Another interview with Souther. This one's from SignOnSanDiego.com.

Back in the saddle

J.D. Souther took 24 years to deliver a new album. Why? 'I was doing a lot of other stuff' Um, what? Read on ...

By Mikel Toombs 1:01 p.m. December 4, 2008

Although he was only a member of the band for a single afternoon in 1970, J.D. Souther helped define the Eagles with such songs as “Best of My Love” and “New Kid in Town.” His partnership with Linda Ronstadt, at times more than musical, produced the likes of “Faithless Love” and “Prisoner in Disguise.”

Souther, who'd been in a band (Longbranch Pennywhistle) with roommate and Eagle-to-be Glenn Frey, also carved out a career as a 1970s singer-songwriter, with a detour into the not-so-super-group the Souther Hillman Furay Band.

But after his 1984 album, “Home by Dawn,” Souther stayed mostly at, well, home, in the Hollywood Hills. He became visible only as a writing credit on records by George Strait, the Dixie Chicks and once and future Eagle Don Henley.

Souther may have been gone, but he wasn't forgotten. The Eagles reached back to 1972 and his debut solo album for “How Long,” which became a single off of last year's reunion album, “Long Road Out of Eden.”

And now Souther, who performs a long-sold-out show Wednesday at AcousticMusic San Diego, has released a new album. Sophisticated and heavily jazz-influenced, “If the World Was You” raises many questions, starting with, Why did it take 24 years to produce a new album?

“I have no idea,” Souther said by phone from a tour stop in snowy Detroit, where he was born John David Souther 63 years ago. “Probably the question I could answer is: Why did I do it now? And the answer is that the material is there – by that I mean the material that I wanted to sing.

“I was always writing. Henley and I wrote a bunch of stuff in '89 that worked out pretty well. And George Strait had a great record with 'Last in Love' on it in '94 or so. And the Dixie Chicks, everyone knows how many records they sold. They had a song of mine on that 'Wide Open Spaces' album.

“It's not that I stopped writing, I was doing a lot of other stuff. I built a great house in the Hollywood Hills that I loved, and I loved being home there. I had two dogs that I'd rescued, and it was a relief to not be on the road and to not be trying to create whatever I thought the late '80s music was – it wasn't exactly turning me on.

“What I was doing musically was, I just went home to learn to try to play better. I built this house with a great studio in it, I set up both my drum kits, got my horns out and tried to reacquaint myself with being a student of music, which is what I always was.”

Souther had started studying music, and playing drums and horns, as a 10-year-old growing up in Amarillo, Texas.

“My parents were swing kids, my dad was a big-band singer,” he said. “So, we always had lots of those WWII big-band records in the house. We had a lot of Dorsey Brothers, a lot of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw. And a lot of Sinatra. Both my parents loved Sinatra.”

Souther's love of Frank Sinatra is well-documented. When Ronstadt recorded her album of standards with Nelson Riddle, the story went that she'd been inspired after Souther had played her the aptly titled “(Sinatra Sings for) Only the Lonely,” also orchestrated by Riddle.

“To be perfectly fair,” he said, “(Ronstadt) had spent an equal, if not greater, amount of time playing me the Stanley Brothers, the Louvin Brothers and Jim and Jesse, the Carter Family. She really completed my country-music education.”

Souther's new album is remarkable in that his familiar songwriting voice comes through in a format that's radically different from the country-and folk-influenced recordings in the 1970s and early 1980s.

“I couldn't see the changes, from the inside anyway. From the outside, yes, it's a horn band instead of a guitar band. It's probably just because I got lonesome for horns,” Souther said.

“I had some of the greatest guitar bands in the world – certainly worked with one of the very greatest guitar bands in the world. And when I moved to the country in Tennessee, I got sort of lonesome for guys playing horns, because that's what I played when I was a kid.”

In fact, Souther, now a family man with a wife and two kids who has lived just outside Nashville since 2002, didn't even play guitar when he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Falling in with Frey, a fellow Detroit native (Souther's family moved when he was 3), and neighbor Jackson Browne, he soon remedied that situation, even briefly becoming a guitarist for the fledgling Eagles.

“I was, for one day. (Asylum Records founder) David Geffen talked us into working up a set,” Souther recalled. “We played a set one afternoon at the Troubadour. And I just remember looking down this line of acoustic guitar players and thinking, I am just the fifth wheel here. These guys do not need me in this band.”

Souther went on to write some of the Eagles' most indelible songs, and in the process seemed responsible for helping to create the band's musical image.

“Thelonius Monk was asked a similar question about how he felt about redefining jazz,” Souther said. “And he said, 'Man, I was just trying to make it sound good.' That's my answer. I had no notions about creating any kind of a niche or being the architect of anything. I was new at the acoustic guitar.”

Souther was more at home, so to speak, when crafting songs for Ronstadt.
“Yes, I didn't live with the Eagles,” he deadpanned. “I don't know that I wrote songs so much for her. We had kind of a collective consciousness together that resulted in great music.

“I always encouraged Linda to write – I don't know why she didn't. I always thought she certainly had the ability. But she had such an astonishing instrument, and she was so good at interpreting songs.”

Mikel Toombs is a Seattle writer.

DETAILS
J.D. SoutherWhen: Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.Where: AcousticMusic San Diego, 4650 Mansfield St., Normal HeightsTickets: Sold outPhone: (619) 303-8176Online: AcousticMusicSanDiego.com

Three choice ones
J.D. Souther talks about three of his favorite songs, two he wrote and one from Frank Sinatra's “Only the Lonely.”

Linda Ronstadt, “Prisoner in Disguise”: Souther calls the duet “just about the zenith of our working together.” “We did that three or four times together in the studio live, just sitting across from each other with a guitar. And we didn't think we had it,” he recalled. “We came in the next day and (producer) Peter Asher says, 'You should hear this.' And we went, 'Really? You got it.'”

The Eagles, “New Kid in Town”: “Those guys are the absolute masters of making layered records, where you cut a rhythm track and you overdub and you overdub and you overdub,” Souther said. “We really worked on that song. I bet it took us eight months or a year to finish that song.”

Frank Sinatra, “Angel Eyes”: “The first time Sinatra retired, the last thing he sang was 'Angel Eyes.' If you recall, at the end of the coda where he sings Excuse me while I disappear, the spot(light) closes out on him and that was it. He walks off the stage and, as far as the public knew at that moment, his career was over. I thought that was high drama and perfect.”

– MIKEL TOOMBS