It’s easy to fall into a familiar pattern in profiling a rock musician.
“Rock singer X sits plaintively sipping on a coffee in Hip Local Coffee Place Y, staring out the window and trying not to talk about his much publicized problem with Z. He seems worn out–and he should be– after playing festival A, B and C and being spotted around town with celebutante D.”
But talking to Jeff Heiskell about his new album Arriving, the first release in years, and his recent spate of successful shows with new band of old friends–also the first in years–it becomes apparent that he is not the typical rock musician.
The paradox is that Heiskell simultaneously comes across as both the most uniquely weird and the most happily boring, normal guy in town. He’s refreshingly…himself.
For one, Heiskell didn’t meet for the interview because, he says, he doesn’t really do much of anything socially with others besides playing music, preferring solitude even in public. Unlike many man-about-town impresarios, Heiskell says he eats alone, works out alone, and even goes to the bar alone, preferring hole-in-the-wall bars in South Knoxville where all they know about him is he’s there “having some beers and drinking and playing some pool.”
He didn’t opt for a star-studded production team or a recording exodus story involving NYC, a famous church or dive in New Orleans, or a rustic cabin in the woods. He just recorded with some of the best local aces from his generation of Knoxville rock, starting with Tim and Susan Lee and finishing later with John T. Baker and Gray Comer in Baker’s South Knoxville studio The Arbor, and adding the Ratliff Brothers, Bo and Jason, as a live rhythm section when it was time to play shows at Open Chord, Waynestock and last months’ Six’ O’ Clock Swerve with Wayne Bledsoe.
Heiskell doesn’t volunteer loads of information unprompted, not seeming overeager to frame the conversation in any identity-creation fantasy agenda, but he also doesn’t contrarily shy away from any topic.
“You have to choose,” he says. “People want to choose what is going to define me. That is not what I want to define me. It’s not talked about because it has nothing to do with me.”
Is that quote about Heiskell’s time in popular ‘90s touring act The Judybats, the pride of Knoxville? Is it about his new work? His penchant for mixing darkness and humor in his lyrics? His open homosexuality? His focus on his design career with Ethan Allen for the past several years?
That’s the point, Heiskell seemed to say in his interview–that no one single thing about him is “the point,” “the theme,” or whatever universal dictum might be prescribed to him. To him it’s about incorporating all the different facets. His trailer park upbringing. His Southern indie college rock days. His professional adult career. His interest in DIY home remodels. It’s all him, because he’s not a flat character or genre study, he’s a fully realized adult.
“I never try to pretend that I am anyone else,” he says.
Like clothes, for example: Heiskell showed up to Waynestock 2016 dressed to the nines in brand new, pressed modern dress clothing. It might have been suggested he was making some kind of statement on the over-casualization of rock, or just trying to be extra fancy to peacock. But the truth? That’s just what he’d worn to work that day at the Ethan Allen Design Center. He didn’t dress up or dress down for the show. He just came as who he is right now in life.
“There’s a lot of faux everything,” he says. “It makes my eyes roll back in my head.” “The subjects of some of the songs, it’s like ‘you’ve never lived any of that, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
Heiskell admits there was some thought of image in the Judybats music, which took him almost to the top in the early and mid-90s when they were signed to Warner Brothers. The albums Native Son (1991), Pain Makes You Beautiful (1993,) and Full-Empty (1994) took him around the country three times and found him in music videos, playing FarmAid and Late Night With Conan O’Brien, and basically becoming the most famous Knoxvillian until Peyton Manning came around.
“It was cute, it was quaint it, was kinda neat and kinda nifty,” Heiskell says, comparing them to REM and the Athens sound. “[It was] some kind of cool, Southern thing, and you thought Southern people were really backwards, but then you see some are pretty hip and pretty cool.”
But, Heiskell says, the crafting of that sound with college radio or the label in mind could be draining.
With his new band, it’s different. “I have never played with a band like this where, when I am up there singing, I’m not worried about what everybody else is doing,” he says. He can trust everybody to do what they do and he can do him. “They are so solid and intuitive that it’s so easy making music with them.”
But Heiskell says that indie sound wasn’t an act, and neither is his accent. They don’t have to be because they are different, somewhat unrelated aspects of a multi-faceted life with many interests.
“I grew up in a trailer park,” he says. “I started breaking horses when I was 12. A lot of these affectations of country and Americana, I’ve lived the life so a lot of those things when I see them appropriated, they really get on my nerves because it’s not genuine at all.”
So back to the clothing choice at Waynestock and what it might have to do with his identity as an artist: “What kind of person–what are you going to be? I just kind of bought this and bought that and I’ve always been a little interested in clothing, so I thought maybe I’ll just be the well-dressed man?… I think it’d be really weird if I was all of a sudden wearing a lot of weathered stuff, it wouldn’t make any sense.”
