Searching For The Wrong Eyed Jesus

Oh wow, wow, wow ...

Back in the day when I did a lot of music related writing I had the chance to do a lengthy phone interview with former model turned cabbie turned alt-country singer songwriter Jim White and to this day that conversation stands as one of the very best I have ever had. Not only does White create some compellingly odd music but he's thoughtful, very funny and a completely natural story teller - a combination that makes for some good times.

White put his story telling abilities to good use by including a lengthy short story, one that he insists is based on true events, in the CD booklet of his first release, The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong Eyed Jesus. That story was so compelling that British film maker Andrew Douglas used it as a launching point for his new film exploring the American deep south.

I can think of much, much worse ways to spend a couple hours that driving around in a car with Jim White, listening to him tell stories about southern religion, but it gets better. The film's website includes one fantastic trailer and the film's soundtrack is just stunning. Jim White - of course - along with Cat Power, David Edwards of 16 Horsepower, The Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd ... this is just utterly fantastic stuff ...

The film is apparently getting some limited theatrical dates in the US now and HVE will be handling a DVD release in early 2006. Go ahead and put me down for one now ...

The site I did the interview for has since disappeared, but I've kept it tucked away ever since, so here it is for those who may be interested ...

TB: I want to talk to you some about the Christian themes on your record.

JW: You know, it's funny. The whole time I've been doing this I've never had anybody talk about issues relating to Christianity. I mean, people talked about them but nobody came up in audiences and asked me about it, and for the last six or seven shows, every show there's two or three people coming up and saying, "I'm a fundamentalist Christian and I'm really interested in these songs and what's your stance, etc. etc." so it's been sort of testing my rhetoric. But I'll tell you, I'm happy whenever a fundamentalist Christian stumbles into one of my shows because I think that there's ... I struggled a lot within the confines of the church. I wanted to seek God and I was raised in a Christian household so I pursued the extreme end of seeking God in Christianity, which is fundamentalism, and I certainly felt more and more lost as a result of trying to draw closer and closer to God. I think there are people like me within the fundamentalist church who are trying so hard to be good soldiers and getting kicked in the face a lot. So, subsequently, I think its good for them to hear from somebody who walked away from the fundamentalist experience and is still actively seeking some sort of ... I would call it a Christian path but I don't want to limit it quite that much.

TB: I'm really surprised that's never come up before.

JW: People have written about it in articles, saying, "Oh, he's got a God hang-up." and things like that.

TB: How I twigged into you in the first place was when you played with Son Volt in Toronto ...

JW: That was a good show. They were nice.

TB: ... Now Magazine, one of the entertainment weeklies in Toronto, used you as an example of how Son Volt should have done their show because they didn't like Son Volt very much live at all.

JW: Really?

TB: Yeah, they used you as the good example, them as the bad example of how to do a live show.

JW: How about that. I thought their show was great.

TB: Their big complaint was that everything sounded the same and that Jay Farrar didn't talk to the audience at all.

JW: Yeah, well see he doesn't talk to anybody. I tried to talk to him a couple of times just to say, "Hello." and, "Thanks for having us." and I can see ... People sometimes say that it's hard to talk to me because I have a bit of a faraway disposition, I'm distant, and I can see how they must feel when I try to talk to him because there was no locating him when you were there with him.

TB: The way NOW described your stuff was to say that you had everybody locked in with your 'grotesque tales of faith.' That's how they summed you up.

JW: (laughs) That's kind of interesting, that's a good oxymoron. Grotesque tales of faith. In the newspaper I read the police blotter every day, the felonies and arrests in Pensacola are just lovely because of the names. The other day a guy ran into a bridge and that bridge has been there for fifty years and how someone can run into an object that's been there for that long I just don't know, but he was from Brilliant, Alabama. It seemed to me like that was a bit of an oxymoron. I think the guy from NOW Magazine, he was sick that night, but he's got a good sense of whimsy ...

There are musicians in the world and there are writers and I think part of the reason that the album has been embraced so much by journalists is that I'm a writer more than I am a musician. So when I get up there and talk to people, I'm talking more like a writer and not like a guy with a groove in his soul.

TB: Let's talk about the story in the CD book.

JW: Okay.

TB: How much of that is meant to be taken seriously and how much is satire? Is it truth?

