News | Discography | Tours | Press | Audio-Video | Lyrics | Side Projects
Vocation
Upcoming Tour Dates:
Nov 21 2009 | Crossing Borders | Den Haag and Antwerp
Dec 3 2009 | Largo small room | Los Angeles, California
Dec 5 2009 | Cafe Haliewa | Haliewa, Hawaii
Dec 15 2009 | Eddies Attic | Atlanta, Georgia
News
Hear Jim's performance on NPR's World Cafe
While on tour in NY recently, Jim and the band detoured to Philadelphia to appear on the always eclectic World Cafe radio program. Listen in!
Download the shows from NPR's website.
Jim's New Album, "Transnormal Skiperoo," Released in US ...OUT NOW!
Are you one of the five Jim White fans in the US who hasn't acquired a bootleg copy of Transnormal Skiperoo via the Internets? If so, you'll be excited to learn that it's now available (legitimately) from this website (as well as other sources) .
Read more about the songs on Transnormal Skiperoo.
See Luaka Bop's hallucinogenic page about Transnormal Skiperoo.
Hear more Jim White songs on Jim's official MySpace page.
Jim Joins the NEA's "The Big Read"
Jim recently joined cultural hard-bangers Alan Arkin, Edward Albee, Gore Vidal, and others to comment on Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for The Big Read, the National Endowment for the Arts' laudable and possibly quixotic effort to create a "nation of readers."
Congratulations to Tucker Martine!
Tucker Martine, who produced "Crash into the Sun" for Jim, was nominated for a Grammy for his engineering work with Bill Frissel. Go Tucker!
Discography
Transnormal Skiperoo
purchase | listen
Drill A Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See
purchase | listen
No Such Place
purchase | listen
Wrong-Eyed Jesus
purchase | listen
Hellwood: Chainsaw of Life
purchase | listen
Various: Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
purchase | listen
Tours
Press
An "echo of his debut"?
Drowned in Sound interviews Jim about the new album.Read more...
dig Internet Radio Interviews Jim White
"Every now and then a musician comes along with a whole lot of interesting things to talk about: Murder, sin, American myths, depression and surfing right hand breaks."
"dig's been playing some of Jim White's music over the last few months; and Tony Walker reviewed his Drill A Hole In That Substrate.... One of the reasons we're fans is the rich atmospheres that Jim White creates (joined by producer Joe Henry in the most recent album). Another reason is probably the dark and terrible tales that White tells." Read more...
"Oh wow, wow, wow."
Read the transcript of one of the best conversations Twitch.com's Todd has ever had. Read more...
Jim White's Hallelujah Breakdown
Girlfriend cheating? Check. Business partner embezzling? Check. Best friend on edge of death? Check. Read more...
"We love it, we just don't know what to do with it."
One strange pilgrim talks to another. Read more...
"Jesus is heavy."
Jim talks with the SF Chronicle about Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, the film he narrated. Read more...
"Yes, Baudrillard!"
Comes with A Smile talks with Jim about the sources of his songs and stories. Read more...
9 Out of 10 Glossy British Magazines Agree...
Drill a Hole is a big wet dream of loss and isolation, sex and the search for grace. The songs that aren't set late at night, in a motel room that doubles as a jail, take place in the rain on some desolate highway, which might be the path of righteousness but goes nowhere. The phone booth to God is out of order, the radio plays nothing but scripture or static, and the girl in his bed doesn't want to redeem him but needs a ride to the Greyhound station. -Mojo
Jim White's songs are the tales of a man who has turned his life into a story and whose life has risen to the challenge. -GQ
***** The Guardian
***** The Independent
**** Uncut Magazine
***** Evening Star
***** What?s On
**** Mojo
Audio-Video
Listen
Jim White & Olabelle at the Earl, Atlanta, GA. Audio file masquerading as a video file of Jim and Olabelle (who play on his new album) performing Jailbird, A Town Called Amen, and Turquoise House.
Get: Real Player | Quicktime
Look
Coming Soon: Tracks from Transnormal Skiperoo, Jim's fourth album
Lyrics
Click the album name to see the lyrics.
Side Projects
visit the official website | purchase the DVD or soundtrack
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
Jim takes two perplexed Englishmen on a tour of (parts of) the rural South in an effort to understand what it is about the place that inspires such powerful storytelling, faith, and despair.
