As he releases Nite Owls, his first album in seven years, the singer/songwriter talks Ed Nash through the songs that have soundtracked his life.
“I promise you I'm not wearing sunglasses to try to look cool!”
When JD McPherson appears on our video call he’s wearing shades, but even though it’s early in the morning in America, he’s most definitely not going for a rock star look. “I have Uveitis, which makes me really sensitive to light right now. I've had it for months and it’s driving me crazy.”
A lifelong devotee of Rock and Roll, for the last three years McPherson has toured with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss as their guitarist and bandleader, and when we speak he’s just finished his third tour with them, where his Uveitis made it easier to get away with wearing sunglasses onstage. “I made up this joke that the doctor told me I had Roy Orbison-itis, so I had to wear sunglass all the time.”
The doctor also gave McPherson an eyepatch, and he jokes, “I really struggled with whether I should wear an eyepatch on stage, and whether I should go for a Johnny Kidd & The Pirates look.
"I sent a photo to Robert and said, ‘Just kidding, I'm not wearing an eyepatch on stage.’ He called me back and said, ‘Are you kidding? You're wearing that thing on stage!’ So Sunglasses are my compromise.”
McPherson announced himself as a pivotal new voice in Rock and Roll with 2010's Signs and Signifier, 2015’s Let the Good Times Roll and Undivided Heart & Soul in 2017. His Christmas-themed album Socks, released in 2018, features one of the best Christmas song titles ever, “Hey Skinny Santa!”, but events beyond his control meant Socks would be “the last thing we did before the pandemic was over.”
I put it to him that little thing called the pandemic put a lot of artists careers on hold. “That little thing goofed things up for people, me included. I think it affected my sense of time and temporal displacement more than anything else. I can't remember when things happened in my life now at all because of that.”
Nite Owls is a stunning return, where McPherson merges his love of Rock and Roll with Glam Rock, ‘60s girl-group harmonies and the electronica of the ‘80s. “This is the first “record, record”, non-seasonally sensitive record in seven years. God, it's flying by”, he reflects. “It's good to finally have it out. It's good to be planning to play these songs and trying something really new for me, to break the ice again, reintroduce myself to old friends and get out of the house a little more.”
I ask if he’s going to keep his sunglasses on for his upcoming tour. “Some people can do it and they look great. I don't know if I could do it or not. Roy Orbison, Andrew Eldritch from The Sisters of Mercy, can do it, but gosh, who else looks cool in shades on stage?”
When I get sent McPherson’s Nine Songs choices before we speak, each of them comes with a sentence documenting the moment he first heard them and why they matter to him. He explains he thought long and hard over the story he wanted to tell with each of them.
“I love this feature. I like the idea of someone trying to weave a structure into it, whether it's autobiographical or not.”
In the end, McPherson decided to tell the story of his life through songs, which he titles “nine auspicious tunes”, taking in guitar lessons from his older brother, meeting his wife and his all-time favourite song. Seeing and hearing his infectious love for each of them is a delight, where he ponders eureka moments in his own musical journey and the artists that inspired and saved him.
“I really reached to try to find a way to have an architecture that was really unusual, but I ended up with phases of my life. This made me think about songs I haven't thought about in a while.”
“Over The Hills and Far Away” by Led Zeppelin
BEST FIT: This was the first song your older brother taught you to play on guitar
JD McPherson: I was playing some things on guitar and he’d show me some chords. Then I saw this song from The Song Remains the Same movie, that I was watching on late night television and that was my first exposure to Led Zeppelin.
What did you love about it?
I loved the acoustic guitar figure at the beginning and then when the song picks up, I was ‘I want to know how to do that.’ It was like seeing a magic trick and having to know how it's done.
For the first time I wanted to learn something that wasn’t a couple of cowboy chords, and luckily my brother knew it. He's sixteen years older than me, so he was around at the perfect time to have learned some of these tunes. I picked it up really quickly oddly enough; something about the hammer runs and pull-offs felt right. That sent me down a really dark path. I was hooked at that point, and I bought every Zeppelin record.
