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Post by the Scribe on Apr 9, 2020 8:33:44 GMT
Linda and J.D. Souther were a couple. I understand he also dated Stevie Nicks or so I've heard.. I wonder how Linda felt about that? Wait it also says Stevie and Jerry Brown dated? lol
JD Souther: A Legendary Journey
americansongwriter.com/jd-souther-a-legendary-journey/
Videos by American Songwriter
He’s the only guy in history who could have been an Eagle but didn’t want to. As he said at the time, “The Eagles will be just fine without me.”
David Geffen, who signed the band, disagreed. “But you’re still going to write with them, right?” he asked. “Of course,” JD Souther answered, shaping the dream life— he could write hits with the Eagles but didn’t have to go out on tour. Instead, he could stay home and write songs for himself and with his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt.
“Tough choice,” he said dryly.
Souther went on to become one of the great pop collaborators of all time. With Don Henley and Glenn Frey, he wrote many of the Eagles’ biggest hits (including “Best of My Love,” “Heartache Tonight,” and “New Kid in Town;” also “How Long,” which he wrote by himself). Souther also wrote many songs that Linda Ronstadt recorded, including great duets such as “Hearts Against the Wind.” With his pal James Taylor, he co-wrote and dueted on their beautiful hit, “Her Town Too.” Other great singers, such as Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, recorded his songs.
He also wrote classics for himself, including his biggest and own iconic standard, “Only The Lonely.” But he contained multitudes then, as he still does, unknown to many of his fans. His genius for writing songs was not restricted to country-rock. Though raised mostly in Amarillo, Texas, it was never country music that lit his fire. Nor was it rock, folk, or blues. It was jazz. Although he accidentally became one of the world’s most successful and beloved songwriters, his dream was to play drums behind a killer jazz band.
more americansongwriter.com/jd-souther-a-legendary-journey/ |
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 27, 2021 16:41:49 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 6, 2022 8:43:47 GMT
JD Souther reflects, from growing up on jazz to hearing Linda Ronstadt sing his 'Faithless Love'
www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/06/01/jd-souther-gives-a-preview-of-the-stories-he-could-tell-on-tour/1275021001/
Ed Masley
The Republic | azcentral.com
JD Souther performs to a packed house at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix on July 10, 2015.
JD Souther never really knows what stories might come spilling out in the course of a solo performance.
The man has lived his share of worthy anecdotes since his arrival in Los Angeles, where he and future Eagle Glenn Frey became roommates and collaborators in the short-lived folk-rock duo Longbranch Pennywhistle. That was shortly before Jackson Browne had him over to David Geffen's house for an audition, which he nailed, resulting in two classic albums on Asylum, 1972's "John David Souther" and 1976's "Black Rose."
He could talk about the Eagles hits he co-wrote – from "Best of My Love" to "New Kid in Town" and "Heartache Tonight" – or wax nostalgic the work he did with former girlfriend Linda Ronstadt, not the least of which was writing "Faithless Love."
"If I talk about 'The Sad Cafe,' geez, I could do a half an hour," Souther says.
"I’m writing a short story about it. If I talk about 'Heartache Tonight,' there are four writers involved. That came together in a really interesting way, some of it over the phone. There’s another song people always request that I literally wrote in the time it takes to sing it. It’s never happened to me before, just that one particular time. That sort of prompts a story. And then, that sometimes leads into another song and that involves a trip I took to Cuba. I’ve been to Cuba twice, but a particular trip I took to Cuba that had a lot of very revealing moments, a lot of insights into just the way people live in other places and how the lives of the people are reflected in the music they make."
How he crafts a concert
There's a certain freedom that comes with a solo performance that allows for any number of spontaneous decisions. But as Souther says, it also makes him work a little harder.
