Jimmie Dale Gilmore

Jimmie Dale Gilmore

COUNTRY AND EASTERN
The Philosophy Behind Jimmie Dale Gilmore's Latest
With his blend of Eastern mysticism and Western grit, Jimmie Dale Gilmore remains an iconic figure of the outlaw in midlife. It's been four years between albums for Gilmore, but with every sung note, ONE ENDLESS NIGHT says that the wait was worthwhile. Covering songs by his Flatlanders bandmate Butch Hancock, as well as Townes Van Zandt, Jesse Winchester, John Hiatt, and others, Gilmore makes their lyrical approach and philosophical musings reflect his own ongoing spiritual investigations, particularly into Buddhist practice. The result is something of a stylist's turn, a la Willie's STARDUST, but at the same time, Gilmore delivers this material as if he were reading from his autobiography. We caught up with him at his Austin home, before he hit the road in support of the new album.

barnesandnoble.com: ONE ENDLESS NIGHT is your first album in four years, yet there are only two songs on which you're credited as a writer. Why pick other writers' songs and not do more originals?

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: I've always regarded myself more as an interpreter and a collector than as a songwriter. I know I have written some good songs; I'm not saying I'm not a good songwriter, but being a songwriter never was my main thrust. My whole career I've been doing covers of stuff; in a sense what I was doing a lot when I was younger was playing country songs for people that mainly listen only to rock 'n' roll, and I was playing rock-'n'-roll songs for people that mainly only listen to country. My stock answer is I'd rather do a good song that somebody else wrote than a mediocre song that I wrote. I never have had this idea that I must cut only my material.

bn.com: It seems that there is a common thread in these songs. One that jumps out is the theme of leaving to search for something, and then returning to a place that feels like home. Was there a conscious attempt on your part to choose songs that reflected that theme?

JDG: Not necessarily, except in the sense that that's the archetypal theme of most music. I think I'm drawn to that type of song. I don't know if "thematic" is the right word, but for me to learn a song in the first place it has to have really touched me somehow. And what I always want to do, when I get touched by a song, and particularly one that isn't necessarily very well known, is to have other people hear it, and I want to try to evoke the same depth of feeling that it produced in me. It's a song-by-song thing. Maybe on this record I just hit a little closer to the quick of that particular approach.

bn.com: Can you pinpoint why the idea of leaving, searching, coming home resonates so strongly in your life?

JDG: I think I've just experienced those emotions so deeply and so much, I feel like a sort of longing and being kind of lost, for my whole life. It's also a theme of our times, I think. And maybe forever -- just a theme of the human condition. But for me personally, that's how I've lived through this life -- a sense of something missing, or maybe me missing something.

bn.com: The other aspect of the songs you write and the songs you choose by other writers, particularly on this album, is a connection to nature and our relation to the physical world around us.

JDG: The thing is, we are nature; humans are nature. It's not like nature is something separate from us; we are it, we're embedded in it, we're part and parcel of it. And that is actually one of the core insights of the Buddha -- it's inseparable. And for me personally, what came of this was a feeling of connectedness that I was missing. We perceive ourselves as being separated; the actual fact of it is that you can't be separated or you'd be dead. To come to the point of realizing that simple fact is in one sense a whole new discovery; in another sense it's going back to the beginning. Some kind of sense of that has been in my music and in my perspective for the whole time.

bn.com: How has your spiritual quest allowed you to look back on your career?

JDG: I experienced a whole lot of confusion from the way my family was in the '60s. The disruption of all the institutions, plus drugs and everything else that played into that -- a dismantling of a worldview. I experienced it, there came a certain point, it was kind of like I've either got to understand better what's going on or I'm going to go crazy. I opted to go for studying Hindu philosophy and studying under a meditation teacher rather than pursuing a music career. My music career had already started at that point -- I was in my late 20s when we did the Flatlanders. So I was a late bloomer even in that respect. But when I came back and did my solo thing, that was many years later. Nearly all the '70s I was devoting myself to trying to find out what was going on.

bn.com: One of the songs you recorded on this album is "Georgia Rose," by Walter Hyatt. It starts to sound like a country drinkin'-and-cheatin' song; but there aren't drinkin' and-cheatin' songs in your repertoire. Rather, you talk about talking personal responsibility for what you've done.

JDG: Well, I hadn't thought about that particular angle of it, but I think it's true. Artistically so many of those songs are so trite and so pat. One of the things I loved about "Georgia Rose" is that Walter Hyatt used that image -- "tonight I'm drinkin' while I'm thinkin'" -- to convey a sense of a way everybody has felt. It wasn't about drinkin'; it was about feeling the way that makes you drink. I love country music and I'm defensive about the stupidity of it, because 90 percent of it is just dumb. Ninety percent of all music is stupid and bad -- or 95 percent. If you're applying any kind of artistic standards to it, most of it is just fad stuff. They discovered that there are maybe two themes that popular country music deals with; that's the most, though. Maybe just one -- the broken love affair and the happy love affair, and everything else is just peripheral to that. Even the drinkin' songs are just maudlin stuff about that. I even love a lot of those songs that are so stupid; I like the sound of them. But I can't sing 'em. I guess what I'm trying to get around to saying is that that song, "Georgia Rose," had this odd effect of finding what was the very best about country and western; although in form it's very different from any normal country-and-western song. The feeling in the line "Once you could've been mine" just says it in such an incredible, understated way.

-- David McGee