The second song I learned was “Stairway to Heaven” and my brother said, ‘If you can learn “Stairway”, you can learn anything.’ There are so many jokes about people learning to play that song in guitar stores and there’s the Wayne's World thing, but it’s such a massive thing, where it's beyond being a song you might hear on the radio. It's like it's larger than life. But the first one was “Over the Hills and Far Away” and it’s still one of my favourite Zep tunes.
Music was very tribal when I was at school. My first musical love was The Smiths, which put me in the indie kids crowd, and then there were the schoolkids who were into heavy metal who loved Led Zeppelin and the Tolkien associations. I remember a classmate telling me the title of this song came from the name of a Tolkien poem.
I have a strange connection to all this. And to touch on what you said, I loved those books when I was a kid, and then having met Robert, he was a kid when he was writing those songs, and he was really into those books about the same time.
I have a friend who's a polyglot, he speaks eight languages and can speak conversational Latin. He’s the smartest person I know and he's a bit of a Tolkien scholar. He always tells me that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is for the hoi polloi, and that there's a deeper well, a deeper reservoir. He told me about the similarities between what Tolkien was writing and what Jung was writing in The Red Book, and it really flipped my wig.
Jung was writing about the collective unconscious; he was doing this dream collection and automated writing. He would tap into that and draw and make these crazy paintings and write this crazy stuff. It was like free association. But at the same time, having never met, it turns out they were writing and drawing the same pictures. Tolkien would always say he wasn't writing, but that he was uncovering this stuff.
There's some strange thing going on that those guys were tapping into. There are swords, elves and Viggo Mortensen running around with beautiful, long curly locks, but there's also this other side of it and there's really something going on with that.
To what you said about being an indie rock fan first, I had the advantage of growing up completely isolated in rural southeast Oklahoma. So I also loved The Smiths but I also loved Van Halen and Madonna. I didn't have anybody telling me that I couldn't like all of those things.
I still meet people that just like being into early Rock and Roll and obscure Rockabilly records. When you travel in Europe you meet people who don’t like muddying the waters with other things. There's such a beautiful world of music out there, and I love that stuff as much as they do, but that's just humans I guess, some people like to join up in tribes.
“Search and Destroy” by The Stooges
BEST FIT: You describe this one as “the song that beckoned me away from what my older brother listened to.”
JD McPherson: When I started playing guitar and listening to what my brother listened to, that was a new kind of music. It wasn't music you’d hear in the world at the time, unless you listened to what they now call classic rock radio in the States.
There were radio stations like KMOD in Oklahoma that would play Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Bad Company, guitar music from the ‘60s and ‘70s. And then you had oldies radio, which was Buddy Holly, Neil Sedaka, stuff from the ‘50s and early ‘60s.
I'd hear Little Richard on the oldies radio, but it didn't click with me that that was Rock and Roll, it clicked to me as ‘This is what my parents listen to.’ It wasn't until I discovered bands like The Stooges that I started to realise that these things are special within that world, and that there's a world of difference between Little Richard and Pat Boone.
When I was into my brother's music – Cream, Zeppelin – I was completely enamored with it. I’d go to Fort Smith, Arkansas or Tulsa, which were the nearest cities that had record stores, and I would get guitar and music magazines, Spin, Rolling Stone, and read them voraciously.
I’d get these indications that there was another kind of music that wasn't in the mainstream. They would casually mention Ramones, Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks or The Stooges, and I knew there was something going on. Then Nirvana came out and my suspicions were confirmed - that this was not like the other things that were on popular radio at the time.
That's when I started doing a deep dive. I remember calling the Hastings music store at the mall in Fort Smith, Arkansas, saying I'd like to order Raw Power, Ramones Mania and Never Mind the Bollocks by Sex Pistols, three cassette tapes. The next time I went to the mall with my Mum, and going to town was a big deal, we’d drive an hour and a half to the city, I would spend all my time in the guitar store and the music store.
I bought those three tapes, I brought my Walkman for the drive home and my mother, who was a minister, wanted to know what I was listening to. I had to think about it, ‘Okay, I've got an hour and a half to get home. How do I do this? What's the least potentially offensive thing?’ Luckily, I picked the Ramones first and she loved it.
And then I was ‘It's either got to be The Stooges or Sex Pistols’, but the Sex Pistols, even just the name of the band might not fly.
