The very first song of yours played on Q108 was ‘I Wasn’t Born An Angel’ and quickly became one of my favorites. One of the many things I like about your songs is they all tell a story. Some filled with pessimism, some with optimism and some with a good chuckle. Are they based on real life experiences?
Yeah, mostly they are. Like anything else when you’re adapting your autobiography to art you take the liberties to make the rhymes work and so forth. ‘I Wasn’t Born An Angel’ From the Hell Hole Swamp record, I call it my life in three minutes or less.
The theme that that song’s about and a lot of my stuff is about is redemption. We go to these dark places and I lived in some dark places and lived through some really dark times. But I emerged through them and I’m not just talking about spiritual redemption. I’m talking about personal redemption where you just kind of grow out of your dysfunctions. In my case, I grew out of my addictions and my violence and my penchant for trouble and all those things. So that’s kind of one of the things you hear through most of my music. I do have a good healthy laugh at myself. Let’s face it. When you’ve been as big a fool as me, you better be able to laugh at yourself.
You’ve also produced tracks with some pretty big names such as A.J. Croce, C.C. Adcock, who produced ‘I Wasn’t Born An Angel’. Even Grammy award winning, Matt Hyde. Are these people you’ve worked with for a long time or just got together with to do a song or two?
A little bit of both. Matt Hyde and I have known each other for years. He was the producer of the first Dance Hall Pimps record, co-produced with Rob Hill. That’s how we know each other. Matt mostly produces rock bands. He’s producing Deaf Tones right now. Matt will come in and produce a single track with me now. Or he’ll say, ‘RJ, I want to try out this new microphone. I’m going to come into your studio, I’m going to set up the microphone.
I just want you to sit and play for two hours while I capture different sounds around you.’ And then we’ll end up with something. It’s as much buddies clowning around in the studio than anything else. With C.C. Adcock, that was set up by the people that represent me. We really wanted to make sure Hell Hole Swamp and the tracks on that record were authentic. We wanted to record them in Louisiana.
We wanted to have real Louisiana people involved. So we got C.C. Adcock from Lafayette and he’s a good old crazy Cajun dude and I love him. . .the funny story there is he happened to be in L.A. and was recording music for the final episode of True Blood. So he squeezed time in to come to my studio in L.A. He shows up and he says: ‘Hey, man. That angel song. I like that song. It’s a cool song but we got to work on it a little bit. We got to make it cooler.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, okay. I’m open to that. How do you think? Chord progressions, some lyrics. What do you think we need to do?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I think we need to make it cooler’ (laughing). That was his direction. Lo and behold, he made it cooler.
Your latest EP, ‘Nightly Suicide’ was released on late March with the title track being released a couple of weeks prior to that. What was the inspiration for the EP?
I wanted to do a very specific thing with Nightly Suicide. Hell Hole Swamp was definitely ‘swampy’. It was rural. It was fiddles and banjo. And just like America is both urban and rural, so is Americana music. And I wanted to do my next record as really an urban Americana record, so it’s an Americana rock record.
The themes and the imagery and the stories in this record are much more urban. And they sound much more urban. So that’s what I wanted to do. I think this is the most intimate and confessional true to life record I’ve done so far in terms if every single song really is true about my life and some part of my life.
Maybe you can give us an insight into the story of the title track from the EP?
Nightly Suicide is really just about living life of active addiction, which I did for many years. And all the trouble that causes and anybody that has ever lived through that will kind of nod their head when they hear this. It’s like when you are living through it you live though it with a defiance. You know you’re killing yourself a little bit every single night , but you’re defiant about it. You're
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