Thomm Jutz Interivew: The Rewards of a Creative Life
Photo by Otis Gibbs
BY JORDAN MAINZER
So far this decade, singer-songwriter Thomm Jutz has found gratification in making music with others, the likes of Tim Stafford, Eric Brace, Tammy Rogers, and Martin Simpson. Earlier this month, he self-released his first solo album in 6 years, the captivating 18-song suite Ring-A-Bellin', though it's only solo by name. Many of its songs are co-writes, and thematically, Jutz explores the very concept of creativity itself, contextualizing his musings in thinkers of the past, the world of Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. Jutz adopts the alchemists' correspondence of the internal and the external--"as above, so below"--in considering the way in which playing music has positively impacted him and allowed him to cope with life's trials and tribulations. Sonically, he started with the bare minimum, adding other instruments and guest players as necessary, indirectly emphasizing their essential nature.
What catalyzed the reflective Ring-A-Bellin', without clouding it, was the death at the age of 52 of Jutz's best friend and collaborator Peter Cooper, who suffered a head injury from a fall. The album's opening track, "Too Many Walls", examines houses as spaces that can carry their own tragedies, peppered with details like "a bedroom for one with a two-car garage" and realizations such as "Life is so simple till it all falls apart." On "Mourning Moon", over a gentle blanket of layered guitars and piano, Jutz sings, "Just takes one bad dream / To make you cold with sweat / One memory / To make you hate your bed." What provides Jutz comfort, however, is songwriting, and Ring-A-Bellin pays tribute to the human tendency to keep on. "Sharpen Your Knife" and "Knocking 'Round Knoxville" sport a soft spot for how the Music Row sausage is made. "Ramblin' Gamblin' Blues" compares Jutz's life road tripping from gig to gig since 19, with that of a riverboat gambler in the late 19th century. Elsewhere, Jutz finds commonalities with the man plowing the fields with a mule, the survivors of Hurricane Helene, and of course, the alchemists themselves. "All they can see is the Sulphur and smoke / Your magnum opus is their dirty joke," Jutz sings, fully knowing that time is the ultimate barometer of brilliance.
The song that centers Ring-A-Bellin' and gives the album its title is "Rag and Bone", where Jutz sings from the point of view of a scrap metal collector. Jeff Taylor's solemn accordion gives way to gorgeous fingerpicked guitar; "Rag and bone / Hear me yellin' / Past the homes / Ring-a-bellin'," Jutz sings. The titular inversion of phrase harks back to when Jutz, Peter's brother Chris, and Jutz's manager Lindsay Hayes were in the hospital after Peter fell, and invented words to pass the time. Far from an absurdist exercise, it was another spark of creativity. Jutz and his wife regularly play word games, something he also encourages his songwriting students at Belmont University to do. "Be playful with language," he told me over the phone last month. "Come up with words. Make your own stuff. Write goofy haikus or tankas...It worked so well for people like John Hartford and Tom T. Hall, and it certainly didn't take away anything from the depth of their writing." Mining approaches and strategies from the past can, ironically, help you produce something new.
Below, read my conversation with Jutz, edited for length and clarity.
Ring-A-Bellin' cover art
Since I Left You: You hadn't made a solo record in a while. In order for making a solo album to be worth it, did you want to make something that was all-encompassing in terms of your life and process as a songwriter? Ring-A-Bellin' seems like the album you've been leading up to for your entire career.
Thomm Jutz: It feels like that to me, too, to be honest. I made my last solo album in 2020, and since then, I've made a [few] collaborative projects, with my friends Tim Stafford, Tammy Rogers, and Martin Simpson. A lot happened since then. My best friend, collaborator, and co-writer Peter Cooper passed away in 2022, and that set a lot of things in motions, in a sense. Some songs are about that, but all of these 18 songs are kind of about the development of my artistic life--hopefully not in a claustrophobic, autobiographical way, but in an archetypal way of overarching themes that relate to the life of a creative person. [It's] not even limited to a songwriter. Of course, [there are] biographical elements in this, but it's not necessarily intended to be a record about my history, although it's in there. It's about how to live a creative life and the challenges that come with that.