Not quite a documentary, yet too real to be fiction, the film includes appearances by the Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd, 16 Horsepower, David Johansen, Lee Sexton, and Harry Crews. The real stars of the movie, though, are the ordinary people who share their stories of grief and loss, survival and hope.
Hellwood freezes over
purchase the CD
Hellwood: Chainsaw of Life
Hellwood is Johnny Dowd, Jim White, and Willie B; three distinct songwriter/musicians brought together by years of friendship, mutual respect, and camaraderie. Recorded in a cabin in central New York, in a room with walls covered in newspaper clippings of musician obituaries, "Chainsaw of Life? is a compendium of a world abandoned by both God and the Devil. A disillusioned couple contemplate suicide to remedy a loveless marriage, con-men use religion to control and steal, a soldier runs away from battle and his best friend dies as a result -- much like Dowd and White?s recent film, ?Searching For The Wrong-eyed Jesus?, this is a travelogue through a hidden America that these writers know intimately.
Mama Lucky
Back in the year 2000, when I began working on No Such Place, I began to hear rumors about this grandma who'd once been a blues singer, but who now worked as a telephone solicitor in Pensacola. She was dirt poor and lived in an old cabin not far from the neighborhood I grew up in and had once been the singer for a band that opened for Willie Nelson for a whole year. I figured if she opened for someone of Willie Nelson's stature she must be pretty good, so I contacted her and asked if she'd be interested in doing some back-up singing work on my upcoming album. She agreed.
When she came into my studio I didn't really know what to expect. Mama Lucky sat herself down and started singing, and oh, what a voice---a wise, troubled voice that had seen many miles of hard road and would likely see a few more. It was one of the fine moments in life where something unexpected materializes before your eyes and fills you with hope about the unknown. She sang a wild wailing banshee scream on The Wound That Never Heals, and really helped put that song right.
I got to thinking about what a waste it was that so few people had heard that voice and dreamed up an idea for an album; I'd take some of the songs that I never could do justice to singing myself, put together a band from local talent and make a little labor-of-love-CD and let Mama Lucky breathe life into the vocals. It just so happens that at that time I was talking a lot to my good friend, producer Tucker Martine, and when I told him about my idea, he offered to co-produce and engineer. When I told him we didn't have any money to pay him for his services, he said he did some projects to make money and some projects because he knew it would be rewarding in a larger sense and he placed the Mama Lucky project in the latter group. God bless Tucker Martine.
So in November of 2002 I assembled a band, picked the songs from the pile of odd songs that I wrote that have never been professionally recorded, and there came Tucker to Pensacola to record Permanent Stranger. The initial sessions went well, with my friends Steve Ferry and Bishop Maples providing much of the original core music. Both of them have wonderfully eclectic music minds and they lent their wildest sensibilities to the tracks. Then Tucker took the material back to Seattle and enlisted the help of truly amazing players like Steve Moore, Eyvind Kang and Carl Blau from Laura Veirs' band.
With Tucker's additions my vision of a simple homegrown album was happily upgraded. I set to work putting my touches on Permanent Stranger; editing and remixing like I do. Finally I got to where I thought the album was close to finished.
That's where things got complicated. I had to shelve the project to work on Drill a Hole In That Substrate And Tell Me What You See. I'd intended to finish the Mama Lucky project soon thereafter but along came Hurricane Ivan, which ripped my town to smithereens and set a series of events in motion that kept me away from the Mama Lucky material until just this year.
During that interval there was the release of Drill A Hole...the touring, the hurricane, the repairs to my house, then a hasty move to Athens, Georgia; marriage and the purchase and renovation of an old farmhouse, the birth of my second child, the completion of another album as well as a side project with Johnny Dowd. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
Finally, after a four-year hiatus, I found myself with two weeks free at the end of this summer and realized it was now or never. I furiously set to work on the tracks and at long last finished Permanent Stranger. I'm really happy with the results and think it's for the best that we waited so long to complete it, as I think the material settled nicely over time.
We'll be mixing in mid December with Pro Tools guru and studio ace John Keane here in Athens, so look for the Mama Lucky album to be released sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2008.
Thanks for your interest,
Jim White