Originally from North Carolina, Jim Lauderdale began performing as a teenager, singing in bands as well as playing harmonica, drums, banjo and guitar.
He released his debut single, ‘Stay Out Of My Arms’, back in 1988, and has since put out a whopping 35 albums, as well as writing songs for artists including George Strait, The Chicks, Lee Ann Womack and Patty Loveless and hosting the Americana Music Awards. On top of that, he’s collaborated with the likes of Ralph Stanley, Robert Hunter, Nick Lowe and Roland White.
Ahead of his set at The Long Road last weekend, I sat down with Jim to talk about his festival experience, his latest album ‘Game Changer’, his longtime friendship and collaboration with Buddy Miller, how he approaches songwriting, what’s next for him and more.
Welcome to the festival!
Thank you.
How have you been finding it so far?
Very nice. What a beautiful place. And I’ve just seen the back roads of it, but it looks like a huge event.
You’ve been out on tour in Europe ahead of this show. How has that been going?
Great. We’ve been to Sweden and Norway, and we came in just for the festival. We flew in from Denmark, and then tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn we fly back to Denmark to play a festival called the Tonder Festival. But I’ve been wanting to play this for years, so I’m really, really excited to be here.
For people who may not have seen you live before, what is a typical Jim Lauderdale show like?
Well I’ll tell you this. When my agent, Paul Fenn, who’s from over here in England, contacted me and said, “OK, got some stuff set up at Long Road, they want you to at least bring two people”. So I said, “You know what, I’m gonna bring my whole band.” And so I’ve really splurged because I want to make a good impression here. And so I’ve got an incredible band. A lady that sings with me, her name is Lillie Mae Rische, and she has had a couple of albums out on Jack White’s label and she toured with him for a while as his fiddle player and sang with him. He had an all-female band and an all-male band and he’d vary it.
But I’ve known Lillie Mae… I first saw her perform when she was 11 years old. She grew up in a family band, and her brother is one of the guitar players, Frank Rische, and Lillie Mae’s husband Craig Smith has been playing on and off with me for several years and he is an incredible guitar player. My producer Jay Weaver is playing bass, and Dave Racine is playing drums. And they’ve all been recording with me on our last four albums. So I’ve just been slowly turning audiences on to them, and my goal is this next year playing more with them, ’cause I’m so happy playing with them. They’re so great. Amazing.
Are there any songs you’re particularly enjoying playing live at the moment?
Yes. My most recent record is a country album called ‘Game Changer’, so we do that song, ‘Game Changer’. We do one that the audiences… I’ve been playing the Grand Ole Opry for about 20 years, and I think I’ve gotten the best response from a song I wrote with a woman that lives over here in London. Her name is Raghad Tmumen, and we wrote this song called ‘You’re Hogging My Mind’. Which how that came about, we were thinking of titles of if Conway [Twitty] and Loretta [Lynn] were still around. What would they sing? So we thought that would have been a good title. So that. And those are two of my favourites.
And also Lillie Mae who I mentioned, I showcase her also, and she does a song I wrote with a woman named Susan Gibson, who wrote The Chicks’ first single called ‘Wide Open Spaces’, and this song’s called ‘I’m Happiest When I’m Moving’. Susan and I wrote that. And also I love this band so much, I’m writing and co-writing an album for them to feature. And they’re called the Game Changers, so today it’s Jim Lauderdale and the Game Changers. But this album, when it comes out, it’ll just be called The Game Changers.
I did want to ask you about the ‘Game Changer’ album which you released last year. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
Sure. I had been working on it for a couple of years, and just refining it, changing some of the songs. But the song I knew was gonna open the album was one I’d recorded called ‘That Kind Of Life (That Kind Of Day)’. Then the pandemic came, and I thought, “I’ve got this record that’s just about done, I need to finish it and get it out.” And then I thought, “Maybe I should wait ’til things ‘get back to normal’ a little more before I release it”. So I wrote another album called ‘Hope’ that I put out, that was kind of just a very uplifting album. I wanted to try to help folks get out of the doldrums and rough times. So then when I felt like it was the right time which was a year ago last August, I put it out.
And we have another record ready to go that we’ll put out in January, called ‘My Favourite Place’. So it’s kind of a continuation. You’ll recognise the band on it, but it is a continuation of the ‘Game Changer’ album.