SILY: You contextualize the album in terms of Carl Jung's alchemical stages, itself inspired by ideas that date back millennia. If the alchemists were to see what life was like now, they'd be dumbfounded. Yet, does connecting your thoughts on creativity back to those eras help you universalize what you're writing about?
TJ: I think so. I think the alchemists would be dumfounded by what's possible today, but I think they would be astonished by how similar the processes are. Not much of that has changed in the way that they approached their work and the way we approach our work, if you take it seriously. I think you'd have to be not very good as a songwriter, or very cynical, to not observe a certain parallel development of you as an artist and as a person. That's what happened with the alchemists. They were working on pre-scientific experiments, and in the context of doing so, they realized that their personal development was mirroring what they were doing in their fairly primitive laboratories, hence the [phrase] they used, "As above, so below." They sensed that what was going on externally was also going on internally. I think we can see...not just as artists today...that the confusion of the world is mirrored by the confusion of so many people materially. Of course, that goes the other way around, too.
[Alchemical] theories are very valid and helpful to me. A lot of people seem to think that as soon as you talk about alchemy, there's some kind of black magic involved. That's completely not the case. It's more of a psychological attitude. To [Jung,] it was great validation of some of his early thoughts when he discovered certain alchemical texts. [He thought,] "Oh my god, 600 years ago, these guys were thinking around the same lines I'm thinking." It was a great relief to him that he wasn't going insane, but that he was actually onto something.
SILY: A song like "Bitter Change" has a very existential, "Why do I do this?"-type alignment of the internal and external, that seems to be very consistent with the alchemists.
TJ: For sure! "Bitter Change" is not a song about not getting enough out of what you do. What I get out of what I do creatively is directly related to how much I put in. I am continuously surprised by how incredibly great the rewards of a creative life are, but how much you have to put in to get that. I'm not at all talking about financial rewards right now. That's a completely different story. That's pleasant if that happens, and to some degree, that has happened for me, but I'm much more talking about living a creative life, living a satisfied life, living a life of meaning. It's astonishing how much you have to put in, and it's astonishing how much you get out of it. You can look at that as, "It's astonishing how much you put in for how little you get out," but I tend to view that differently. It's a direct correlation, and it's very satisfactory to me. It's the only life I want to live. Being creative and making music is a way of explaining the world to me and is a way of understanding my place in the world. Whenever I'm creating, when I'm writing, recording, or playing live with other people, that's when I'm happiest. That's why I'm ...very active. I create a lot because it's what I'm supposed to do.
SILY: On "Ramblin' Gamblin' Blues", you're exploring your own ethos, but as you mentioned, through an archetypal fictional story. How do you find that creative process, exploring archetypes or fiction for some deeper truth about yourself?
TJ: I don't think I start a song thinking about whether a song deals with an archetypal setting or image. It's more that you come across these things if you think along these lines, and then you accept them as such and don't tie them so much to your autobiography, but to the bigger image, the energy that connects the two things. I don't think think it makes any difference that this song is about a riverboat gambler in 1898 versus me going on the road at the age of 19 in 1998. The archetypal image is the same. I don't plan to write songs like that, necessarily. They just happen because of the things that I'm interested in.
My life's ambition started by seeing Bobby Bare playing on TV on a German country TV show when I was 11 years old. I knew that's what I wanted to do, and I started playing the guitar that very day. Today, in retrospect, I understand I was seeing something my psyche could latch onto and go, "This is it. This image resonates with me. This is what I'm made to do." With "Ramblin' Gamblin' Blues", Tammy Rogers and I wrote that based on the guitar lick, the instrumental theme. There was no plan to write about something that connects to psychology or an archetype. That just fell out. You connect the dots later. I guess that's what could be considered a synchronistic event. Those things go together in the moment or later, and you realize, "That's what that was." It's another thing that keeps it so interesting.
SILY: The idea of synchrony is consistent with the song that gives the record its title, "Rag and Bone". You're singing about scrap collectors, and you invert a phrase to create a rhyme, which reminds you of when you were in the hospital after Peter fell, and you, Chris, and Lindsay would make up words to pass the time.
TJ: That song has some synergies with the record, because I really do think I'm a scrap collector, or a collector of scrap ideas. I operate in the corners of the music business. I'm not in the mainstream. I'm not trying to rag on the mainstream--I've got nothing for it or against it, it's just not something I'm interested in. The image works for me: the more interesting stuff, the stuff where things grow more along the banks of the river and not in the middle of the river where it's deep and cold.
