Jubal Lee Young interview
Jubal Lee Young Celebrates Outsider Songwriters With Wild Birds Warble
Singer/songwriter and guitarist Jubal Lee Young will be releasing his first album in a number of years, Wild Birds Warble, on June 28th. Unusually for Young, the album is made up mainly of covers that look back to his upbringing as the son of songwriter and performer Steve Young and songwriter Terrye Newkirk. Steve Young, who wrote songs like The Eagles’ hit “Seven Bridges Road” and Waylon Jennings favorite “Lonesome, On’ry & Mean,” is showcased on this album with several of his songs newly interpreted. But as the title of the album hints, Jubal Lee Young reached further afield to the work of songwriters he knew personally growing up who all shared “wild” traits like David Olney, Warren Zevon, and Townes Van Zandt.
For Jubal Lee Young, he felt a particular pull to bring these songs together, perhaps as a way of examining his own key influences, but they also express his aesthetic of performing vocals and guitar live in an unvarnished way. He worked closely with Producer Markus Stadler at Bumpin’ Heads Studio in Nashville, as well as a bluegrass-influenced studio band to bring the tracks to life. The result is sense of presence as well as precision, a directness that is also organic, qualities that may be becoming less common in studio recorded music. I spoke with Jubal Lee Young about conjuring the mood and tone of these songs, what he thinks of musical identities, and about his father’s legacy.
Americana Highways: I know it’s been some time since you released an album, but it sounds like there has been some continuity for you in terms of playing and thinking towards future works.
Jubal Lee Young: Definitely, and I’ve dabbled some in home recording. I have demo after demo in all sorts of styles. I’m a little bit of a kid in a candy shop. But this album, for me, is the family tradition and what I grew up steeped in. It does come very naturally to me, though I like to rock it out sometime, too.
AH: It sounds like choosing these songs was probably fairly easy, too.
JLY: As a consequence of one of the other projects I was working on that got shelved, I had been looking at a bunch of these songs already. One of those projects was a Steve Young tribute, and maybe someday, that’ll get resurrected again. I’ve been working on it off and on with a family friend for almost 15 years. Eventually, maybe we’ll pull it off. So that’s one of the reasons that there are so many Steve Young songs included. Another project was going to be a live thing with an old friend, and that’s where some of the other songs emerged. But a lot of the songs were actually by friends of my father’s and people who I grew up around, so it was not a stretch.
At some point, I sat down and decided what was missing and what needed to be there. Eventually, we had a total of 15. But I actually have five more coming. They were bonus tracks that I went back and recorded because the original album was too long to go on an LP release. I did five more so I could eventually do a double LP. Now I’ve priced the double LP and we’ll see what happens! [Laughs] That is the plan. I should have four sides that are within those limits.
AH: Do you think it’s useful as a musician to have several projects in the works at any one time because naturally some of them might not work out, so then you still have avenues to pursue?
JLY: I, personally, do, though some people may need to focus on one thing. I would say that almost nothing is going to work out like what’s in your head. [Laughs] But another thing is that things just get screwed up, people have rifts, people have schedule conflicts, especially in a town like Nashville. For some projects, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Sometimes you just think, “Whatever!” When I was a young man, I had that hyper-focused thing of thinking, “This is my band, this is my identity. I can’t work outside of this, ever!” I don’t know where I got that from, but I wish I had been more like I am now, then. I wish I had thought, “Yes, I can have three projects. If one starts to suffer because of another, I might have to look at that, but what’s wrong with being in three bands with different directions?” That’s more what I do now.
AH: I think that’s becoming much more the way people operate now. At the same time, there’s that weird social media pressure to brand into only one identity, so there’s a conflict of sorts.
JLY: I do have a teenager, so I have these areas where I know about bands who have other projects going on. I think the kids these days are doing that more. But when I was coming up, it was, “No! Your band is your tribe, by God!” That was it.
AH: As it becomes more financially difficult to be a musician, maybe that’s kind of a levelling thing, because people are realizing it’s the same level of difficulty to do one project as to do three.
JLY: Yeah! If you love music, then a lot of times you love more than one kind of music. The industry doesn’t abide that well. They want you to fit neatly into a category that they can market traditionally. We’re doing a lot of that now ourselves, of course. I think that’s hurt careers. If Shooter Jennings had just come out playing Outlaw Country and just done that, would it have helped his career? Maybe. I applaud him for being more experimental, but did it hurt his career? I don’t know. I’ve done the same thing. It does glitch out the industry when you don’t follow the established path.
AH: I’m aware that to some extent, the way that you performed these songs on the album is simply the way that you do it. But did you and Markus talk about sound at all, or approaches to these songs? You’re making choices.
JLY: To a degree, on a case-by-case basis, some of that was done. But I can’t stress enough how much credit Markus deserves for this album. I was going in there and, literally, sitting down with a guitar and vocal mics and performing the song. Then I walked away, and he’d bring in Brian Zahn to play bass. And Markus is a multi-instrumentalist, so he’s playing banjo, dobro, mandolin on a lot of it. Then Christian would come in and do the fiddle. Markus would send me rough mixes, and it would basically be done, there.