JW: Well, there's always two answers to this question. This is an amalgam of two incidents. Principally it's one thing that happened to me, but there's a second thing melded into the middle to create hyper-realism, or surrealism if you want. So, it in fact happened to me. However, the whole point of the story is ... I'll tell you this. I corrected my understanding of the story. I don't sit down and think "I'm gonna write this story about this thing." The words start coming out and then I figure out what they mean. Kind journalists like you ask questions that nudge me closer and closer towards what I know deep inside of myself so it's a little discovery process. And what I discovered ... I remember when I wrote the last line, "Long live wrong eyed Jesus! Do you know what I mean when I say that?" I immediately had to go back to the front and write, "A True Story." I knew that it was two true stories, but I felt this incredible compulsion to do it, and I thought about it and didn't know why I did it. I realized well after the fact, twenty interviews in, that the reason I did it was because just as there is no way to approximate the eyes of Jesus there is no way to say, "I am telling you the truth." So when I say it's a true story, that's the satire. It's a wink. But at the same time it's a paradox because it is a true story. But, as I say, the whole point is that as soon as I say that I know truth I know that I am no where near the vicinity of it. And that's the danger of all religious dogma. As soon as someone says, "I know God." then you can bet that God is more absent from them than from anybody on earth.

I played this show the other night here in Pensacola and these Christian kids came up to me afterward and they were trying to convince me to come to their church. They were really funny, they were real late twentieth century media products, and they said, "But Jim, the Lord is so there, at that church." and I said, "God dammit, the Lord is here! I'm gonna kick my van, that's the Lord! I'm gonna spit on the sidewalk, that's the Lord! The Lord is everywhere! Don't tell me the Lord is more in one place than in any other, that's the most absurd concept I've ever heard!" You ever see the film 'Brother Sun, Sister Moon'?

TB: No I haven't, but I've heard a lot about it.

JW: Franco Zefferelli ... it's almost homoerotic, it's almost a homoerotic representation of the saint ...

TB: Francis of Assisi, right?

JW: Yeah. The positive side of it is presenting this Francis of Assisi thought, this paradigm that Francis of Assisi said, which is that ... he embraced a larger form of pantheism than most Christians would admit to. I'm certainly in that line of thought. I think that you go out into the world and you seek God in the unlikely places because that's ... according to my theory as soon as you seek God, He hides. So if you back your way into an unlikely place, where you'd least expect God to be, maybe you'll feel a little tap on your shoulder and you'll have a fine little revelation.

TB: So you'd describe yourself as a pantheist?

JW: As soon as I do, I'm not. (laughs)

TB: Well, what is your own religious history?

JW: Well, let's see. I was pope for a while and then they kicked me out because my hair was not red enough ... No. I grew up in a ... my mother is a very Presbyterian, romantic religious person, you know? Not really organized in any way toward a fervent walk as the Southern Pentecostals would say. I was brought here to the South when I was a kid. I was an outsider and I immediately started running around with all these kids from the Pentecostal church and the Baptist church. I felt them to be much more alive and vital than my parents. My father was a college educated agnostic and my mother was a misty eyed Presbyterian and I felt much more at home with these people who had this crazy religious experience every week on Wednesday night and Sunday, when they'd speak in tongues. It just seemed like there was something right about it. It seemed like there was a beautiful relationship between what was pent up in them and how it came out. They had an externalization of their feelings about God and it was volcanic. I had all of these intense, tangled pent up feelings inside of me which I wanted to be volcanically removed from my soul. Expunged. And the church seemed like a nice place.

I went back and forth, you know, from the age of about eight until thirteen and then I got heavy into drugs and ran with a bad crowd for a couple years. They all started dying off from drug overdoses and that's when this thing happened, when I was about fifteen, where I was hitchhiking and the guy picked me up and the various events transpired that made me feel like I was on a most wanted list from God.

From that point on, from fifteen to about twenty three, I was a fire breathing Pentecostal. Then I had what they call a crisis of faith as a result of a series of tragedies in my life. They were not the trials of Job, they were a little less conspicuous, and at the end of it I felt like I had to walk off in a direction away from church and churchy people. Church didn't fit anymore. I come back here and I look at my friends and I realize how churchy they are, and everything they do whether it's church or sports or whatever, it's all organized around church and I'm an outsider. I don't fit in in that context.