So how does that relate to the sound on Arriving? Was there a conscious agenda to go more rock than usual? To opt out of the female vocal he’s had accompanying him in the past? What’s the agenda?
“Everything [out] there is an agenda, a sound or a plan,” he says, “and I’ve never liked that. I’ve always wanted to be pretty eclectic. I’m just in the stage now of do I want a certain sound or just write a bunch of songs like I did before and not really think about that?”
Talking with Heiskell and a few of his band-mates, bandleader/guitarist John T. Baker, who also recorded much of the album at his South Knoxville studio The Arbor, and drummer Jason Sizemore of Paper Faces, 30 Amp Fuse, Nug Jug and Stinkfoot USA, in an attempt to define what the ‘90s actually ultimately meant to music, and if there is a definitive ‘90s sound, opinions and theories abound, but the thing they all agree about is that it was about authenticity and that Heiskell is a seminal voice of that period.
“Jeff’s definitely a voice of that era,” Baker says. “The ’90s…it was more heart-on-the-sleeve and then it got more ironic as the ‘90s advanced. They called it college rock. [It was] based on folk music initially, but amplified.”
Like Heiskell himself, Baker credits a little band from Athens, Georgia for kicking off a lot of the college rock sound. “REM created a whole chain of bands in their wake, kind of jangly pop,” he says, “and then college rock became aware of itself. Nirvana hit and then it was okay to be grungy and blocky and distorted and that hadn’t been okay for a while…It became aware of itself as art…the louder and more purposefully artsy it got.”
That awareness of itself and reaction to over-produced and indulgent music of the past few decades seemed to cultivate an irreverence and simplicity in approach that felt refreshing to a lot of the musicians and listeners of the day.
“One thing I like about Jeff,” says live Heiskell drummer Jason Ratliff, “He writes serious lyrics to a degree but he doesn’t take himself seriously. Some of his songs are tongue in cheek.”
Ratliff has known Jeff a long time, since he was in a band called Paper Faces and frequented the Longbranch Saloon when it was the hot spot for original independent rock in Knoxville in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, often running into Heiskell.
“Back in those days that was kind of the musician hangout and you just bumped into other people in other bands,” he says. We would just have long musical talks there.”
“There was a decade of bird-flipping at the ‘80s,” Ratliff says. “There was a lot of angst and the Gen-Xers sick of being force-fed crap, and maybe that’s what kicked all that off.” He also cites Nirvana and bands like Primus for leading that charge.
But Ratliff developed his drumming sound–a fuller, harder, brighter, more rocking sound than people might be used to from Judybats and other indie of the day–in his teenage years, listening to King Crimson, Frank Zappa and XTC, Keith Moon of The Who, Stewart Copeland of The Police and Neil Peart of Rush. “That was almost mandatory as a drummer at that time,” he says.
Baker had known the Paper Faces well, and when he’d briefly moved to Memphis, his band had played an opening slot there for the Judybats at one point, so while he wasn’t huge buds with Heiskell at the time, they knew a lot of the same people and when Heiskell was looking for a studio to finish Arriving and a live band, Baker was able to pull the lineup together for him and help him record in a studio just a mile from his house.
Heiskell, again, is a paradox. He talks at length about his dedication to doing everything 100 percent, saying his break since Clip-On Nose Ring (2008) is a reflection of his lack of desire to do anything unless he was inspired enough to do it at top quality. On the other hand, he seems to have embraced and enjoyed the no -frills, no-drama, homegrown quality of the process this time around so much that he’s already planning new material with this same lineup.
“I don’t think there’s anyone who puts more pressure on myself than I do,” he says. “Anything I do I want to put 100 percent into it and I want it fantastic. I do it in all areas of my life.” But maybe that free, happy-go-lucky vibe that comes off doesn’t come from lack of quality control or effort, but rather from the freedom of his supported-auteur approach this time around. “Being able to not have to feel like…I’m not having to bow to any higher power than myself with making this new music,” he explains. “And I’m able to be that taskmaster with myself. I don’t have to compromise at all because I’m the one who is setting the parameters. I know what kind of goals I am going for.”
“Usually in the past, I would get done with a CD and then listen back to it within the next month and all I would hear was the things I would have done differently,” Heiskell says, “and with this one I’ve only grown to like it better and I’ve never had that experience before. I think I am going to do another one.”
Back to the clothing metaphor once more to close: for Heiskell, satisfaction to lounge in one outfit, looking sharp for everyone to see, never appears to satisfy him. He has to shop for, or even design, the next one. Life isn’t an iconic style or image, it’s an eclectic and ever-changing wardrobe, a series of different phases to be experienced fully and openly.
“I’ve been really encouraged by the reviews I’ve got and by the reaction to the CD,” he says. “I am very energized by that, but at the same time, you have to think, ‘what is it that I am going to do? What other songs am I going to write?”
