Big Inner is an album of firsts, for White and for our place in time. A conductor in every sense of the word, an ambitious new label and a solo album were an easy segue from White's well-known post as the leader of the avant-garde jazz band Fight the Big Bull.Īs you swing into "Will You Love Me," you're a goner.
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White assumed the actor-director role for Big Inner it's the first Spacebomb album, the playbook and the highlight reel all at once, for a colossal series of upcoming albums from Natalie Prass, Karl Blau, Joe Westerlund (Megafaun), and Ivan Howard (The Rosebuds, Gayngs). This is Spacebomb: an inimitable House Band, a producer, and a unified crew of arrangers and musicians join with an artist and cut a record - with staggering results. This core group, multiplied by horns, strings, and a choir (all culled from and roused by the venerable landscape of Richmond, Virginia), was captured to tape in White's own tricked-out attic on the west side of town. A gifted jazz arranger and exceptional guitarist, White is joined by bassist Cameron Ralston (the Wise) and drummer Pinson Chanselle (the Mighty) in the formation of the Spacebomb House Band. White is Spacebomb - the process, the sound, the spirit, and the record label which White's debut launches. You don't need the seven-voice choir chasing White's voice to make you believe it, but it sure doesn't hurt.įor a record so personal, built on such code, it's never been a secret. The vibe is farmed by Trey Pollard's cinematic string arrangement, Megafaun's Phil Cook on near-frantic keys, baritone sax squawks, pacemaking congas, and the first appearance of a burning White guitar solo. "Big Love," the album's whopping second track, evolves the serenade of the opener into an all-out field holler. The references - from the lyrics that echo the common conditions of love, death, seeking, and finding, to open tributes to artists like Washington Phillips, Allen Toussaint, Jorge Ben, Jimmy Cliff, and Randy Newman - are their own scavenger hunt through history and through White's place in it. It's his soul and it's his music.īig Inner is told in seven songs that merge memory with the rawness of any given human moment. Whether you're a woman or man, White's mournful, get-it-on voice may be all you can hear: I don’t want to live a day longer than you, so let’s meet the Lord together. Overdubbed woodwinds and muted brass like it on top, dancing around the embers of the bass line.
The choir lets you know you're not alone. The guitar only talks when it has something to say. Plants it in your head as it blooms in his. The first time around, White only hums the chorus. You give me joy like a fountain deep down in my soul.
White and the world of Spacebomb he's convincing you to stay the night. It's feeling the wood of the church pew on your back. He stitched his own flag out of it.Īnd so it begins with "One of These Days," looking in, up, and over in its declarations of love. Jimmy Cliff had sung "Many Rivers to Cross." So had Harry Nilsson. Randy Newman's Sail Away was a decade old. Lee Perry had built The Black Ark in his backyard in Kingston. Alan Lomax's recordings sat in a big building in Washington, DC. The dusts of the Delta had swirled into Rock and Roll. White, there was so much to listen to, so much to put your heart into, already. On that day in August, when the earth shifted into the shape of Matthew E. Something between them taught him to time travel. Something between them taught him to love. His first moves, from picking up a basketball to picking up a guitar, were cast in the dual glow of these latitudes. His unfolded out of the mingled sands of Virginia Beach and Manila, the youngest son in a family that raised him barefoot between the blurred racket of that far eastern jungle city and the backyard lightning-bug-hum of a trimmed southern lawn.
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