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“Sit with him, listen to his songs, overhear him introduce someone he admires to someone else he admires, and you’ll likely be reminded of what you like best about being human.”
The Inimitable Scott Whiddon Is Releasing a Solo Album
Scott Whiddon (credit: @andrewbrinkhorst)
By Delia Rose Gibbs
Scott Whiddon puts his heart into it — and by “it,” I mean everything.
You’ll realize this shortly after sitting down with him and exploring a topic of interest — any topic at all — as he winds his way through an assortment of loosely related subjects (as many Southerners are wont to do).
I got to chat with him recently about his forthcoming album and I can’t stop telling everyone about it.
Whiddon beams, seemingly from a deep well of his own light that’s been made more luminous by his penchant for refracting the light of those around him. Sit with him, listen to his songs, overhear him introduce someone he admires to someone else he admires, and you’ll likely be reminded of what you like best about being human.
What Whiddon exudes is, in large part, the result of loving a lot of people for a lot of different reasons; and losing some of those people seems to have brightened rather than dimmed his own light. What he’s lost inspires what he creates, as demonstrated on the 10 tracks on his new album Sometimes Just Isn’t Enough.
Sometimes Just Isn't Enough album cover art by Lori Larusso
To write those songs Whiddon adopted an approach that his wife, Carrie Green, a writer and librarian, has employed religiously for years. The two-pronged approach is simple, but it’s not easy. Step One: Set aside the same time several days a week to attend to the work at hand. Step Two: Dedicate some of that time to the discipline of curiosity, to “throw up an antenna” while listening to music, reading, or getting out into the world to see what there is to see and hear what there is to hear.
Regarding these forays, Whiddon said, “Sometimes nothing happens. But other times, everything happens.”
When both his lyrical and musical hoppers got full enough, he started pairing pieces of music with strings of words until there was a “click,” and a song began to emerge. As more songs took shape, Whiddon said, the album revealed itself to be about disaster, memory, grief, and grace.
"[These songs] are a series of interconnected scenes. You get pieces of the story, but you don’t get the whole thing … There’s apocalypse on this record — there’s fire, there’s flood, there’s a car wreck that’s truly awful. But I think at the end of it, we get to see something that connects us in our humanity.”
I could quote Whiddon forever: “What are some things all human beings have in common? We figure out what we’re going to eat, what’s good to eat, we figure out who we pray to or not pray to, we figure out how we make homes, we figure out how we make kinship. We figure out how to make art. But another thing that binds us is that we grieve. It’s one of the things that makes us all the same.”
Whiddon describes the songs as “definitely experiences that are personal and singular, but once I put them out there, I hope they become something infinitely larger than me … that they become a story that [others] can see [themselves] within.”
He does that in songs like Learn To Be Quiet:
“I sometimes catch myself waving at someone that looks like you / If you were older”
Other songs, like the opening track The Rest of Our Lives, feel like late night “remember when” sessions:
We could confess that we hid the evidence
Retrace our steps the best as I could remember them
And we went by different names / We always went by different names
It’s always good to get your story straight
A talented writer, educator, and guitar player, Whiddon has contributed to various musical projects since joining Transylvania University’s faculty in 2006. Sometimes Just Isn’t Enough is his first solo record, but Whiddon says that making the record was more like a “team sport.”
He had a deep bench of collaborators: “I knew about a third of the way through writing that I was going to ask Blake [Cox] and Brandon [Judd],” Whiddon said of his album’s bassist and drummer, respectively. “They signed on immediately and they didn’t just bring their musical abilities — they brought their brains. We’ve played in various projects together and I knew they would help give some muscularity and some velocity to these sad boy songs. They put a set of T-tops on them, and a supercharger engine, and they made them swing.”
Producer J. Tom Hnatow
J. Tom Hnatow, a veteran producer who’s worked with artists ranging from Ringo Starr and Magnolia Boulevard to Vandeveer and John R. Miller, recorded Sometimes Just Isn’t Enough at his studio Small Blue. “Tom is a wizard,” Whiddon said. “He’s an amazing communicator and storyteller.” In addition to engineering, producing, and mixing the record, at Whiddon’s urging Hnatow added “some rippin’ guitar” as well as keys and synths.
“There’s a lot of this record that was left on the cutting room floor. I was really glad to be able to do that. [The studio band] helped make choices about lyrics. We got to make choices about arrangements, about guitar solos. I can’t imagine a better crew for this project.”
Whiddon thinks of the album as a menu and the upcoming live show as the meal. From my impressions as an early listener of the album, Lexington is in for a feast at the Green Lantern on West Third Street early next month. The live band will be Cox and Judd plus Mitch Snider, guitarist for Kind Skies and bassist for The Come Back Marys.
Whiddon’s favorite Lexington-based band, Movie Jail, will open the show (the blog BrooklynVegan describes their sound as “hypnotic, airy indie rock”) and he’s alluded to four surprise on-stage guests. “They’re going to help tell a part of the story, too … The [songs] that they’re going to sing, while they’re not my songs, are in the DNA of this record.”
Whiddon added, “That’s the whole point of this endeavor. Write every day or try to. Get your ego out of the way. Think about process rather than product. Surround yourself intentionally with inspiring people who are kind to the world. If you do those things, you’re probably about 90 percent of the way to writing a thing you want to write.”
Sometimes Just Isn’t Enough is set for release on Bandcamp and limited vinyl release on September 29. The LP release show starts at 8 p.m. on Saturday, October 2 at the Green Lantern.