Photo by Otis Gibbs
SILY: The way you connect the way you make songs to this period of grief, even if it's not something the average listener might pick up on if they're not looking at the liner notes, it makes me think of the album in a way that's not linear. You have this centerpiece, "Rag and Bone". You bookend the album with songs that have to do with death, and the final song "Settle Me Down" shows light at the end of the tunnel, the type that would make you want to press play and start the record again. Do you view the album as a sequence of songs, or something that's more self-reflexive?
TJ: I think this album makes most sense if one listens to it beginning to end and reads the liner notes with it, but I hope the individual songs can stand by themselves. I think they do. I have a very big catalog of songs, because I write a lot. When I sequenced the record and was looking for material from it, these songs jumped out at me because they fit together.
The grief over Peter is a part of this record, but it's not the main theme of this record. It's the theme of a couple of songs or the sub-theme of a set of songs. The opening song and the closing song are, more than anything, about space and place. The first song is about different houses that I've lived in, that friends of mine have lived in, and the last song is about finding place where you're happy, a place within yourself, a place in the physical world. To me, that last song is very hopeful. It's not a song about death. It's a song about being in a place with everything that's happened before where you're content to be there. It makes sense for it to be the last song on the album because you've just listened to all of this and come to the conclusion that it's good where you're at. You're settling down in your body: "Settle me down in my body / Pick us out a little old song / Something sweet that'll roll like a river / Carry my worries till they're long, long gone." To me, that's what music does. When I look back on my life, whenever I was sad or not in a good space--and still, to this day--the best cure for me is to go for a run and play guitar. Every time I sit down with my guitar, I feel good. I feel better. That's what that last song is about.
Place is a concept I think about a lot. I only really write about two main themes, and those are home and time. They're connected to each other, and everything else seems to be sub-categories of that. Place is directly connected to home...and place is a different form of space. All of those themes are really interesting to me. Why do we feel a desire to enclose so much open space? What is home? Is that a spiritual place, a physical place, or both? Place is a geography, but it's also dialog between geography and people. All of these things I find very interesting.
SILY: On opener "Too Many Walls", you're questioning whether a home can carry something with it, whether it can be defined by tragedy. On "Settle Me Down", home is offering you a safer haven to feel your feelings about death. That's where I made the connection of the first and the last song being about death, in addition to being about place.
TJ: I can totally dig that. That's cool. That's great.
SILY: Musically, you started very bare on the record and added on elements as you deemed them necessary. I find the songs to have a lot of space. There are a lot of times when there's no singing for a while. Did starting bare allow you to really hone in on not just instrumental space, but lyrical space, like where you might extend a vowel here or there, when you start and stop singing?
TJ: Absolutely. It created a feeling of musical freedom, and adventure. Adventure and freedom go together for me. I [started] with the smallest musical unit that made sense for every song. Sometimes, it was just me and a bass player, or just me singing and playing. There are hardly any overdubs on this record. 99% of what you hear is everybody in the room. The vocals are live, and we're all playing together.
There's a place for layering in music. If you want to make a record like Roxy Music or the Beach Boys, or a modern pop or country record, you have to layer and overdub stuff. I can do that, and I do that when it's necessary, but for this record, I really had the desire to be in the room and play with people and not give any direction. Let's just play music together and everybody interpret the chart that indicates the chord structure of the song. They're all people I trust 100% musically. A lot of phrasing [was] changed on the go. All the solos are improvised. There's no premeditation of "I'm gonna play this hot lick" or "I'm gonna play this not-so-hot lick." It's how it happens in the moment. Of course, that makes for a warts-and-all approach, but as it often happens for me, things that I didn't plan that at first felt like a little mistake [became my] favorite parts. I have many places on this record where I don't even know how I did it or why I did it, but I really like it.
SILY: I sometimes think of albums like this, with no overdubs and the way you let verses come when they come, in terms of a different type of psychology: gestalt.
TJ: I love that. I don't know enough about it, but I know just enough about it to see the connection. That's awesome.
Photo by Otis Gibbs
SILY: Can you tell me about the visual aspects of the album?
