JD Souther

Goodbye To A Dear Friend

JD Souther passed away this last weekend. JD was a special guy in my life. He was a special guy in many lives. He had what I think of as a Big Life. I won’t try to enumerate his achievements, or write even a short biography here, which one can get other places; instead I’d like to give you a bit of a sense of who he was from my point of view, as a friend, and perhaps a different view from what you might get elsewhere through telling some personal stories from my time with him.

He was a man who I loved, and was lucky enough to know for about thirty years. We made an made an album together in 2015 after intermittently talking about making one together for twenty years. We recently had been talking about making another one together. I spoke to him probably 4 days before he passed, and had just sent him a musical sketch for new song to help to get the ball rolling in regard to a musical direction for something new. As always, that call was filled with laughter, bleak philosophical humor, an update on each other’s life, and a general and harsh review of our feelings regarding the human condition. He had somewhat recently moved, selling what he called a “wee little farm” outside of Nashville, and buying a house in a rather remote area between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico.

JD was a rare blend of wonderful elements as a person; an incredibly gifted songwriter with a great voice, a well-read, erudite and smart guy, with a sharp and sophisticated wit. As a songwriter he was a merciless editor, never settling for anything but the best musical and poetic solution on songs. While having an almost obsessive nature regarding organizational parts of his life, he was even more scattered than me in regard to the process of songwriting. When we worked together part of my job as the producer was to help him track down fragments of songs scattered around his house on scraps of paper or in little notebooks, that he had started, and to help him organize and finish ideas. We also worked together in a more spontaneous manner, sitting across from each other with a guitar and a bass, and playing around with musical ideas, some of which we would pursue, and many that we would develop to a point, then decide to abandon, in search of something better and more interesting.

He was the kind of friend that I’ve always felt lucky to know, fortunate to have in my life. There are certain people in life that, along with giving one the intangible pleasure of communicating on the same “wavelength”, never fail to leave one in a fulfilled state of mind after each interaction, having learned about a good book to look for, engaging in an extended and ongoing humorous discourse, always enjoying a similar way of looking at the world.

JD had a gruff and somewhat grumpy elegance He loved women. He remained friends with all of the women that he had relationships with. In one song that we wrote together he wrote “I fall in love with every woman I meet”, and it was true. He was an honest writer. He was a poetic sharpshooter; I’m sure one of the reasons that The Eagles, James Taylor and others brought him in on writing or finishing many of what, in my humble opinion, were some of their strongest, and most affecting songs.

He had great stories that he would repeatedly relate to me. I would always let him continue with the story, even after I recognized the beginning of them, as I loved the way he told them as much as the stories themselves. One of these occurred in conjunction with our mutual friend Warren Zevon:

One day he happened to run into Warren at a small upscale market in Hollywood. Warren, who also was an obsessive serial monogamist, saw a woman as he was shopping, that he was attracted to. He began to somewhat conspicuously follow the woman around the store, waiting for an opportunity to speak to her. Up one aisle and down the next, he pursued her at a borderline inappropriate distance. After about 15 minutes of this the woman turned to Warren and, at this point extremely exasperated by him stalking her as she shopped, turned to him and exclaimed “What are you doing?!!!” Warren responded, with arms spread by his side, smiling sheepishly and responded with the question “Can I be blamed?…”. It was somewhat telling that this was one of his favorite stories. JD was honest about the objects of his obsessions.

He was a voracious reader. We shared a genuine and obsessive passion for books, as well as the inability to walk out of a book store without buying 7 or 8 books.

Another Warren story. One year while I was working on a couple of songs with Warren, who was also an incurable book-lover, I received a parcel on my birthday from him. When I opened the package it was a book by the philosopher Martin Heidegger called “Being In Time”. Now….. Martin Heidegger was not exactly my cup of tea. Aside from having become an avid Nazi supporter during WWII, he was one of the most difficult and abstruse writers that I ever tried to read. I cracked open the book to take yet another shot at trying to read him. It was utterly impossible for me to get through 5 pages. As I tried to read the first section of the book it became clear to me that Warren never would have been remotely interested in spending time trying to decode a seven hundred page book that though apparently being somewhat of a key text of existentialism, seemed to me to be an endless and labor-intensive examination of the idea that life was a “curse”.

When we were doing pre-production and some writing for “Tenderness”, the album that we made together, I went out and stayed with him for about a week at his house in Nashville. As is the usual practice among book-lovers, the day that I arrived at his house, the first thing that I wanted to do as I wandered around the living room, which had some sizable book shelves that were full, was to look through his book collection. As I came to the end of one shelf I came upon that black and white cover that I knew…. Being In Time by Martin Heidegger. JD was in the kitchen making us some lunch. I yelled from the living room, knowing that as in Warren’s case, there was no way that he would have read a page of this chest-crusher of a book. “JD! How did you get this book??…. He came out of the kitchen with a fork and knife in hand, squinted, trying to make out the title, and responded “That? Oh, Warren gave it to me for my birthday!”

His departure, for me, as well as a great many other people, will leave me with that rare pitch of loneliness and sadness that one gets when extraordinary people pass away. To quote one of his great lines: “I miss you like childhood…”