The people in my Pentecostal church who were smart enough told me that, they said, "You're different from the rest of us and we don't know how to talk to you, we don't know what to say. We're afraid of you in a way." Which is an interesting thing to hear. They couldn't say that I had the devil in me because they could see that I was seeking God as hard as they were, but I was seeking in a way that they didn't fully comprehend. No faulting them. They're good intentioned people in the church. However, the manifestation of their intent sometimes get tangled in the brambles of bad thinking. There's a quote for you.

TB: Was there any particular type of thing in the church that was off-putting?

JW: Well, there's lots of things. In terms of off-putting, the whole concept of sending people to hell bothered me, because if you have questions in your mind you have to ask them. I was informed that asking those questions was a function of the devil.

And my poor girlfriend, her father committed suicide when she was twenty years old or eighteen years old. She went to the funeral and the preacher from their church trapped her in a corner and told her that if she didn't rededicate her life to Christ right then and right there that she was going to go to hell just like her daddy. That's the dark side of the Pentecostal experience.

Once again, there's funny moments when you discover that this realm that you think is so anointed is just as soiled as anything else in the world. I came around the corner one time during a shut-in ... you know what a shut-in is?

TB: I don't, actually.

JW: Well, you lock yourself in a church and you pray incessantly and you tithe and make sacrifices. You might do it for a day or two days, I've heard of it going for up to a month. We did it for a day at a time.

So, we were doing a shut-in and they were saying how they needed money for missions and all this. At a certain break in the proceedings everybody disbanded, drank coffee and talked, and I came around a corner headed to the restroom and there were the two most senior elders of the church talking about the bond issue they were going to buy into with the church's money. They were doing investment banking with the church money and something about that just ... I had just given every penny I had in this great sacrifice for missions and suddenly I saw that this was a business and that they had a front man, the preacher, who did PR for these power brokers behind the scenes, who were the elders and the movers and the shakers. It seemed to sully what was taking place in terms of the positive reaching out for God.

TB: Would you say your belief in God survived your experience with the church?

JW: Oh, it was amplified by leaving the church. This is what I know, this is my ultimate conclusion about God: whenever you say the word God there's the god that you invent, then there is the God that is hidden -- I won't say hides behind -- that is hidden behind that god. The god you invent always looks just like you and that's fine, that's all you can do is invent that god, but at that moment -- when you invent that god -- you have to tell yourself, "This is the god I invent." not, "This is God and there is no other." because the other God hidden behind the one you invent is the true God. Both of them have their place in the world.

Religion takes itself very seriously and says, "This is the true God". Islam, fundamentalist Islam is really bad about that, and it's so sad because within the confines of the Islamic church there's Sufism -- I don't know if you know Sufism at all ...

TB: I know something about it, yeah.

JW: Yeah, that's probably one of the sweetest concepts of God in religion that exists on this planet Earth. They are certainly overwhelmed by the negative thinking fundamentalist Islamics.

I guess the idea that I have about God borders on mysticism. I'm not saying I'm a mystic, I'm just saying I think about issues in mysticism a lot, so if you want to write anything about me and my relationship to God you can say that I'm fascinated by the idea that since we can't know God we have to just be good people. I think the Apostle Paul said that at the end of his life. He said, "Beyond all of these teachings I tell you to love." And that's it. Don't worry about the law, just worry about love. And that's a huge challenge, but it's a better invocation than "Women should wear their hair long and men should not."

You know, there's a scripture in the Bible that says men shouldn't wear their hair long. There's another one in Leviticus that says that we should not eat shellfish. My friend Guy Fisher reads the Bible every day, expressly to find contradictions. He works in the most backward, rural Pentecostal plant out here in Pensecola and whenever they start witnessing to him he says, "Well, do you eat shellfish?" and they say, "What do you mean?" He says, "Do you have oysters or shrimp?". They say, "Yes" and he says, "Well you're as much of a sinner as I am! It says in Leviticus 4 that you can't eat shellfish!" He's a very funny person.

TB: Let's talk about the story a bit. I got your album just after I finished reading Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor ...

JW: (laughs) Well! There was God at work! And not necessarily a friendly God ...

TB: I like Flannery ...

JW: I love her. She certainly describes a God which is not sweet and sappy and sentimental. That God that she talks about is full of right angles that are hard to follow.

TB: What is it about southern writing, I've been reading some William Faulkner recently too, and it seems like there's a certain tone to the writing that comes out of the deep south, that kind of pervades it ...

JW: I got a theory about that. You want to hear it?

TB: Yeah, I do.