TJ: I've been...writing [not just] songs, but essays. Over the pandemic years, I got a graduate degree in Appalachian Studies, because as a University teacher, you should have a graduate degree, and I didn't have one, and my University really wanted me to have one. I wrote a lot more. I did a lot more research and read a lot more. I wrote essays on songwriting. I just felt like this record could do with a little more explanation and then had the idea to make a companion book to go with it. It would give me an outlet for some of these essays, a place where I can explain the songs, people can read the lyrics. It would be something, in the day and age of physical products like CDs not being that relevant anymore, that's out of the ordinary. I talked to a friend of mine, Gina Meredith, a wonderful graphic designer, and I said, "Look, I have these essays, I have them all together, can you help me put them in sequence so they can be printed?" She said, "Why don't you let me run with this a little bit? I'll put some more thought in." Before I knew it, she asked me about photos and contributed original art, and others contributed original art, and it turned into a really beautiful 40-page hardcover book with really nice original art that really amplifies the message of the lyrics.
I've never done something like that before. I'm really happy that I did it. It was a lot of work. I didn't know how much work it was going to be. I couldn't have done it without Gina's input and the artwork my wife contributed, that Gina contributed...I just sent them the music and said, "Can you do something for these 3-4 songs?" and just left it at that. I didn't nitpick or say, "I'm not sure if I like this." So there's a sort of stream of consciousness approach to the whole album that's reflected in the artwork. I really like that. I'm a big believer that if I collaborate with people creatively, the first rule needs to be that I let them be creative and not strangle their creativity by telling them what I think. It always has to be a back-and-forth. That's also how I approach working with players in the studio. I never say, "Play this," or, "Don't play that." Play what you want, and if it works for both of us, great, and if it doesn't, we'll adjust. No rules makes the music better.
SILY: How do you find adapting the performance of these songs to a live band? Is it just as artistically fulfilling as writing and recording them in the first place?
TJ: I think so, but again, I don't conceptualize that at all. I just hand them a chart that has the chords, and we'll rehearse a couple times. But I don't say, "Try to play this," or, "Play how it is on the record." It's, "Do what you want, and then we'll see." It makes it exciting again. After you record, it provides you with the possibility to reinvent the songs again. I'm really excited about doing that.
SILY: What's next for you in the short or long term?
TJ: I have a duo record with my friend Dean Fields in the can. A couple of songs on the record, Dean and I wrote together. I'm working on a trio record with my friends Adam Wright and Lacy Green, my favorite co-writers here in town. I'm going to work on recordings of some bluesy material I have. There's a lot of gigging going on this spring and summer. I'll go to Europe with my friend Eric Brace, to Holland and Germany. Eric and I just put a record out in January called Circle and Square. I like it like that. Some people think, "That's too much," and it probably is. Then again, putting out music has never been easier than it is now. The people that want to listen to my music are gonna want to listen to everything I put out, which makes me think it's a good idea to keep releasing things. Sometimes, on a larger scale, like with this record, it'll be an online release and people can stream stuff, and that's good, too. I feel like it's my place in the world to write and record because it makes me happy, and hopefully, it makes people happy to listen to it.
SILY: Do you get time to listen to music, watch movies, or read books?
'TJ: I don't listen to nearly as much music as I used to. I'm very selective with what I listen to. Most of the stuff I listen to is from the 20's and 30's. I listen to newer stuff when I listen more analytically and want to hear what it sounds like or certain artists I'm interested in. I don't listen to mainstream radio at all. I read as much as I can--probably quite a lot, but I often wish I had more time. I kind of take it as it comes. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I have to admit, [days when] I've been working on music and teaching the whole day, sometimes at 9:00 PM at night, it's nice to watch Ted Lasso or Shrinking or something like that. I'm amazed by how good TV has gotten. I enjoy some of that quite a bit.
I try to read several books parallel at the same time, because it seems to work for me. I like to read something psychology-related, something that's a story, and something connected to music history. Sprinkle in poetry: I keep a couple collections out because it's a good thing to read first thing in the morning. At the moment, I'm trying to find my way through James Joyce's Ulysses, which is very enjoyable but difficult. I'm very grateful for a companion book that Patrick Hastings wrote because without it, I'd miss so much. It's a challenging read, but good challenging.