And the line “I am an Antichrist" may not have floated your mother’s boat.
I played the Stooges, and I cannot tell you the revulsion that I felt from my mother. It is the most brash, visceral, violent music and I fell in love. My high school band started learning “Raw Power” and “Search and Destroy”. I became obsessed with the single piano note in “Raw Power”, and ideas that you could distill Rock and Roll down to the most minimum effective dose, to the least complicated thing, and it would be just as effective.
Hearing “Search and Destroy” kick off that record off blew my mind. And that's when my appetite for the out of the ordinary was really opened up.
The Stooges come up in Nine Songs features a lot, when we spoke to Johnny Marr he talked about the transformative power of hearing James Williamson’s guitar playing for the first time. What do you think it is about them that makes musicians love them so much?
I think it's an amalgamation of a lot of things. It's proto-punk, it's before punk rock, so there was no movement behind it, they sprung out of the grass. Raw Power was them being left to their own devices. They were like a red-headed stepchild to the label, they went into the studio, and this is what they came up with – it was that dirty, that overdriven, and completely abandoned.
To see footage of their live shows was the most extreme example of Rock and Roll up to that point, the music is great, the grooves are so cool.
They didn't last very long, and they didn't really ever make anything bad. Fun House is actually my preferred record, but I didn't like it as much at first because it's a little tamer, but it's a little more sophisticated than Raw Power.
The first record is incredible too, the John Cale production and with the loud claps. That's something that I stole many times, there's got to be one element on a record that's abnormally loud, and claps are the best option.
It seemed like they’ve been there forever, and they’ve got a carbon date of a billion. The Stooges are irreplaceable, beyond reproach. They sound like the best teenage band in the world.
“Midnight Shift” by Buddy Holly & The Crickets
BEST FIT: This is your ‘most life-altering song’ and it’s quite obscure, I couldn't find out much about it.
JD McPherson: This came after I was getting into The Stooges, Punk Rock and the burgeoning alternative scene, and I was already that, I wearing weird clothes and fighting off angry cowboys. I was definitely at least sixteen because I could drive to a music store that opened in McAlester, Oklahoma, which was an hour from my house.
It was called Noiztoyz and the purpose of the store was to sell tapes to people. I don't think they had this in the UK, but these guys would buy these little mini trucks, fill the beds up with speakers, play hip hop and rap music and they would pull into the Sonic Drive-In and rattle the roof of it. Then they’d drive away down the street, all in a line.
But this place could order things, so I’d go in there and ask, ‘Have you got any Johnny Burnette?’ and they’d say ‘No'. So I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll order some Johnny Burnette’.
This girl started working there who had moved up from Dallas, she was six foot five, blonde. I don't know what she was doing in McAlester, she was probably getting away from some stuff in Dallas, but she became kind of my lifeline. She recommended a lot of cool music to me, she told me about Jane's Addiction, Butthole Surfers and a few Texas bands.
They would buy collections and sell them and one day she said, ‘I was going to get rid of this because it’s never going to sell in this store. But I think you might like it.’ It was a Buddy Holly box set, and I was like, ‘Oh, okay’, but because she gave it to me, I listened to it.
I’d heard Buddy Holly's pop stuff on the oldies station I talked about earlier and it didn't really float my boat, but to hear the early music with Sonny Curtis on guitar, it was like a lightning bolt hit me.
What drew you to it?
It had that verve and vigour that the Ramones had, but it had great musicianship. It wasn't just rattling off 20 power chords; it was this incredible guitar playing from Sonny and I could immediately see it - ‘This is what I want to do. I want to start learning this’. And that's when it hit me, that that's Rock and Roll music.
I read that the producers wouldn't let Buddy Holly play guitar on this song, they said it had to be Sonny Curtis.
Yes, you can always tell when Buddy's the guitar player. He plays the same solo in multiple songs and I love that. Obviously, Buddy was a genius, he was 20 years old, and he wrote a million amazing songs. He didn't have the chops that Sonny had, but their biggest hits came after he was the guitar player.
My little high school band immediately started incorporating that and I started to try and come up with ‘What other kinds of music are like this?’ I knew Elvis was The King of Rock and Roll, so I bought the earliest Elvis stuff, which was The Sun Sessions, and that was a whole other door that opened up.
