JD Souther Is Back

With A Brand-New Album After A Quarter-Century Hiatus

One of the principal architects of so-called southern California country-rock, JD Souther famously played a key role in the formation of the Eagles and co-wrote their hits “Heartache Tonight,” “Victim of Love,” “New Kid In Town,” and “Best of My Love,” as well as writing Linda Ronstadt’s classics “Faithless Love,” “Simple Man, Simple Dream,” and “Prisoner in Disguise.”

A highly sought-after songwriter and session player, Souther also released four critically acclaimed solo albums — John David Souther (1972), Black Rose (1976), You’re Only Lonely (1979) and Home By Dawn (1984) — and two albums as a member of The Souther Hillman Furay Band, the supergroup that united Souther with Poco’s Richie Furay and the Byrds’ Chris Hillman.

But in 1985, after countless hit records, Grammy nominations, American Music Awards, and gold and platinum albums, JD Souther decided to walk away from his solo career. According to Souther, “I wanted to be a better musician and songwriter. I wanted to just stay home, practice, read, and write.”

Relocating to Nashville (after Northern California, New York, Japan, and Ireland for six months), Souther wrote for and with artists as diverse as India.Arie, Brooks & Dunn, Jimmy Buffett, Glen Campbell, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Diamond Rio, The Dixie Chicks, Don Henley, Raul Malo, One Flew South, Roy Orbison, Bernadette Peters, Bonnie Raitt, George Strait, Brian Wilson, Trisha Yearwood, Warren Zevon, and, most recently, the newly re-formed Eagles, who chose a Souther protest song “How Long” as their debut single from the Eagle’s first studio album in 28 years.

You can’t talk about, or to Souther, without mentioning the Eagles. Besides his work on the several aforementioned hits, “How Long,” from Long Road Out Of Eden, was written and first recorded by Souther in 1972.

And now, Souther returns with his first studio album in 25 years: If The World Was You, recorded live in the studio with a five-piece ensemble, two horns, piano, bass, and drums. He plans to tour supporting the new project with several backing musicians in the fall, but he took a stab at a couple of his new songs during a solo stop in SoHo (New York) at the City Winery May 28.

Over the course of nearly two hours that evening, Souther was affable and forthcoming, treating about 200 fans to a songbook of material spanning his entire career, including a few of the aforementioned hits he penned with his “buddies from the Eagles.” Switching back and forth between guitar and piano, Souther wove songs and stories together with his crystal-clear tenor hitting all the high notes with ease.

In a preconcert call to The Newtown Bee, Souther stretched his chat to nearly an hour with Associate Editor John Voket. Several segments of that interview appear below, but check out an extended audio version of the JD Souther interview online by clicking on NewtownBee.com.

Newtown Bee: Focusing on If The World Was You, that title really conjures up a powerful sentiment — I respect the fact that you shy away from talking about relationships, but can you discuss the person who represents the “you” in the title?

JD Souther: Everyone. It’s a very generalized “you.” In fact, sometimes I think I should have called it If the World Was You (And It Is). You know that’s one line in a song called “The Secret Handshake of Faith,” which is the culmination of the album at the end. And my piano player just couldn’t shake that phrase. He just kept saying, “Man, that just says something I never heard said before.’ And, I said, “I agree it’s never been said before, but does it have any emotional resonance for you?’ And he says, “Yeah, it makes me cry — it’s so cool.” Now that’s an awful lot of pluses, so I told him that’s what we’re gonna call the album.

Newtown Bee: You still have a pretty potent tie to the Eagles as a result of them recording “How Long” just last year despite the fact that that number has a 30-year history. Has it changed much in its construction, or its lyrical content since you first sang it on your first solo album in ’72?

JD Souther: It changed a little in the first year I was playing it. It started off as a shuffle, and became a little bluesier ... a little darker. It’s not the happiest song in the world. It’s about a guy who goes off to war and doesn’t come back. And I wasn’t performing it for a lot of years, but as their manager said to me about a year ago, “An Eagles hit is always a beautiful thing.” And it is — so I started doing it in my set again.

You know the Eagles record is a lot like mine. When I started touring with a band in ’72, I changed it from a shuffle into that kind of straight 8-beat that it is now. And they were doing it on stage then during their first tour. And as often happened with us, if I recorded something, usually they didn’t; and if they recorded something we wrote, then I didn’t. That one, since I wrote it myself and the record was already out, they just passed on recording it. Frankly it was a total surprise and delight to me that they did it last year.

Newtown Bee: There is kind of a club of so-called California rock or country rock artists that sprang from those foundational years in the music business and the LA scene of the 70s and 80s that still seems to be going strong, with your former downstairs tenant Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt who recorded your “Run Like a Thief,” James Taylor, and a long and rich collaboration with Linda Ronstadt. Have these relationships helped you and all of them stay in business?

JD Souther: Well let’s hope it goes on for another 30 years. You know I ran into Tony Bennett a couple of summers ago in LaGuardia and we were gettin’ our shoes shined. And we’re up there chattin’ and he asked if I was doing any dates. So I said, I hadn’t been for awhile but I got a new record and he says, “I heard — it’s kind of a jazz thing.” So I said I’ll be out doing a few dates, how about you? And he goes “No, we’re cutting down to about 60 dates a year”!

He’s a hero to me in a hundred different ways. I’ve been listening to his music since I was a little kid. And God willing, I’ll be out doing the same thing when I’m 81 and having as much fun as he is. I’m a lifer. I’ve been playing music since I was 11 and I don’t see any reason to quit.

Newtown Bee: It’s been said if the Eagles, and a lot of those artists you’ve worked with, came out today, they would be pegged into a country music format. But at the time they were classified as rock, and even pop or Top 40 songs. Can you talk about being in the boat as that California rock sound of the 70s and early 80s became reclassified into what would surely be country material today?

JD Souther: The problem with bein’ in the middle of the boat is when you’re in the midst of any kind of phenomenon that affects a lot of the public, is that you’re still sailing the boat. You’re watching the weather, you’re bailing out the boat, you’re trying to steer the thing right. And there’s always something going down, metaphorically, your compass; a rudder is broken; some of your lines are crossed. So you’re always workin’ it from the inside out, so where the ripples go is so completely out of our control. I mean, it is why we have managers, PR guys, it’s why we do interviews, and it’s the reason why MTV was so successful.

It had the support of everyone from the composer to the consumer — insofar as you had a bigger window. You could not only hear the music, you could see the people and get off on this cinematic dimension. But I don’t think there’s clear view of what’s happening on the shore when you’re out in the middle of a storm trying to make the boat go true. I’ll say this, we all wrote these songs to last. And everyone is aware that in this business, your presence could be a very transitory one. I read a lot of interviews with McCartney and Lennon where they said, “If we get a couple of years out of this it will be amazing.” Here we are 50 years later and nobody that picks up an acoustic guitar doesn’t try to play “Blackbird.”

(Hear more of the JD Souther interview online at NewtownBee.com.)