Self portrait photo by Jim White, second self-portrait and cover art photo by Trey Blake
Jim White and Trey Blake Excavate The Possibilities of Precious Bane
The album Precious Bane, a collaboration between Jim White and Trey Blake, arrived at the end of January via Fluff and Gravy Records, with a very interesting, and somewhat unusual backstory. White, an author and longtime singer, songwriter, and performer, made Blake’s acquaintance after one of his UK shows and after many years of friendship, White has been able to help shepherd Blake’s first music into the hands of the public. Blake, who is a neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist without much financial support, is not someone who would normally have access to recording facilities, but through a series of fortuitous events was able to get basic tracks recorded with Joe Watson of the band Stereolab, and White was able to complete the recordings for release.
White and Blake’s initial friendship bloomed over an eccentric novel from the 1920s called Precious Bane that hinted at British gothic and folk elements, and that came to be a part of the tone of the album that resulted from their work together. As you might expect from the story so far, White is someone who is particularly aware of the possibilities of Outsider art and lingering folk traditions in the world around him. I spoke with him about this inclination of his, how it affects his work, and of the growth and development of Trey Blake’s work that enabled the creation of Precious Bane.
Americana Highways: I know that the stories that led to Precious Bane were not from your own life, but do you ever try to specifically take stories from your life to create your music? You’ve had a very eventful life.
Jim White: I have a strange memory for detail. I can’t remember anything from the present, but I can remember the past. It’s something about the way my brain is wired. There are only a couple of songs in my whole catalog that are completely autobiographical. “Bluebird” is one, and “Christmas Day” is another one. Generally, I don’t write songs conceptually, but I write them reflectively. Usually I’ll hear some series of notes and find them evocative in some way, and then I’ll go look at notes I’ve made of things I’ve overheard or ideas that have come to me. I’ll go combing through piles and piles of notes, looking for things that match the music, and then I’ll get twenty pages of ideas around the music, and I’ll start whittling it down and waiting for a story to come out.
I got this idea, actually, from Tom Waits. I worked in a restaurant in New York City in the 1980s, and it was a popular restaurant in Soho. One day Tom Waits walked in, who was living in New York at the time. I loved his music. He stood staring at the cafeteria board for a long time, and I finally said, “What’ll you have, Mack?” He said, “Nothing from here.” And he turned around and walked out. Then he walked across the street, where there were some abandoned buildings.
There was a homeless guy living in a doorway, who was a friend of mine, called Hank. He was sure that he was the illegitimate son of Hank Williams. He had a guitar and it had one string on it. He’d make these kind of feral noises and scare the hell out of everybody. I gave him food from the restaurant and cared for him deeply. When Tom sat down next to hank, it made me really happy. I’m watching through the plate glass window, and I saw Tom get out a notebook. He sat there for an hour with Hank, talking and making notes of the things Hank said. I had never thought of that, but just thought I should remember stuff that happened. The next day, I went out and got a notebook, and started writing down anytime I heard a phrase that someone said, or came across a random thing that had some musicality to it, like words that felt musical, I’d write them down. Pretty soon, I had notebooks full of stuff that I’d use for writing fiction, stories, and for writing songs.
AH: How did you and Trey Blake start working on this project together? I understand that she came to some of your shows in the UK.
JW: Trey came up to me at a show in London, 12 years ago probably, and she was very shy, but if you understand spiritual things, there was an aura around her. It wasn’t a clear aura, but a complicated one. She gave me a book called Precious Bane, written by Mary Webb, in the 1920s, about 18th century rural England, and this disfigured woman who has this extraordinary, weird, crazy life. It’s this psycho-sexual farm drama. [Laughs] She said it meant a lot to her and my music meant a lot to her, so she thought she’d give it to me.
On the plane home, I started reading it. In the back, she’d written her e-mail address, so I wrote and thanked her. When she wrote back, the words just leaped off the page. There was something magic in the way that she wrote. She lives in abject poverty in the UK, never been an artist, and she’s autistic. She had a very hard life due to being undiagnosed and from a poor, working-class family. She had to find her own way, and there was all kinds of hard living. Out of it, she found a way to live. We would trade messages as friends for years.