Then it was Little Richard and Gene Vincent, anything I could think of that was Rock and Roll - not just oldies - became my new obsession, and that started record digging and me becoming completely consumed with that music.
What made this song in particular so life altering for you?
That was the most life altering music because it really set my path forward of what I would eventually do professionally. My first record was as close to that music as I could try to get. I think in a way it set my music apart from what was happening in Americana radio at the time, and it gave me an audience.
If I hadn't been given that box set, I would never have come to the conclusion that this is what I loved about The Stooges and the Ramones, but it makes more sense for me. I can identify more with a kid from Lubbock, Texas than I can with four guys from Queens or somebody from Leeds, it became my thing.
“A Little Respect” by Erasure
BEST FIT: This one’s all about romance, it was the first song you danced to with the person who became your spouse.
JD McPherson: When I was at university in Central Oklahoma some friends of mine heard about this Goth club that had opened in Tulsa. I’d have my greaser uniform on, we’d pile into a van, get a bottle of Captain Morgan, drive to Tulsa and try to meet girls. The club was called Roadkill.
We’d go every weekend, and I saw this girl who didn’t have purple hair and leather and buckles. She was in a very sensible kind of mod outfit, brown hair, not a lot of makeup, a black blazer with a Smith's T-shirt, monkey boots and jeans.
We started talking and we ended up dancing to that song. After that I bought the Erasure Pop! The First 20 Hits compilation. I'm a huge Vince Clark fan, I can't think of anybody that wrote as many memorable melodies as Vince. I tried to track Vince down to write songs with him at some point, but my A&R person couldn't track him down. I don't know if he would have done it anyway, but I’m massive fan of all of his projects.
But that song is special for that reason. I've been married for married for 21 years.
How did you end up getting married?
It's a pretty serendipitous story. We met and we danced, and I had no game at all, but I did give her my phone number. We danced away and then I never heard from her. I had this friend Greta who lived in Tulsa. I was belly aching to Greta that I met this girl, I gave her my number, she didn't call me back, that I'm super bummed out, and I can't go back to Roadkill now.
All Greta knew was her name and a brief description of what she looked like. Fast forward to a few weeks and my then object of affection, and now my spouse, had gone to a bachelorette party at a gentleman's club with her friend who was getting married.
She's at this strip club and my friend Greta was there, because that's something she liked to do. She was looking around and saw this girl, and she had this idea to walk up to her and say, ‘Hey, did you meet my friend a few weeks ago?’
And she was like, ‘Oh, my God, he gave me his phone number.’ She didn't have pockets that night, so she put my number in her shoe, and then danced all night and it all went away.
So because of this completely random meeting at this gentlemen’s club with Greta, she called me that night, and now we've been together for almost 24 years.
“Wish Someone Would Care” by Irma Thomas
BEST FIT: You’ve described this one as the song that most influences your production choices.
JD McPherson: There's not a session that I've been a part of that I haven't played that song for somebody for inspiration.
I love the Allen Toussaint produced Irma, it's perfect to me. I look at its place in history and to my knowledge nothing else sounded like that when it was being made. There's some secret magic in New Orleans with the way they record, the way they play, the way they sing and the way they write, that is so special.
Irma is my favorite singer and those are my favorite songs. If you go through my small catalogue, you're going to hear tubular bells, you're going to hear overly busy drums, and all of that stuff comes from hearing that song from Irma.
I got to see her on one of the last Plant Krauss tours. I got a message after the gig at Jazz Fest that we were going down to Preservation Hall and Robert might sing a song with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. I didn’t know that Irma was going to be there. She got up and played “It's Raining” with the Pres Hall Jazz Band and I was just bawling.
I couldn't believe I was getting to see this, because it was like seeing her in the ‘60s, it was one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. She was royalty to those people and to see her with the best possible band backing her was such a gift.
She's got a fascinating story. She was married twice by the time she was 19. She got her first break when she was a waitress when she was signed to a label after singing on a bar table, but she never got as big as, say, Aretha Franklin, which I’m baffled by, because her voice is incredible.
