JD Souther

With songwriting credits including the Eagles' new single, How Long, and previous hits The Best of My Love and New Kid In Town, plus putting words into the mouths of Linda Ronstadt, Glen Campbell, the Dixie Chicks and many more, even if you don't know John David Souther by name you'll have heard his songs. He was a key player in the Los Angeles music scene of the mid 1960s to early 1970s.

His biggest hit as a solo artist was his 1979 Orbison-influenced song You're Only Lonely from the album of the same name. A collaboration with James Taylor called Her Town Too from Taylor's Dad Loves His Work album, reached number 11 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. He chatted to me at the end of a short UK tour.

It's largely JD's choice that people don't necessarily know the artist behind the songs.

"Obviously I preferred it that way for years because I wasn't putting out records. I haven't made a new studio album in twenty years, it's been almost as long as the Eagles."

JD describes his time out as an early retirement.

"I retired at 40 instead of 60, that's all, so I took a lot of time off, travelled around the world for fun instead of to play gigs, and built a fabulous house in the hills. I love the outdoors, riding horses and camping deep in the mountains. I watched a lot of my family work until they were so old that by the time they retired there wasn't much fun or physical energy left in them."

Some music "got out" during the 1980s, and he was still collaborating occasionally with artists such as the Eagles' Don Henley.

"Don and I had a little flurry of stuff around '89 and '90, that was really fun for me, when we wrote The Heart of the Matter, If Dirt Were Dollars and Little Tin God. Some really good stuff came out of that period. One of those '80s songs [I'll Take Care Of You] is on the Dixie Chicks' Wide Open Spaces album."

During the 1990s, however, JD felt he didn't have anything that he was burning to play.

"I was kind of empty after the last album I put out and frankly I was bored of what I was writing. And you can't exactly complain about your income stream with the Eagles and Dixie Chicks and George Strait doing your songs!"

He often finds it refreshing to have his songs interpreted by other artists with their own emotions.

"They all have their own lives, they're like children - once you kick them out of the house you're done with them."

As well as travelling, he spent time acting, and has appeared in the television series Thirtysomething.

"I'm better than I was 10 years ago because at my age I don't really have the ego about my looks anymore, I just show up and do the work."

He enjoys acting because he can absorb himself in it.

"You learn to inhabit a character so completely that you forget everything. It's bliss, it's like being on stage. I do forget things on stage - last night I started to play and couldn't remember the first line so I played the intro about three times and finally just went, 'I give up, does anyone know the first line to this song?' A girl gave me the line, I thanked her and sang the song. I've been singing that song for 20 years and I still forgot what it was, but once I started I was completely inside it. I don't 'regain consciousness' until the end of the song. The greatest thing you can have in life is absolute remorseless absorption in what you're doing, that is a good definition of not just art but a life well lived - to be so in the middle of it that you're absolutely without caution."

Now JD is working on a new album, which will be his first since 1985. He also has a greatest hits album out, Border Town - The Very Best of JD Souther, offering the chance to enjoy many of his songs. He explains why he has resumed making music.

"I got lonesome for it and started practicing again. I went from being very happy not to go out and play music for years, to now being much happier when I'm out playing than I am the rest of the time, so I guess I came back to do it at just the right time. I'm dying to get the record out and get my band out. All sorts of good stuff's happening at once, this new Eagles record is coming out and the first single is my song."

Barney Hoskyns's recent Hotel California book about the Los Angeles music scene of the mid 1960s to early 1970s and the subsequent BBC4 documentary of the same name both stressed the importance that JD played within this movement. However he does not really feel part of a scene.

"Of all of us that get credit for that southern California scene, the only person from southern California was Jackson - we're from all over America. I was born in Detroit and raised in Amarillo, Texas, Frey grew up in Michigan, Henley in Texas, Linda Ronstadt was from Tucson, Waddy Wachtel from New York, James Taylor from New England, others were from Canada - there's no common denominator. There just happened to be a lot of us in LA at the same time."

JD acknowledges that mixing with musicians from all over America helped hone their sound.

"Undoubtedly we were influencing each other in ways that we wouldn't have even recognised, just like all those New York folk guys and the jazz scene surely must have been influenced by each other. We all stand on the shoulders of giants - there wouldn't be any Miles Davies if there hadn't been a Louis Armstrong, or a Clifford Brown. It's accretive, like Chinese chain poetry, it grows with every artistic addition and becomes slightly different. We all heard each other play, and soaked up everything that was around us."

Hollywood proved to be where JD received his true education, after leaving university in Texas.

"LA was just another kind of university, that was really my college. In '69 and '70 Glen, Don and I just about lived at the Troubadour bar, watching all these great songwriters - Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Kris Kristofferson, Elton John, James Taylor, Carol King and the Burrito Brothers. Our group, which was behind them of course, were on their way up and we were all still playing open mic nights, that's what Jackson, Don and I were doing."

