Strange things appear in Jim White’s songs. There are revelations
and tall tales, absurdities and tragedies, Southern roots and
existential disorientation. A man sits on a railroad track howling at
the moon. Jesus returns driving a motor home, alongside Buddha on
a motorcycle and Muhammad in a train. The singer finds himself
“handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi, where things is always better than they seem.”
Mr. White grew up in Pensacola, Fla., soaking up the Pentecostal preaching that many of his songs still react against. He recently made a documentary for the BBC, “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” about the rural South, and he now lives in Georgia. The music on his new album, “Transnormal Skiperoo” (Luaka Bop), leans mostly toward folksy country.
At Joe’s Pub on Tuesday he also played older songs that touched on blues-rock and reggae. His band had an easygoing twang, but the music wasn’t old-fashioned. A drum machine supplied the beat, and every so often Mr. White made a repeating loop of his
voice for added texture.
While his tunes are down-home, his words are restless and uncertain. He opened his set with “Alabama Chrome,” with a melody like an old banjo tune and lyrics about how “the contradictions are larger than any language can explain.”
Onstage Mr. White is entirely his own combination of philosopher and raconteur, country boy and intellectual. He told stories about befriending a homeless man whose name was Help, and trying to find the “elegant solution” for the lyrics of a song he kept rewriting. “I’ve written some of the best songs ever,” he deadpanned. “And they’ve been largely ignored. That gives me some sense of satisfaction that I’m an artist.” While his patter was full of genial irony, his songs don’t settle for jokes. They’re about life as an inveterate misfit and outsider, sometimes wry, as in “Turquoise House,” but more often pensive, as in “Jailbird.” It’s a ballad with a streak of Neil Young introspection, wishing he could “disappear, and leave myself behind.”
He introduced the last song of the set, “Still Waters” (from his 1997 debut album), as something he wrote “to create solace, because I felt like I was losing my mind.” Amid quiet fingerpicking he sang about a ghost, a shipwreck, a suicide and how “I just throw myself into the arms of that which would betray me.” The solace, perhaps, was that he
had made a song out of it.