JW: From the month of say May until October we're trapped in a crucible of intense heat and humidity, and we are a northern people. If you look at us our skin is fair and we're from northern Europe originally. So, we're displaced and put in this kind of a climate. It's just like if you take a Saint Bernard to a tropical zone, they have a high rate of dementia. That's a scientifically proven fact. So, I think there's a bit of dementia that goes along with being a northern inclined person put into this crucible of the South. I really think that the environment has a tremendous influence on the mind set of the South. There's a weird kind of lunacy down here.

I came back after living in New York for twelve, thirteen years. I moved back a couple of months ago. I wander around and just look and there's no centre. In almost every town I go to there's no centre. And the reason, I think, there's no centre is because you just get crazy because of the heat.

TB: That just feeds into all areas of life?

JW: Sure. If you go to California you see the inverse because the weather's so nice every single day. It's always the same. The people are very plain, even though California's a haven for kooks and radicals, etceteras etceteras. The people are, in fact, pretty plain. The people are quite exotic here. Everywhere I go there's a character, a funny character, and the reason they're funny is because the South is ... you have your exterior and your interior crucible and in the interplay between the two a high percentage of people develop eccentric personalities.

TB: I don't know why this just came to mind, but have you seen the Apostle?

JW: I haven't and I want to.

TB: It's very good. I remember reading the introduction to the script for that one day in a bookstore and Robert Duvall was talking about how that form of holiness movement, high Pentecostal preaching was what he considered to be the only truly American art form.

JW: (laughs) It's something.

TB: Do you think that's a product of the environment there in the South?

JW: Well, I'll tell you something. Those preachers who can defy the elements and simply walk out on the hottest summer day in their white shirt with their neck tie on and preach the gospel in the sun sitting on a flatbed, they have a certain dynamic fervency which is enviable among artists, you know? They have a conviction in what they are doing that transcends most artist's inspiration. I think it's a little bit of a cross reference. It's the same intensity with a different application.

I think most artists ... I remember I was on a song writing panel in New York at CMJ last year and this guy asked, "Well, how do you get the discipline to sit down and write a song? Because I sit down and write my music but pretty soon I want to go out for a walk and pretty soon I want to go do this .." because I'd just said that if I'm working on a song I'll work for eighteen hours straight on one verse. And then the next day I'll work for eighteen hours, I'm doing it right now with a song, I'll sit with one sentence and for eighteen hours I'll just wear it out. So he asked me that and I just looked at him and said, "You know, if you have to ask the question I don't know that you're necessarily chosen to walk that way." You have to find out who you are and then be that person. To be a fire breathing artist or a fire breathing Christian you have to have the fire in you, you can't import it from K Mart or anything. You've got to have that instilled in you already. I think that the function of locating it and honing it is an ancillary issue. Either it's there or it's not there. You can look in people's eyes and tell if it's there, and I'll tell you something, I looked in his eyes and it wasn't. When I looked in that guy from Son Volt's eyes, Jay Farrar, it was there. It was very intensely there. Most of the people that I've met along the way who are successful, I worked in the film industry too, have that same crazy look in their eye. In the South, like I say, there's a lot less opportunity for it to end up being where it goes because of the inherent madness of the South. Northern climates are more conducive to A to B causality. In the South somewhere between A and B you just sort of forget what you're doing because you're so hot.

TB: I want to quote a couple of phrases from the story at you and get your general thoughts on them. Just a few things that struck me as I was reading it though last time. There's one spot where you're talking about "The utterances of helplessness generally known as prayer." What would you say prayer is to you, how does it function?

JW: My friend Sophie, who's one of the smartest people I know, she said, "Of course I pray. When I need a taxi, I pray. When my bills are late, I pray. When I need this, I pray. Other than that, I have no prayers." I think that, this goes along with the whole concept of saying that you know God, as soon as you say, "I am praying to God", what you're praying to is yourself. When you're praying to yourself, that to me is a statement of helplessness. And it's fine to acknowledge that, it's fine to say, "Look at me, I'm helpless." because in sort of a circular way, as soon as you say you're helpless that allows God to help you. Do you see? So when I say I'm closing my eyes and praying to God, I'm actually praying to myself, and I know I'm praying to myself and that there is no God who's going to hear and intervene ... Like Tolstoy said, "God hears our prayers and remains silent." As soon as I know that, as soon as I say, "What I'm doing has no reason." then I am acting on faith. Do you know what I mean? There is belief and there is faith and faith comes not from hearing but from the Word of God, and not the Word of God as in the Bible, but the Word of God like the Word which is unutterable. As soon as I say that I don't know, that's when the opportunity for knowing takes place.