"I don’t have the fantastic Chris Walters on piano to just let him take these gorgeous, Gershwinesque solos," Souther says. "It’s really all on me. And since I’m not that kind of virtuoso player, I have to do the storytelling as one of the featured things. I can’t just be like a guy in a jazz trio and let everybody solo an equal amount of time. That’s not what people are paying to see, first of all. But second of all, I can’t construct a set that way based on my own abilities on guitar and piano. So it has to become, by definition, a storytelling experience.
2015 REVIEW:JD Souther brings emotion in concert
www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/07/11/jd-souther-concert-review-phoenix-musical-instrument-museum/30013635/
He does his best to come up with a show that holds together musically while touching on a decent number of the songs that, as he sees it, "obviously people want to hear most when they buy the tickets."
At a recent performance in Bay Shore, New York, for example, he opened with "New Kid in Town" and made his way through several other Eagles songs and "Faithless Love" while dusting off three songs from "John David Souther" and his most successful solo hit, "You're Only Lonely," a bittersweet ballad that sounds like it was written with Roy Orbison in mind.
"I can’t play every song that everyone wants to hear," Souther says. "It would be a four-hour set. And we want to cover a little new ground, too, and maybe play a couple of songs a bit differently than they’ve heard them before."
Inspired by Hal Holbrook
He tries to treat it like an evening at the theater with a perhaps unlikely source of inspiration.
“The best evening I ever spent in the theater was with Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain show," he says.
"It’s a one-man show. He’s been doing it for 30 years. I’ve seen it maybe eight, nine times. And the way he’s able to connect with 1,000 people while just sort of slowly pacing back and forth onstage and telling stories, it sort of lit my way into the way I do what I do musically. It may not make any sense, but it’s an important part of my life. I’ve met him a few times. We used to eat in the same restaurant in L.A. and I’ve talked to him about it a couple times. The degree of commitment he brings to this probably two and a half hours is such that people don’t talk, they don’t leave. And you’re always interested.”
Talking about talking on stage
It hasn't always been this way, Souther drawing the audience deeper into his performance with accompanying anecdotes.
“There were years on the road where I didn’t talk at all between songs, just because I didn’t want to,” Souther says. “Some of it was stubbornness. Some of it was just wanting to keep everything that goes from the bandstand out to the audience part of the whole group. Even as recently as two years ago, when I just had the trio out, it’s a little traveling show. So even though I would talk a little bit in those sets, I like to let the music do the talking.”
JD Souther performs during Skyville Live, Wednesday, July 13, 2016, in Nashville, Tenn.
The first time he toured with the trio, he says, they spent about two years where they didn't even get an introduction.
"We just walked on stage, sort of mulled around for a minute and started playing," Souther says. "I had seen Miles Davis do that and I thought it was so cool. It is so cool. And boy, you've really got to be good then. You've got to absolutely deliver the goods."
When he toured with rock and roll bands in the '70s and early '80s, it depended on his mood.
"Some nights," he says, "I felt a little chatty. Some nights I just walked on and started playing. We did a set in France one night where I did it with my back completely to the audience.”
Souther laughs, then cautions, “I’m not recommending that anyone do that. But it was a peculiar circumstance in front of an audience that clearly was not interested in me. I was opening for someone they wanted to see. And I had this great little rockabilly band from Buffalo, New York. They had worked so hard to prep for this European tour and the second date was just a disaster because no one was interested in seeing us on stage. So I turned my back to the audience and played to the band."
They were actually great that night, as it turns out. This he knows because he asked someone to translate the following morning's review in the paper.
"The journalist was seated in such a place that he didn’t necessarily notice all the people in front that were kind of disinterested and waiting for the headliner," Souther recalls. "So he couldn’t figure out why we would play this great set and not look at the audience.”
The roots of 'Tenderness'
Souther's latest release, 2015's "Tenderness," found the singer exploring his earlier source of inspiration – the Great American Songbook.
JD Souther turned to his former flame, Linda Ronstadt, for approval of his latest CD, "Tenderness."
"The ‘Tenderness’ record probably reflects more the music I heard when I was small,” he says.