When she finally mentioned that she’d written some songs, I said, “Please make a recording of them.” So she did, and she sent me some recordings that she’d made on her phone. She was singing like Yoko Ono, which was not necessarily a good thing! I asked her to send the words to the songs, and she did, and they were great fucking songs. I said, “The singing is impossible to listen to, but you are an incredibly talented songwriter.” Four more years passed and she wrote a memoir, called Where Grey Is Just The Silver Untransformed. I read it, and it was phenomenal. About six months later, I knew that we had to find a way for the world to receive her gift. I couldn’t really get attention on the memoir, because it’s not in a neat category. About a year later, she wrote some more songs and sang in a more normal voice. She said, “I don’t have a phone anymore, so I don’t know how I can record them.” I said, “Try to find someone.” She lives in Brighton, and about a month later, she was very excited because she’d met someone who said that he was going to record the songs for her. She said, “This guy Joe let me record, and I brought my friend in who sang with me some. I’ll have Joe send them to you.”
I was expecting it to be low-end, bad recording, but it wasn’t. It was high-end professional. The songs are the ones that you hear on the record. I was touring, and had burned a CD of it, and was listening, and it was just magic. At one point, I just pulled the car over, since I wanted to listen to the songs and not be distracted. When I told her the recordings were so good, she said that Joe was in a band and even played gigs sometimes. I asked her what the band was. She said that his name was Joe Watson and she couldn’t remember the band, so I asked her, “It wouldn’t be Stereolab, would it?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s it! Have you heard of them?” By chance, she met Joe Watson, the keyboard player from Stereolab, and he saw the same thing in her as me.
AH: That’s such an astonishing thing, what that moment is like, when someone talks to a total stranger, and makes an impression. And as you said, she’s not someone from the mainstream of society, she comes off as an unusual person, not necessarily approachable. How amazing that he didn’t dismiss her.
JW: For sure. She’s an odd duck. She looks kind of like a weird hipster witch. It’s good that people have their ear to the ground, and are listening. I wrote to him later and thanked him, and he said, “Yeah, I kind of saw the same thing that you did.” I took the tracks that he recorded with her, which were just two guitars, her vocals, and her friend John’s vocals, and I built them into proper songs. We could have released the album with her spare, stark, acoustic tracks, and it might have been nice, but my concern was that she didn’t really have the tools to present it to the world. She didn’t have the tools to generate social media. That’s when I said, “Maybe I should take some of her songs and place them with my songs. In the UK, I have a following.” The Americana audience in the UK is very astute, and know good music when they hear it.
AH: It seems like there’s a strong link between Americana and spookier folk traditions in the UK anyway that would fit particularly well when listening to this music.
JW: There are songs from 16th century that have mutated echoes of British heritage here in the South. The South was settled by poor people from Ireland, Scotland, and England, with a distrust of central authority because of generations of betrayals by the powers that be. Essentially, we’re just singing a spin on English folk music.
AH: I love that. The holidays recently passed, and researched a couple of old, strange holiday songs, and found out just how very old they are. Which is the reason for their unusual lyrics. You can get back to the late Middle Ages sometimes.
JW: I was so stunned at the advent of the internet to realize that, just like American blues is indebted to African music, American hillbilly music is indebted to Celtic and English folk ballads from almost a thousand years ago. It’s crazy.
AH: This reminds me, essentially, of Outsider art, which relates to Trey and her whole approach to music. It’s art that’s not being created through anything like official channels. Are folk art and Outsider art the same thing, do you think?
JW: The academic world argues a lot about this. You can be trained in folk art, whereas Outsider art is more of an aesthetic outburst from an unlikely source. These are people who create weird and powerful art. I began seeing Outsider art in galleries in New York city and I began to see similarities between the art they made. They need aesthetic outbursts in order to endure.
AH: It makes living possible. It’s a life-process.
JW: When Dylan was having his heyday, the engineers were saying, “Bob Dylan wasn’t writing those songs. He was just transcribing what was being sent to him.”
Thanks very much for chatting with us about the music and so much more, Jim White. Find more details and tour information here on his website: https://jimwhitemusic.net/
Enjoy our previous coverage here: Interview: Jim White on “Waffles, Triangles & Jesus,” Magical Realism and the Ephemeral
And our review of the album here: REVIEW: Jim White and Trey Blake “Precious Bane”