A master of change
A new album by James Jackson Toth adds up to a wholesale reinvention
Every so often, James Jackson Toth leaves something behind. The New York-born, Tennessee-based singer-songwriter still cringes at the memory of waking up groggy in a hotel room a few years ago and forgetting to retrieve a bag of LPs he had bought while on tour. Toth confesses he left his cellphone in the van by mistake, far away from his current location: walking along Bourbon Street in pursuit of another record store.
"You can replace a cellphone, but never put a bag of records in a hotel room drawer," Toth warns ruefully. "But that was years ago. I've made my peace with it."
Something else Toth has left behind - this time intentionally - is the name, sound, and persona he adopted and cultivated as Wooden Wand, a sometimes solo, sometimes band project under whose moniker Toth issued a rash of both homemade and officially released albums. Wooden Wand's ramshackle approach had absolutely nothing to do with the darkly burnished roots-flavored pop-rock that informs Toth's recently released solo album, "Waiting in Vain."
Rather, those outings combined a hodgepodge of elements: eccentric folk music, psychedelic meanderings, and cracked campfire ditties that felt as scattershot as the two dozen or so singles, EPs, and full-lengths that flooded his fans and followers. With 2007's "James & the Quiet," which he released on Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label, Toth announced he was retiring the Wooden Wand name for good.
At the time, Toth, who headlines T.T. the Bear's on Wednesday, said he wanted to make a very "un-weird record" that acknowledged the Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings albums he had immersed himself in while on the road. If "James & the Quiet" strongly hinted at Toth's newfound direction of concise, classically structured songcraft, "Waiting in Vain" fully embraces it.
"I just think we just hit a wall or a ceiling or however you wanna say it," says Toth on a cellphone borrowed from his bass player, Shayde Sartin. "I'm just really restless and don't ever want to repeat myself. I wanted to make records that were more reverential to the lineage of rock 'n' roll because that's the music we listen to the most."
Indeed, when we speak, Toth sounds genuinely excited to have run into Jeff Keith, the lead singer for the '80s hard rock outfit Tesla. "We grew up listening to Tesla, and I loved that stuff when I was a kid," he says. "I come from a metal family. I have a cousin who was in Type O Negative, so it was kind of in my DNA."
Although no one's ever going to confuse Toth's solo venture with a power ballad from the Tesla catalog, compared to the music he made as Wooden Wand, "Waiting in Vain" marks a quantum leap forward in terms of an album that aims to reach listeners beyond the freak-folk fringe. The Fender Rhodes-accented opener, "Nothing Hides," for instance, gently glows as it draws you in, like a lamplit bar beckoning in the rain.
Elsewhere, touches of vibraphone, Wurlitzer organ, and muted electric guitar create a consistently warm ambience that grows both brighter (the Tom Petty- esque "Becoming Faust"), sharper (the Bob Dylan-inspired "Beulah the Good") or dimmer (the Joe Henry-channeling "Midnight Watchman"). Throughout, Toth wraps his tales of trouble, bourbon, and fallible souls in the kind of languid drawl that suggests he's sampled all three.
"I think a lot of it is the old literary standby of dark and light, and good and evil," Toth says of his allegorical narratives. "I like to paint in broad strokes so that people can apply their own experiences to it. It is a concept record thematically in that all the songs deal with temptation and redemption."
While ostensibly a solo album, nearly a dozen musicians contributed to "Waiting in Vain" - among them his wife, Jexie Lynn Toth, on vocals; guitarists Nels Cline (Wilco) and John Dietrich (Deerhoof); drummer Otto Hauser (Devendra Banhart/Vetiver); and onetime Nirvana and Soundgarden producer Steve Fisk, who played keyboards, piano, and organ and also produced the album.
Listening to "Waiting in Vain," you get the sense that the album is less a new artistic direction for the onetime Wooden Wand frontman than a full-blown reinvention.
"I think every record, ideally, is a reinvention," Toth says. "Neil Young is the obvious example, constantly doing whatever he wanted to do and following his muse wherever it led him. That's what I'm going to do, too. My next record won't sound anything like 'Waiting in Vain.' "
The same might be said about his previous project. "I think, if nothing else, it was idiosyncratic and distinctive," says Toth. "If you put on a Wooden Wand record, I don't think you'd confuse it with anything else. But I don't go back and listen. There's not enough hours in the day, and too many great records to hear." 