Were there any songs on this record that were either particularly easy or particularly challenging in terms of the writing?
Well songwriting with me is funny. It’s either very easy, like that song ‘That Kind Of Life (That Kind Of Day)’ off of the ‘Game Changer’ album. That riff that’s on the pedal steel and the Telecaster, that was the first thing I wrote for it. And then the title kind of came to me. Lyrics are the slowest thing for me. So sometimes I’ll record an album’s worth of melodies and all the solos, everything, but I won’t know what the song’s gonna be about. I will kind of sing fake vowels, dummy lyrics as they call them. And then later the song kind of writes itself lyrically. So it’s a combination of things.
The song ‘Game Changer’, that kind of came easily. And then Craig Smith, the guitar player who’s with me today, played a solo that I’m so proud of him for. He uses a guitar which Clarence White and Jim Fender invented, this contraption to put into Telecasters which sounds like a pedal steel on certain notes, and it’s just a brilliant solo.
You’ve touched a little on your songwriting process already. Is your approach different when you write for yourself compared to other artists? Or is it always fairly similar?
You know, sometimes when I write for other artists it’s easier. Because I kind of channel them in a way. George Strait, the country artist who’s probably recorded more of my songs [than any other] – he’s done about 15 and I’m hoping for 16 on this next album. He’s got a song on hold as they say. And when he’s going in the studio I will write with him in mind. And the irony is though, I’d say seven out of 10 times, he never records the songs [chuckles] that I specifically write for him. When I think in my mind, “oh boy, this is a surefire hit for George Strait”, and then sometimes he’ll record something that I’ll go, “well, I’ll play this for him kind of as a last resort, I don’t think he’ll go for it” and then he ends up liking those.
It’s over 30 years now since your first album…
It’s probably… actually I’ve got a bluegrass album coming in September, so that’ll be album 36. The first one came out in ’92, but I had another bluegrass album. I wanted it to come out in 1979 or ’80, I thought it would come out but it didn’t. I couldn’t get a record deal for it. It was a duo album with Roland White, Clarence White’s brother. And Marty Stuart played guitar, acoustic. It’s a bluegrass record. And then we lost the masters, then Roland White found a tape. And that was released four years ago, I guess. So my first album became my 30th.
Is that variety something you feel has kept you motivated to keep working and staying in music?
It does. Bluegrass was kind of my first love in a lot of ways. And as far as me wanting to record something. And so it took a long time, but then my first bluegrass records were with one of my heroes named Ralph Stanley. So I did a few records with him. And then that led to me writing with one of my favourite writers named Robert Hunter, who with Jerry Garcia kind of wrote The Grateful Dead songbook, pretty much. So Robert and I ended up writing about a hundred songs. So these kind of things, it helps keep things fresh for me to challenge myself with an album in mind. That motivates me and gives me a structure to look at a light of the end of the tunnel, to finish something.
Do you feel the way you’ve approached your music has changed over time, or has it always been quite consistent?
I go through peaks and valleys of sometimes feeling like, “oh, I don’t know if I’ve got it any more”. And then some songs will come to me and it’s very rewarding, and that encourages me to go on. But I don’t know. I guess just after all this time I feel like I’m improving at it, but there’s still a long way to go. I feel like I still have a lot of good challenges ahead.
Speaking of challenges, I saw on your Instagram you’ve been learning clawhammer banjo. How’s that been going?
Yes. It’s been going fine. I’ve been so busy and then I couldn’t bring one on the road, but I actually have a recording project I’m working on in Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee. And I want to write, either alone or co-write, with the artists and have a new Bristol Sessions of old timey players. There are a lot of really great young players, and there are a lot of great players that have been around for a long time. But old timey music… I’ve always loved it, but I haven’t delved into it enough. And so that is very inspiring. I’ve only recorded two songs for it so far. There’s an incredible young clawhammer player named Nora Brown, and then a trio called The Blue Ridge Girls. Martha Spencer is one of the members, she might have been over here, but she comes from a family band called The White Top Mountain Band. Her family was in that. And so I want to try to do something to give to that community and maybe bring more awareness to that style of music, which I think is great.