If there was something there that I didn’t love or wanted to do a little different, we would fix it. But mostly he just did a great job with it. I think everyone who was involved with it sees it as something special, great, and good, and maybe a little different. I’m not inventing the wheel with it, but I’m certainly not following the bluegrass rules with it, or the Outlaw Country one. It’s a weird bluegrass, Outlaw Country hybrid, really. Much like my father, that’s just what I do. It’s just weaving your own tapestry with some folk, some country, some rock ‘n roll. It is a good representation of that facet of my musical personality.
AH: This is really interesting for me to hear, because this process means that your vocals were laid down without hearing the other instrumentation. You make some real choices there, and you weren’t being guided by other peoples’ input. That’s just your vision for the song.
JLY: That’s just me. I’m playing guitar and singing on all of them. That’s just a straight-up recording of me playing the songs. Everything was added onto them after the fact. It’s very real. We could set up in your living room and this is basically what you’d hear. There are a few overdubs. On “Seven Bridges” there are some stacked strings. I feel like there’s a little bit of a swing back to that in the public’s taste lately. Maybe everyone’s starting to get their fill of the perfectly tuned, perfect, soulless music that they’ve been getting for 20 years. We all know we have Pro Tools now, but can we get back to putting some humanity back in it, now?
AH: There’s certainly a counter-movement of that kind. The pandemic period helped that along as people were playing live on line and being more informal.
JLY: It matters. With the advent of all this technology, I think it might have stripped away the hunger to master some of these skills. A buddy of mine was in a debate with someone about my “Seven Bridges Road” track, where they were saying that I was using autotune. I did not! I’m not. There’s not anything like that on there. That’s just what happens when you can hear and sing. If you practice it, you’ll get it. You don’t need autotuning. Technology says, “You can fix it.” But if you do it right, you don’t have to fix it. So just learn to do it right. I’m 52. I had to learn how to sing and play. There was no choice.
AH: Has putting this album together created some momentum for you on other projects?
JLY: I’m ready to go record the next one. The next one’s going to be much more original-heavy. I don’t know why I needed to do this album, it just felt like I did. It was almost like the soundtrack of my childhood. Some of the songs I’ve been playing for years, but some of them were just what it needed.
AH: That’s an interesting thought that, as an artist, this album looking back was just something you really needed to do. It was a step for you.
JLY: I think that’s fair, too. I’m at odds, sometimes, with the modern perception of the singer/songwriter thing. I think the bar has lowered, but I also feel like the window has narrowed. It’s like, “If you’re not giving me some tired, mediocre imagery that makes me want to slit my wrists, you’re not considered a great songwriter anymore.” [Laughs] I’ve got too much Paul McCartney in me in some ways. I don’t write a lot of super-depressing shit. [Laughs] I’m more Guy Clark writing about my tomatoes.
There’s a Townes [Van Zandt] quote where someone was telling him how great his songs were and he said, “Yeah, some of them have no hope at all!” But it’s not true. If you look at a song like “No Place To Fall,” it’s a wretched character embracing the inevitable doom and gloom, but at the end of that second verse is a wonderful ray of hope, saying “take care of each other.” I feel like, sometimes, in the more modern era, they forget that part. You can make me feel your pain, but I need a ray of hope before the song ends. Just give me a little glimmer.
AH: It can become an easy shorthand that to leave hope out is somehow trendy. Like if there’s no hope, that’s somehow more authentic.
JLY: But it’s not! Because that’s not the human condition. If we actually lose hope, we quit, don’t we? I think we have to represent that. But I get what you’re saying, it’s almost like the George R. R. Martin trend of killing the main character. It’s saying, “I’m going to break the rules, haha!” But counter-balance that with something.
AH: This does make me laugh that you’re saying this, because some of the songs on this album are pretty dark. But they are all stories, aren’t they? You like storytelling and characters, clearly.
JLY: Yes, absolutely! And humor. My dad was more subtle than me with the humor, but “White Trash Song” is a funny song at the end of the day.
AH: What made you decide to do another version of “Angel with a Broken Heart”? How does it differ this time around?
JLY: I didn’t have any issue with the old one, but we moved this one up a step and it gives some energy to it. The Bluegrassy approach suits it very well. Being sort of the unofficial stand-in for the shelved Steve Young project, I felt like that song was appropriate, since I did write it about him. He was a much harder working man than a lot of people probably realize, but in relative obscurity. Some of that was his own doing and choices, and not something that one can be bitter with the industry about.
I think he shunned the idea and trappings of fame, personally. I get it. I want success, and I want to make a living doing this, but I want to be able to take my daughter to get a cheeseburger in peace. He got more known at one time, around Nashville, and I do remember people coming up and interrupting stuff. That wasn’t okay with him. [Laughs] That was kind of how he was.
Thanks very much for the laughter and conversation, Jubal Lee Young. Find more details and information here on his website: https://juballeeyoung.com/
And check out our premiere of “Seven Bridges Road” here: Song Premiere: Jubal Lee Young “Seven Bridges Road”
Terrific interview! Thanks.