seemed to be in line,” he recalls. “So I sort of relaxed and assumed that I’d made it to safety, you know?” But then he began studying his feathered friends more closely.
“The bluebirds had a nest in the back yard, and my wife became obsessed with how the cats were going to kill the babies,” sighs the Renaissance man, who’s dabbled in prose writing, acting, photography, modeling, folk art, even film scoring in his adventurous career. “And sure enough, the cats did kill the babies, so it quickly became this nightmare. And then the bluebirds started attacking the windows of my car, and it was like a Hitchcock movie.” Then his wife suddenly announced she was leaving him for another man, midway through the recording of his cathartic new Where It Hits You, his first solo album in five years. “And after she left, I’d stare out that window and look at those bluebirds, and it was like a message from the universe, that you can never, ever say you’re safe. All you can do is keep your eyes open and listen and pay attention—you can never just shut your brain off and say ‘I’ve made it.’”
And here’s the added irony: All of the foggy, forlorn dirges on Where It Hits You—like “Sunday’s Refrain,” “The Way Of Alone” and “State Of Grace”—were penned before White had any inkling of marriage trouble. There was only one he even remotely tinkered with—the ominous-toned duet with Caroline Herring, “Epilogue To A Marriage,” which had a slightly friendlier title, pre-breakup. More irony, White sighs. “The day my wife told me she was leaving me was the day that Caroline came over to sing with me, and we’re out there in my home studio, singing, while my wife was outside making plans to move out of our house. Caroline was singing her heart out on that song, and it was, umm, real hard to keep my shit together. So that day is certainly seared in my psyche.”
In fact, two Hits You compositions—the gently jazzy “Infinite Mind” and the ghostly piano-cobwebbed “Chase The Dark Away”—were penned expressly for his unfaithful missus, White adds. “Because she was afraid of a lot of crazy shit, and you can’t let fear rule your life—you have to look into the eyes of the people that love you and remember that this is your anchor in the world. And it was weird, because my wife left before I had sung any of these songs, because I record vocals last. So I was in tears for two solid weeks while I did the vocals. I was an emotional wreck, because I had to sing these songs, but there was no one to sing them to anymore.”
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