TB: Alright. Another of the interesting phrases on here, "The peculiar economies of the spirit world."

JW: That's funny, because I just wrote something about the economy of the spirit world yesterday. I hadn't thought about that. I don't read that story. I write them and I forget about them.

TB: Well, what would you say is 'peculiar' about the economy of the spirit world?

JW: Well, you know, around the idea of prayer, it's like you walk in with your pocket full of one dollar prayer bills and you see the item on the shelf which you need, which you think is two hundred prayer dollars. You walk up to the counter with the two hundred prayer dollars and one day the guy says, "You don't have enough." and another day the cashier says, "You've given me one hundred and ninety nine too many." The economy of the prayer world is irrational. The economy of the spirit world is irrational, and that's good. We think the more we can qualify and quantify things, the more power it has.

TB: Why do you think that is?

JW: Because as soon as we can peg it between two points on the horizon it becomes a representation of the finite rather than the infinite and there is no opportunity for the larger force outside of you to sneak in and alter your perspective, because it's all part of your perspective if you can say, "This exists between here and there."

TB: Okay, last one of these, from the very end of the story. You say, "There is but one Jesus and I must defend the small comfort I take in knowing that his eyes will be forever wrong. Long live wrong eyed Jesus."

JW: That might just be some writing hyperbole.

TB: Are you familiar with Eastern iconography at all?

JW: No.

TB: Well, you use the 'wrong eyed' image over and over again, and it reminds me of the way eastern icons of Christ are often painted. They often intentionally do the eyes wrong.

JW: Is that true?

TB: Yes, it is.

JW: Oh, how beautiful.

TB: There's one eye, I'm not sure whether it's the right or the left, that is looking directly out of the painting back at you and there's one eye that is looking slightly up.

JW: Oh, lovely.

TB: It's supposed to be looking into the physical world and also into infinity at the same time.

JW: It's very comforting to find this out. You think that you're alone wandering through the wilderness, barking like a dog, and suddenly you find that you're speaking a language that you didn't know. That's very comforting. Thank you for telling me that.

I don't know anybody in Eastern Orthodoxy. When you say that, it's the guys dressed in the black robes, right?

TB: Yes. Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox.

JW: Yeah, I've seen them wandering around New York at times, when I was living there. The whole concept of wearing a garb that separates you and says anything other than, "I'm a freak." is worrisome to me. I saw them in the roads and thought ... Priests and preachers I don't have much use for anymore. I told my friend Wendell that the other day, he's a fundamentalist Christian, and he said, "They're all of the devil, all of them preachers. I had to go to a Pat Robertson crusade to get saved because I couldn't go to a church."

TB: So what was the significance of the eyes of Christ for you?

JW: Oh, well ...

TB: Why can't they be right?

JW: Why can't they be right? 'Cause, you know, they say the eyes are the portal of the soul and when you try to represent the soul of Jesus, how can you do that? You can't. I mean, the whole idea is that you can bodily represent him but if you try to represent his spirit, that's putting a limitation on what is supposed to be a limitless entity.

TB: Do you believe Jesus was divine? Do you still subscribe to that?

JW: I don't worry much about it. I really don't. I don't worry much about it. And that's all I can say.

TB: I've got a couple things, getting away from the record a bit. Your bio says that you went from being a pro surfer to a model in Milan ...

JW: That was my crisis of faith, pro surfing to model in Milan. I had a crisis of faith in there and figured I had to disrupt everything.

TB: And then you were a cabbie in New York and then into music.

JW: I was actually almost homeless in New York. I was a dishwasher for about a year and I had some very hard times. I was out of work for about three months when I first got there, just couldn't find a job. It was just loonie, I was out of my mind. I'd had my hand caught in an electric saw right before I left Pensecola, so I only had one working hand, and a one armed man in New York is at a severe disadvantage when looking for work. All that stuff is pretty accurate. It's a thumbnail sketch of a life of misdirection.

TB: How did you end up in music?

