Something is going on with The White Buffalo.
He hasn’t been singing that long. He didn’t even start until a dozen or so years ago, when as a 19-year-old songs began pouring forth with such ferocity, and in such a forceful and unusual voice, that even his mother was a bit startled.
“Aw, honey,” she said. “What is this?”
He would occasionally commandeer a microphone at open mike nights in college in San Francisco if the circumstances were right – that is, if he was shit-faced drunk enough – and then after graduating he did what any good whisky-drinking history major possessing a resonant baritone vibrato and an Old Testament sense of language, wrath, and love should do. He went pro.
His friends convinced him that his name, Jake Smith, wouldn’t really work on the stage. So they put some names in a hat, and he drew out The White Buffalo. Good enough, he figured.
“Some of my friends thought Jake Smith wasn’t the most alluring of stage names, and maybe I could have something a little more mystical,” Smith said. “An old friend of mine came up with it… I didn’t know anything about the whole Indian aspect of it, I didn’t know the Ted Nugent song or that there was a Charles Bronson movie before I took it on. But I think it works pretty well.”
“It’s kind of weird – it seems like there are many more hip kind of bands that are all about animal names, like a color with an animal,” he added. “Everybody does that. There are tons of different ones – Deer Feet, Deer Antler, Deer Butt, whatever.”
The White Buffalo fits Smith well for a few reasons. First, he is a large bearded white man who looks like he has possibly spent some time trapping animals in the high country. Second, his music has a certain 1860s quality – tales of mayhem and men on the run, deep love and big damned trouble – and that big voice is decidedly not of the wispily modern emotional mode.
Lastly, the Buffalo has the makings of a myth: when people lay eyes on him, when they hear these simple songs so simply and powerfully sung, they tell others. And so word of The White Buffalo tends to arrive before he does, in that most old-fashioned manner, by word-of-mouth. For the first six years of his resolutely handmade career – no label, no press agents – his following steadily grew in this underground way.
The White Buffalo, in other words, leaves a lasting impression.
“I think a lot of that whole concept of grassroots, the way things have spread – it’s such an organic build, there is nobody being force fed,” said Smith, who appears at Dive on the Redondo Pier Thursday night. “I think it’s the fact that there is no bullshit around anything I do – the songs are songs, you know, and I try to move people or at least do something, tell a story or make it interesting or get some kind of emotional reaction from somebody…”
“And I think there is not a whole lot of that going on, really,” he added. “I mean, there are good songwriters, but so much even of the stuff that I like seem to be almost an ambient kind of thing, where you don’t even understand the words on some of them.”
In Smith’s work, words matter. And he sings them loud and clear.
“I just feel it’s such a huge aspect of writing and kind of touching people,” he said. “It’s half the thing. You get an emotion from listening to a symphonic movement or something, yeah, absolutely, but when you have the capacity, you can use words to get a point across or tell a story.”
The White Buffalo’s new EP, Prepare for Black & Blue, is his first effort for a label (Ruff Shod) and contains five songs that cover a thematic swath that includes mass murder, whisky, and love.
“My songs are not all sunshine and roses,” Smith said. “I have some of those, but this last EP was pretty heavy. There was lots of drinking, lots of relationship, and a little murder thrown in.”
His last album – Hogtied Revisited, a stunningly well-wrought collection of songs that brings to mind both Cormac McCarthy and Waylon Jennings, somehow – included an ode to a bar (“Bar and the Beer”) that was also a meditation on the metaphysics of a good drunk. There’s plenty of drink, but even more heft, and his newest release likewise contains a teetering ode to Jameson’s Irish Whisky (“John Jameson”) and a quite a bit of bleary eyed regret throughout.
“I didn’t really think about it until after I listened to it, but I think there is some reference to booze or drinking in every song except one – and the only one that doesn’t reference it is a guy that starts killing people for a woman’s affection,” Smith said. “I’m recording now and will put out a full length hopefully by summertime, and yeah, there is some drinking on it – but not on every song, at least.”
“John Jameson” is one of those songs that anyone of the Irish whisky drinking tribe immediately recognizes – it’s as if he’s pulled a song that already existed from the ether – but his language has such a rhythm and natural lyricism that Smith somehow manages to pull beauty from a trip into the gutter.
“I’m sloshed and seeing stars/stumbling between bars/Curse you Jameson/You have destroyed me once again/But I need you now….I’m bruised and busted now/Got to get to you somehow/I can’t stop before I start/To dry this drowning heart…I’m lost in the middle of a drunk/I’m not sinking I have sunk….”
The underlying theme isn’t drunkenness but absence. Much of Prepare for Black & Blue explores the darker aspects of love – the vulnerability created by love and the loss that so often follows. Even his straight-up love song – “Love Song #2” – is more longing than la-la happy love.
“That one I think is probably the happiest song on the album,” Smith said. “Not that there was a lot competition for that…The thing is, I have a pretty nice relationship with my wife. I’m married, and I’ve been with the same woman for eight years. And yeah, there is some hard times and drunken fights and silliness, but it’s good for the most part – you know, I love her. At the same time, the real side of things is there is pain within love – of finding love, or lost love, or unrequited love. It’s hard.”
Which, strangely enough, isn’t to say this is dark music: it gets downright jaunty (particularly on the murder song “Oh Darling What Have I Done”) and always has a compelling narrative pull. His voice has frequently been compared to Eddie Vedder or Richie Havens – “I hear that a lot,” he said – but his songwriting forbearers include the likes of Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt. His writing is spare and carefully crafted. He covers some brooding territory but manages to shine light in the darkest corners with pure lyrical beauty.
Maybe that’s the real mystery that is at the heart of the growing legend that is The White Buffalo: he means what he sings, and sings it very well. It’s a surprisingly rare combination.
“I’ve always been drawn to music that has great lyrics,” Smith said. “I watch the Grammys, and as I’ve gotten older, I can appreciate talent – but there is a point to where its puppetry, you know? Yeah, the guy’s a great singer and a good dancer, but really, any of the stuff he is telling you, is it really a part of him?”
The White Buffalo plays Dive Feb. 17. Latch Key Kid is also on the bill. See brixtonsouthbay.com for tickets or thewhitebuffalo.com for more information.