I think that has something to do with the isolated nature of New Orleans music. Obviously, some New Orleans music has leaked out, like Fats Domino, and becomes huge and massive, but for the most part New Orleans is almost like a walled off city.
Had she gone up to New York or she'd been from New York, it wouldn’t have been the same music. She's obviously beloved, and her music did make it out, but at the time I have the feeling that it was the nature of New Orleans. Not much gets in, not much gets out and they're fine with that.
There was that TV show Treme, where the DJ was interviewing Kermit (Ruffins), and that playing on an Elvis Costello record was on offer. He's like, ‘Don't you want to get out and see get the world? What do you want to do, smoke weed and play backyard barbecues the rest of your life?” And Kermit goes, “That’ll work.”
I asked Angel Olsen if it’s harder to write a song about being happy in love than a sad one, and she said it was, but the perfect example was Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love is”. It's an absolutely beautiful song, you listen to it and you feel like you’re in love.
Yes, with the crazy production and with those little bells. Oh my God, that stuff just blows my mind. That's as good as pop music gets in my opinion.
“Stay Loose” by Broncho
BEST FIT: This is a song “by an uncharacteristically modern band that influenced my own music.” Why ‘uncharacteristically?’
JD McPherson: I do tend to wallow in the mire of my record collection! (laughs) I tend to not stray out, but once in a while something will come through, and this one happened because they're from my town.
Broncho are one of my favorite bands ever, they hit a chord with me the way that The Jesus and Mary Chain or My Bloody Valentine do, in that if you scratch through this veil of feedback and noise then you're going to find this beautiful melody.
When their first record came out, they reminded me of post punk, almost like a Jay Reatard vibe. Their second record Just Enough Hip to Be Woman was when they really figured out what they were, that's the one you want to start with. It’s got these big reverbs and Ryan really leans into his strange voice.
I sent that record to Josh Homme from Queens of The Stone Age. He fell in love with them and took them on tour. But he also told me, “My audience welcomes every opener we've taken out on the road with open arms, but I cannot say the same thing for Broncho.” They're so confrontational and they're going to make you work for the affection that they deserve.
How did they influence your own work?
That record really started to make me think about how I might start to incorporate some of the other influences in my life into what I recorded and wrote, and this new record is really influenced by Broncho. I started working with their mixer Chad Copelin, who's a genius, an Oklahoma City guy, and he ended up mixing my record. And I just kept saying, “Man, more Broncho, make it more Broncho”.
I've told this to Ryan, the singer from Broncho, he's aware that I'm a super fan and once in a while he'll grant me a phone interview. Their records are great, but it's an acquired taste I think, but once your palette adjusts to them, you start to really see how great the music is.
They haven't put a record out for a while, have they?
No, but they've got one coming soon.
“Abide With Me” by Thelonious Monk
BEST FIT: This has been your walk on song for the last 10 years, it’s a very short song which only gives you 54 seconds to get on stage.
JD McPherson: It works out perfectly. We just walk out, strap the guitars on and launch right in.
I thought so hard about the walk on music, because the obvious thing to do is to play something that gets people pumped up.
Lots of bands have used songs from movies. The Ramones walked out to the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I think Suede used to walk out to something from Gone With the Wind, some big cinematic thing, it was “The Ecstasy of Gold” for Metallica.
The first time I opened up for Robert's band, The Sensational Space Shifters, they walked out to “Rumble” by Link Wray. I've seen people walk out to “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by The Stones, and all of these are wonderful choices.
I agonised over what to walk out to, such as ‘Do we walk out to something from the ‘50s?’ And then it hit me. I'm an art school kid, I got a Master of Fine Arts in really far out art things and I always wanted to convey some kind of avant-garde sensibility, even if people didn't understand that or pick up on that.
That little track that opens Monk's Music is an arrangement for saxophones, which immediately hinted at what I was into. But it's also a hymn. It's very meditative. It's a saxophone arrangement of a hymn.
The story of the hymn is really interesting, the lyric was written by the Scottish vicar and poet Henry Francis Lyte and two decades later the church musician William Henry Monk re-wrote the music.
All these little boxes were checked. For me, it was short to the point it sounds like you're graduating a little bit, so all of those things together turned that into the walk on song.
Monk doesn't actually play on it, but John Coltrane is in the brass section.
