JD Clayton might be a born record producer and not know it yet. The Arkansas singer, songwriter and bandleader had a batch of new songs, and loose plans to follow up on his well-received debut record. He didn’t cast about for the chance to work with a name-brand record-maker. He wasn’t even sure he had an album’s worth of material, and his band hadn’t heard anything yet. Still, he booked a week at Nashville’s legendary Sound Emporium and came up with a unique modus operandi that seems to borrow from zen master Rick Rubin.
“I was staying in a cottage north of town, about an hour outside of Nashville,” Clayton says in Episode 320 of The String. “I would wake up at 6 am and look at all the songs I had available. I would sit down and kind of plot how I wanted them to sound, and what the form was going to be, and how I was going to do this with the band. And then I would make a cup of coffee, go over everything, get in my car, drive an hour. And every morning, having that hour drive to the studio, I could decompress. I could think and plan how the day would go. I'd show up. Everybody would be there ready to rock.”
Clayton’s trust in his guys came from a couple of years of intense touring, as he built a national reputation, including opening shows for Old Crow Medicine Show, Hank Williams Jr., and Dwight Yoakam. They’re given room to run on the resulting album Blue Sky Sundays, his first for Rounder Records. So I asked for a rundown of who we’re hearing, and Clayton obliged.
Kirby Bland has been a lifetime friend and drummer with JD since he first formed a band at college in his hometown of Fort Smith, AR. Guitarist Bo Aleman heard Clayton playing a set in Nashville and then happened to see him at a guitar store the next day. They hooked up, and now Aleman provides some good grease fire guitar on songs like the bluesy “Arkansas Kid.” Clayton met bass player and harmony singer Lee Williams through a contact at Belmont University. Rounding out the band was keyboard player Hank Long.
We can feel the symbiosis between leader and band in the opening track “Let You Down.” What starts with a simple acoustic guitar and harmonica builds gradually to a funky breakbeat, some blazing guitar, and even a drum solo. It’s a well-constructed five-minute journey with all kinds of surprises. And Clayton got these cohesive performances with just a few rehearsals and on-the-go feedback. “Probably more than anything, I love being in the studio, and I love working with musicians, and I love challenging them and then watching them rise to the occasion,” Clayton says.
JD’s musical origins are so wholesome and charming that I actually called him on it, but with an admiration for his family story that turned out to be mutual. He first heard roots music from his grandfather, who played banjo in, if I heard this right, The Jesus Man Gospel Band, which “would tour around to prisons in Arkansas, feed them a barbecue dinner and play a bluegrass show.” On regular Friday night hangs, grandad taught JD basic chords. And while JD didn’t get much into bluegrass, his father’s CD collection full of singer songwriters fueled his interest to try the same. “It has to be said,I'm very blessed,” Clayton says. “I had kind of an unbelievable upbringing. And that's really a testament to the people that raised me.”
No wonder JD is smiling wide and unabashedly on both of his LP covers so far. This is a fun, ranging conversation with a good guy - a 29-year-old husband and father of two - who’s living out the ethos of his charming song “High Hopes & Low Expectations.”