JD started out in the band Longbranch Pennywhistle, before moving on to country-rock 'supergroup' The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band with Chris Hillman of Byrds fame and Richie Furay of Poco. At one time he rehearsed with The Eagles, but turned down the offer to join as a full member. "I'm not a very good band member," he says. Instead he helped to pen some of their most well known tracks.

"Those few songs that are so famous were mostly written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey and it just happens that that group worked really well together, including Jackson Browne. Then Warren Zevon and I wrote a song together because we are great friends, and James Taylor and Waddy Wachtel and I wrote a song together and it was a big hit. We were friends just hanging out, it wasn't any kind of a scheduled working event, we were just sitting around doing nothing and Waddy said, 'Why don't we write a song?' James and I looked at each other, like, 'We gotta work?' Waddy started playing guitar and James sang a line and I sang a line and pretty soon we had a song."

Those co-written songs are the exception in JD's career.

"Pretty much everything on my album is written by myself, except for two songs on the You're Only Lonely album that I wrote with Glenn Frey. Most of the time I'm a typical, lonely, boring, stay-at-home writer, sitting up late at night trying to think of something to say that hasn't been said," he laughs.

Songwriting in recent years has been a process of going where JD's mood takes him.

"When I first moved to Nashville 5 years ago I tried a few co-writing sessions. I admire those guys but I'm no good at it. I don't know how they can show up at 10am, end up with a song at 6pm, and make a demo the next day that sounds any good. I'm much more of a plodder, blown about by emotional whimsy, I have no idea where I'm going to land. Prisoner In Disguise is a good example, it's one of my favourite songs of mine and seems to be a lot of people's favourite. It's a pretty long, deep song but it is what a classical composer would call 'through composed', from the beginning right to the end, it started with the first line and I never wrote past the place where I was sure. I never went looking for a chorus and then wrote back the verse in front of it, or went looking for a hook and then tried to rhyme it. I just kept saying the next thing, like a novelist without an outline - maybe I had some sort of outline in my head, but I really didn't know where it was going, it was like painting."

Despite not being heavily into co-writing, he did get a little help from a friend on Prisoner In Disguise.

"I played it for Joni Mitchell and there's a line that goes, 'But if he doesn't return your call on time, oh my my,' and I just sang 'oh my my' every time that spot came up because I didn't have anything else to say there. When I finished, Joni said, 'That's a beautiful song," and I said, 'I've got to finish that line though,' but she said, 'Oh I thought that was wonderful, I thought that's what you intended.' Once she said that I decided to leave it there - thus it stayed."

He has been working with a new band on his recent material.

"It's not a guitar band. It resembles those quarter-time or Miles Davies bands of the late 50s and 60s, with two horns and a rhythm section - piano, double bass, drums. These guys have to tolerate a rockabilly singer and half-arsed guitar player which Miles didn't have to do! It's the same sonic approach. All the album is played live and there are fantastic jazz players. I don't know if it's a jazz record - whatever a JD record is, that's what it is. This instrumentation is based more on modes and scales than guitar chords, but playing the songs by myself on a solo guitar I can't tell much difference between the newer and older ones."

JD has been playing music his whole life, in high school, orchestras and so on, including jazz drums, so the Miles Davies influence is not completely out of the blue.

"I started trying to write songs that I didn't know how to write, playing keys I didn't know how to play in and tackle subjects that I was unfamiliar with. If you're an artist for life you have to keep reinventing yourself otherwise you just die of boredom. I hope it keeps people interested, certainly it's kept me interested."

The songs on his new album develop themes of "alienation and depression versus compassion and emergence" that have always been there, according to JD.

"We're all so connected to the rest of the world now with satellite TV that we know what the other ones are doing. The days are past of sticking your head in the sand and pretending that your empire is alright because things are alright at home. Empires suck - it's a crappy thing to go to somebody else's backyard and beat it up trying to make your friends rich."

The idealism that you'd expect from someone who learnt his craft in the midst of California's 'hippy' days is mixed with a personal interest in the welfare of the human race.

"I'd like to see people with a more compassionate view of each other and of nature which is vanishing. There's no worries about the planet failing - there'll be plenty of rats, cockroaches and organisms of all sorts that will adapt and survive - but I worry that this human experiment will snuff itself out with greed and ambition. I've got a 9 year old kid, I want her to have a kid too, I want life to be good, rich and green and when she's grown I want there to be polar bears, a rainforest and a breathable atmosphere."

JD describes himself as "somewhat overly idealistic".

"We can afford scepticism because it allows us to question dogma and conventional wisdom, but I just don't think we can afford cynicism anymore. I think people need a committed kind of active idealism. I'm hopeful, even though I probably look dark and cynical, I really believe that there is within the depths of the human spirit the ability to heal itself."

By Cherry Butler

You can purchase Border Town - The Very Best of JD Souther from all good record stores, or online at Amazon.

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