Yes, and it’s from my favorite Monk record. The only time we've ever deviated from it was when we played New Orleans once, and the iPod we carried around had malfunctioned.
This was before streaming, and the sound guy was like, ‘Is there anything else you want to walk out to?’ I had just heard “Pony” by Ginuwine, which was fantastic walk on music, but we eventually got our iPod working again, and it was back to Monk!
“Killing The Blues” by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
BEST FIT: You toured as part of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s band, and this is your favorite song they’ve recorded together.
JD McPherson: The Plant Krauss project is covers, they're pulling from the American Songbook, they're pulling from old Celtic tunes. The idea is they're reinterpreting songs together. I included this one because they changed my life, or they saved my creative life.
I was probably done with music right at the end of the pandemic. My old band had split and gone to do other things, and I didn't really feel the joy anymore - about wanting to make anything or even finish the record that's now out. I had this unfinished record that I didn't even want to do, and to get that phone call to go on tour with them saved me.
More than that though, I'd always been a huge fan of that project. That first record Raising Sand blew my mind when I heard it, I loved it so much. It was how dark and old school the recording of it was, but it was such a beautiful sound, and the rhythm section was incredible.
I've always had that record saved to a device just in case I lost Wi-Fi, so I’d still have something to listen to. I remember being on a European flight and I was sitting next to this great big Norwegian dude. I had it up on my laptop and he kind of elbowed me. I pulled off my headphones and he said, ‘I love that record.’ We ended up talking about it forever. And so, many years later, to be in such a dark place and a sad state, I got the call to go audition for their return.
Where did you first appear with them?
It was for BBC One. I got there and Duane Eddy was there, James Burton was there and I'm like, ‘Why am I playing guitar again?!’ But that led to a tour and eventually touring with them for three years, which was a lifebuoy, being able to play with musicians like that and my heroes, I'm eternally grateful. So I had to put them on here, because they're as instrumental to me keeping going as finding that Buddy Holly song was when I was a kid.
Why “Killing the Blues” in particular?
It’s so great, it's unbelievable, and theirs is the best version. I borrowed a pedal steel guitar six months before the tour started in case we did that tune. I'd never played pedal steel before, it’s a nightmare and I'm definitely not here to play pedal steel, but I learned that song, I brought it to rehearsal, and it got cut. But I'm okay with that, because I'll never get tired of that song, it's beautiful.
You’ve just finished another tour with them, do you think you’ll work with them again in the future, or does it depend on where each of your musical paths take you?
Alison has something happening next year and she’s focusing on that. But I think there may be a chance it could happen again. And if it does, fantastic, but if not, I'm grateful for what I got.
“Love Letters” by Ketty Lester
BEST FIT We’re finishing with your all-time favorite song ever.
JD McPherson: I know I'm always touting this badge of being a Rock and Roll person, and I am, I really do love it, but I’m also a really sentimental person, I have a real romantic side, and I tend to really geek out on 12/8 ballads. So I present to your readers the queen of all 12/8 ballads, which is “Love Letters” by Ketty Lester.
It's her finest moment and it's the perfect recording. The piano in that song is the greatest thing I've ever heard. The groove is fantastic. The lyric is saccharine, but not in a trite way. And it's in a David Lynch movie.
It’s in Blue Velvet, and soundtracks a very brutal scene.
It’s a scene where the police are raiding the drug den, there's guns going off, and a cop goes rolling across the street. Jeffrey is at Dorothy’s apartment and there’s blood coming out of his head. It’s very surreal but it's like there’s this beautiful thing underneath it.
That's something I never really thought about, that seeing David Lynch movies in high school really influenced my value system as art and music go. It's this ‘50s aesthetic, but it's turned on its ear a little bit.
What makes it your favourite song ever?
Sometimes I'll say “In My Room” by the Beach Boys is my other favorite song, and they're very similar, they're almost the same exact tempo. But “In My Room” is much more about this injured spirit that finds comfort in solitude, and “Love Letters” is much more outwardly directed.
There's been some really good versions of it. Elvis did it. Tom Jones did it. Allison Moyet did it, but man, I never get tired of hearing Ketty Lester’s version of it. What a tune, it’s brilliant.
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