Simone White

Simone White was born in Hawaii, where her family lived in a house on the north shore of Oahu. Her parents - a sculptor in light and a folk singer - were members of a philosophical school. The family moved around the US, lived communally, listened to only classical music and didn't have a TV. For the pre-teen Simone, that meant sneaking Beatles albums in to the house and being the eternal new kid at school.



The family's cultural austerity wasn't genetically programmed. White's maternal grandma was a performer in the burlesque tradition, a fiercely glamorous woman with an extraordinary wardrobe of (homemade) stage outfits. On the other side of the family, her aunt and grandfather ran a music publishing company that turned out songs for teen pop combos. "I have these 45s with different acts singing my auntie's songs about bobby socks and not getting asked to the dance," says White.



White was living in Seattle when she first started playing the guitar at 22, and unsurprisingly, her influences weren't 50s teenbeat or the Beatles but Sonic Youth and The Pixies. It took several years and multiple moves - Seattle, Paris, London, New York - before White began playing and singing in what she describes as her true voice. "I stopped banging away at the guitar and started finger picking. I was listening to Low and was really inspired by their delicate guitars, their breathwork, the harmonies. I realized that I'd been afraid to sing beautifully, I'd sort of masked my real voice with this dissonant edge." White started playing out in clubs, bars, art house parties, hanging out with a gang of poets. "It was from another time, everyone was playing jazz and doing surrealist theatre," she smiles.



Summer 2004 found her in LA following a West Coast tour spent driving up and down through California, Oregon and Washington. "I was listening to Bonnie Prince Billy's Master and Everyone the whole time, nonstop, and I kept saying to people, did you hear this record? I want to make a record like this." She got an introduction and a phone number, and called Mark Nevers, its producer. In no time she pitched up in Nashville at Nevers's home/recording studio the Beech House, stayed in his daughter's bedroom and began recording I Am The Man. It was a happy and relaxed session. "It's a big old wooden house with a huge oak tree out front, a porch with a swinging chair, two dogs a cat and his kids' toys all over the place. The piano is in the living room, there's a main recording room which would be a bedroom, although I also recorded in the hallway, the drums are out back in another room, everything is connected with windows so you can see each other. It's a very nice, casual atmosphere to record in."



After a break of several months - during which time White moved again, to LA - recording resumed in Nashville. This time, work was more intense and there were a few more surprises. "Mark brought in his musicians, his guys. He's got this great group that he uses all the time. We recorded live, all spread out through the house. I'd play them a song a couple times, they'd huddle and do this Nashville thing, talking in code. Then we'd record. I was really amazed at what happened with The American War. I had no idea what it could sound like with a band. Being solo all the time it's a revelation to suddenly be on a wave, caught up and carried along by so much sound. We recorded two days with the musicians, five songs in six hours each day. It seemed incredibly fast." Nevers passed the recordings to Honest Jon's, during the sessions for Candi Staton's His Hands album. Simone returned to the Beech House for another couple of weeks - some new songs and arrangements, some second attempts - and that was that.



White is charmingly resistant to making comparisons to her sound: "It's hard to say what you sound like when you're in your own self. It's very awkward when I'm asked, I shuffle and hum and haw and of course that's dumb so I've taken to shouting "GOOD MUSIC". You have to shout it though, like you're a badass". She's much happier talking about her influences, which have moved from Sonic Youth to Nina Simone, Cesaria Evora and Odetta, and about songwriting. "I've written songs a few different ways. I thought for a long time that they just came to me, bam, and some of them do. But I saw that I was also writing them a long time before I sat down with the guitar. They start nudging and elbowing their way in and then suddenly I'm sitting down writing it."



Leading off with Carole King's I Didn't Have Any Summer Romance, I Am The Man takes in an enormously broad range of subject and mood; from a surrealist flight of fancy like Why Is Your Raincoat Always Crying? to the stricken intimacy of Sweetest Love Song or the clear-eyed and full-voiced protest of The American War. White doesn't apologise for the wide vein of political song that runs through the record but she does recognize how hard she worked to make the songs a success: "I spent a lot of time trying to get them right lyrically; you're walking a thin line with political songs, I tried to make them emotional and real and moving without being strident. There's some humour in them too, that helps." Politics, humour, love, despair and good tunes; Simone White has it all.