JW: I broke my leg twice when I was eighteen, when I was top surfer on the Gulf of Mexico. I was two weeks from going to the U.S. surfing championships and there I am lying on the ground with my leg all crumpled and twisted and looking like it was never going to work again. So, I thought, "Well, I've got six months here, I've got to be able to do something." Someone had left a guitar at my house, so because I was crippled and couldn't leave I just sat around and played guitar all day. A guy came over and taught me the first four chords to Stairway to Heaven, which is appropriate, and from there it's all just crazy extrapolation. Whenever I play with musicians they just ... It's funny. Medium level musicians always tell me that I'm doing everything wrong, but really good musicians say I'm doing everything 'interestingly' or 'differently'. When I got signed I thought, "I've got to put a band together so I can perform". I contacted all these mid level musicians who were pretty good, and they all said the same thing to me after a certain amount of time. It was exemplified in this one statement that the guitar player from PM Dawn told me. He said, "I've been playing music for twenty years and I've never said this to anybody, but it's painful playing with you. It's just painful. I don't know what you're doing." And yet, when I went to the next stage I got k.d. lang's bass player from Toronto, David Pilch, I got him through Victoria Williams who was kind enough to suggest him. He listened to what I was doing and he said, "You're playing all the bass lines already! What am I supposed to do?" And I said, "Well, you know I heard you've got a background in jazz music, can you figure out some sort of jazz thing?" and he went, "Oh, great!" and he was really excited. Then he started listening as an improvisational jazz musician and he had all of these beautiful ideas and he was just ecstatic with what he could do and the opportunity to be free. You get to a certain level where everybody tells you it's wrong, and then you get to a level after that where people understand that wrong is just different. I think that finding that out is very difficult, because you can get to the next level and be told that wrong is still wrong.

TB: How did you end up working with Joe Henry and Victoria Williams? Those are two favorites of mine.

JW: Oh, well. They're both the sweetest people on earth. If they had a competition, they'd be the finalists. Joe Henry's wife, who would win the contest, Melanie Ciccone, a tape that I made for a friend of mine ... I was real, real, real sick. I had made a movie and fell deathly ill with mysterious infections and was bed ridden for two months, pretty much. I couldn't walk and laying in bed I started writing songs again just to pass the time. It seems like every time I have a music surge it's the result of some medical tragedy in my life. This friend of mine came to visit me from California because he heard that I might be dying because I was that sick. When he came up to the house to see me he heard the music coming through the window. He knew that I was a musician and that I never played in front of anybody, ever. If someone asked me to play a song, I'd say no because I was really shy, I'd just freeze up. So he listened through the window while I played three or four songs. Then he came into the room and hugged me and told me that he wanted me to do two things. He wanted me to get better first and then record those songs for him so that he could listen to them in his car in California. I got better a couple of months later, well I got well enough so that I could walk it was fully two years before I completely recovered, and I made a tape for him. I sent him the tape and he played it for his girlfriend and they sort of made it the music that they listened to while they were in the car. She was with Melanie one day and she said, "I want you to listen to this." and Melanie said, "This is really good, does he have a record deal?" They called me on the phone and said, "This girl who's in the music industry heard your tape and she wants to help you get a record deal." And I thought it was a practical joke. I truly did. I talked to her, but I thought she was just a nut who was claiming to have this show biz pedigree. Daniel Lanois' manager, Joe Henry's wife, Madonna's sister, right ... Anyway, she's the one who brought Joe in. Melanie talked to him and said, "It's going to be really helpful to him if you play on the record because people will recognize your name and be interested." So he came in even though he was on tour at the time. He stopped by the studio for about three hours. We found out that we share a religious relationship to a particular movie called Vernon, Florida. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but go and rent it immediately and study it six times before you make a conclusion about it. The first time you watch it, you'll say it's a snide sort of condescending look at some nutty people in Florida. Then, as you watch it more and more you realize that it's a function of great love and a beautiful film. So, he and I discovered that we had this great love for this film, and he played on the album. Victoria came as a result of Sylvia Reed, my manager. Sylvia had organized the first Sweet Relief for Victoria. Sylvia does all sorts of good works and loves marginalized musicians and when she heard my weird little tape, which was of the worst quality, and Sylvia said, "I'd love for Victoria to hear these songs, I think she'd like them." She eventually gave Victoria a tape and Victoria agreed to sing on the album, which was a real double edged blessing. It's a blessing just because you get to meet and spend time with someone as ethereal and otherworldly as her, and at the same time, in terms of industry validation, ever read who hears that Victoria Williams is on the album has a framework in which to decide whether or not they want to get it. It's a kind blessing and contribution. I can't thank her enough. She's a sweet person.