“The soundtrack in my household was classical and opera and Sinatra. And Sinatra. And Sinatra. Which means a lot of Gershwin, a lot of Cole Porter, a lot of Harold Arlen, a lot of Johnny Mercer, just the classic American songwriters. And the fact that that’s most of the music that I heard before I got interested in rock and roll, I think it leaves a real impression. Linda Ronstadt and I have talked about this a lot. She is a great believer in the thought that your greatest musical impressions are formed when you’re a small child.”
In working on "Tenderness," Souther says, "I just sort of unchained that little beast and it said, 'Oh yeah, this is the first music you ever heard; listen to this.' One of my friends always calls it my Gershwin album."
"I don't think there was ever a point where I intended to do anything else. There was no plan B.
JD Souther on becoming a musician
Asked if those jazz vocal albums he heard as a child are what made him decide to become a musician, Souther says, "I don't think there was ever a point where I intended to do anything else. There was no plan B. I started beating on things as a drummer when I was a little bitty kid. I started taking violin lessons in the fourth grade. I was in orchestra for a couple years."
That was risky, he says, "because I had to carry my violin to football practice every Wednesday. And Texas football players in the fourth and fifth grade were not necessarily respectful of a scrawny kid with a violin. So I never got great at football. I was just too skinny. But I got better at fighting and a little bit better at violin."
From there, he learned to play the clarinet, then tenor sax and back to drums.
"And then nothing else mattered," he says. "I'm just a natural born drummer."
'Faithless Love'
Given his lifelong affection for jazz, it may seem odd that Souther found himself so deeply immersed in the heart of the '70s country-rock community.
"Part of it was just environmental," Souther says. "Everybody around us was playing acoustic guitar and trying to write songs. So I went home to Texas and got an acoustic guitar from my dad's music store, the Texas Musical Instrument Co. I got a Gibson Dove, and I went back to California and started plunking around on it. And it turned out I guess I had a knack for that too."
JD Souther (left) performs with Jackson Browne on Sept. 17, 2014.
His first attempts at writing songs, he says, "were reflective of the environment around me and certainly the result of, to some degree, my limitations. Looking back, I kind of like that. I think the first solo album, I kind of agree with Bob Lefsetz. He once said it sounded like a great demo, like it wasn't quite complete. But there's a great charm in it. Maybe I'll go back in that direction on the next album. I don't know."
He's still a student, Souther, of the songwriting process and tradition. But he does recall the point at which it started feeling like he must be doing something right.
"It was after I heard Linda Ronstadt's version of 'Faithless Love,'" he says. "And then other people started recording it. And people started telling me about it. Smokey Robinson told me once that he thought it was perfect. Peter Asher told me he thought it was the best bridge he'd ever heard. Dorothy Fields, who was a great lyricist from the '40s and '50s who wrote 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' and 'The Way You Look Tonight,' told me she thought it was the perfect song. That was a moment, I have to say."
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @edmasley.
Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.
JD Souther
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 7, and Saturday, June 8.
Where: Musical Instrument Museum, 4725 E. Mayo Blvd., Phoenix.
Admission: $48.50-$53.50.
Details: 480-478-6000, themim.org.
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Post by the Scribe on Jan 21, 2022 1:49:42 GMT
JD Souther talks You're Only Lonely
113,742 viewsAug 3, 2016
Decades TV Network
29.9K subscribers
"My friends, Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey and Don Henley and eventually Warren Zevon, were all part of a group that really loved each other's music. As different as we all were from each other, I think we all had a good partnership." J.D. Souther talks about beginning his career in music and establishing himself as a well-known songwriter.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 7, 2022 10:31:56 GMT
Linda Ronstadt & JD Souther - 'Faithless Love' 12/20/74
111 views Sep 15, 2022
'In Concert' simulcast on December 20, 1974 from WRIF-FM Detroit. I don't think I've seen video of this performance on You Tube before.
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 4, 2022 2:25:49 GMT
 yearbook photo |
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