There’s also a fella, a gypsy kind of jazz Django Reinhart type guitar player named Greg Ruby, and we’re starting to write together. I wanna do an acoustic jazz record, eventually down the line, and there’s a song on this next album, the follow-up to ‘Game Changer’, which is kind of hillbilly jazz I guess you’d call it. Because there is a tradition, Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West were these two pickers that would do this really fast jazzy stuff on guitar and pedal steel. And there’s Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours. They were great as players and they would play this type of thing. So that’s another challenge for me I’m gonna be working on in the future. And more bluegrass.
You’ve has so many collaborators over the years but I particularly wanted to ask you about working with Buddy Miller, and the radio show you have together [‘The Buddy & Jim Show’ on SiriusXM Outlaw Country]. How did that come about?
Well Buddy, I met him in New York City in 1980. I’d moved there a few months earlier from North Carolina and he’d moved there from Texas. He had been a part of that scene in the 70s there and moved up. There were a lot of great players that moved to New York oddly enough, in ’79, ’80, and there was kind of a country scene. And Buddy had the best band, it was the Buddy Miller Band, and his now wife Julie was a singer. Larry Campbell played pedal steel with them. And then Julie left and he got an unknown singer from Texas named Shawn Colvin to come up.
So Buddy and I… I would go see him on the nights I wasn’t working, and he would always let me sit in which was very kind. And then I moved to Los Angeles to follow the spirit of Gram Parsons, and I got a call from Buddy saying, “I quit music for a while, but I’m living in San Francisco and I’m starting to play music again, and Julie and I are moving to LA, so if you know anybody that needs a guitar player…” So I thought, “This guy is one of the best artists. I’ll hire him for a little while but eventually he’s gonna explode with his talent.” You know, he’s so incredible. And so he played with me for a while, and then as I knew would happen he started playing with Steve Earle and Emmylou, and has gone on to make so many great records, and was with Robert Plant and the Band of Joy.
So… gosh, I guess about 11 years ago, he said that he was offered a radio show with SiriusXM, and would I like to co-host it with him? And so I thought, “This is gonna be a perfect way to selfishly get to spend more time with Buddy.” I’m almost crying, because he’s so important to me, and for years we were both just busy that I wouldn’t see him much. So it’s great to get to see him, sometimes once a week, sometimes two or three times a week. We tape a lot of shows. But he’s a very important person in my life.
Is there a song you’re particularly proud of in your career? Either one you’ve written and recorded yourself or one you’ve worked on for another artist?
I think one of them is a song called ‘King Of Broken Hearts’ that I wrote as a tribute to Gram Parsons and George Jones. That one I am very proud of. I had started a song called ‘I Love You More’, and I had seen Nick Lowe when he was coming up – I’d opened up for him back in ’95 and ’96 on a tour. And then I saw him in Nashville opening up for Wilco, touring with them. So I had breakfast with Neil Brockman, Nick’s engineer, a sound guy who I’d known from years back. And to make a long story short, I went in the studio with Nick’s band and Bobby Irwin and Neil co-produced, and I wanted to do a record in England. When I was seven the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan and that really kind of set my path for music. And so I wanted to record in England. And so I ended up doing this record called ‘London Southern’. I wanted Neil also to co-produce it but he needed the songs early, and unfortunately I write sometimes the day of or the night before. But this song, ‘I Love You More’, I only had part of it done, and then when I was coming over to do four shows before we went into the studio, I finished it in Glasgow and Neil added some strings to it, so I really enjoy playing that song.
Have you got plans to come back to the UK at some point after this trip?
Oh gosh, I wanna come back as much as possible. My agent over here lives in the UK, his name is Paul Fenn, who is somebody I’ve been wanting to work with for over 20 years, and he finally took me on which I’m very happy about. So I’m hoping to come over and I wanna bring the Game Changers band back with me. I’d love to come over and do some bluegrass with the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys, they’re the bluegrass band I’m working with, or solo. I will come at the drop of a hat. Whenever there’s an opportunity I wanna come back.
Jim Lauderdale’s latest album, ‘Game Changer’, is out now on Sky Crunch Records. His new record, ‘The Long And Lonesome Letting Go’ (with the Po’ Ramblin’ Boys), will be released on 15th September.
