JPG: With the subject matter in your work — the environment and preservation — do you have to be a “latte-drinking bleeding heart liberal elite” to have interest in such matters?

JJG: Definitely not. My friends are the exact opposite of that and are staunch supporters of doing things the right way or I say the right way, just trying to do things a little more intelligent in terms of long term. Instead of clearcutting, you cut 300 acres and you want to put in a subdivision instead of clearcutting it and cramming one house on top of the other like they did and they’re sitting here empty. They’re empty and the other [development], they’re a third of the way full. And half of that third those houses are for sale. It didn’t work. It didn’t work because all that was a charade, as everybody knows. It’s all about pumped up money. The point was and then there’s a developer that comes around and says, ‘300 acres. I’m only going to put up X-amount of houses on it and we’re going to leave all these woods. We’re going to leave this lake. We’re going to leave this swamp. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that and maybe have a nice trail, but we’re going to leave woods connected to woods.’ It’s just going to make sense in the long run instead of clear cutting and trying to sell a fantasy to somebody. In the end, that whole fantasy just caved in on lots of people. That was the greedy way.

I compare it to if you lived in the Pacific Northwest, and you saw salmon coming up the river and you moved there and you thought, ‘Salmon are going to be here. Look how many there are.’ If you got it in your head that it’s always going to be like this, always going to be this many fish coming up the river so you just started stringing up huge nets across, just grab ‘em all and then you based your life on that and then they stop coming. That’s the dumb way to do it. The smart way to do it is take a few salmon and let everything live to fight another day. Live to make it another day instead of I’m going to take it all now. Everybody can understand that. I don’t care how liberal elite or right wing conservative or how bourgeois liberal they are. I think everybody can understand that. As long as they don’t let their politics and identities they’ve built inside that get in their way of the reality.

JPG: By the way, I was just being sarcastic. It was just fun to say ‘bleeding heart liberal.’

JJG: (laughs) I’ve said it occasionally myself.

JPG: It’s interesting because I happened to see an interview with the author Carl Hiaasen (“Skinny Dip,” “Nature Girl”) and he has similar views. He’s from Florida as well, and he’s angry about what’s happened in your home state, which makes you the musical Carl Hiaasen or he’s the literary JJ Grey.

JJG: I’m sure he doesn’t know who I am, but I know who he is.

JPG: Well, I guess he needs to get schooled sooner or later. Another consistent thing on your albums – the cover artwork – which is created by you. Are those ink drawings?

JJG: I draw it with pencil and then I color it with a black pen. Then, I’ll scan it and clean up any little bits, pen marks or something like that. I like the grasshopper [on Georgia Warhorse ]. I threw that in. One day I just got a wild, I don’t know what got into me in Starkville, Mississippi. There’s an art store downtown. I went and bought a pad and some pencils and pens and started drawing. I realized I’d done some artwork stuff years ago for Georgia Warhorse. That title and the art work, I guess the artwork was done probably before Blackwater was made (released in 2001). In the end I didn’t like it and I just wanted to redraw the grasshopper; the same with the trees (on 2004’s Lochloosa ), the snakes (on 2007’s Country Ghett ”) and the orange blossoms (on 2008’s Orange Blossoms ).

Dan [Prothero], that was a photo he did on Blackwater. He kicked the whole thing off within a certain aesthetic and I just loved it. And I wanted all the records to have that certain artistic feel like that, stay true to that thing he started with. I really liked it. All the other albums that I did after that that, I did covers for. I kept it sort of in the vein that he started.

JPG: It makes each album like a chapter in a book.

JJG: Yeah, that’s the way that I look at it. The records are autobiographical in a lot of ways. I just try to keep it like chapters in a book, so to speak.

JPG: Last thing, I read that you were involved in the documentary, “The Good Soldier.” What did you do for that?

JJG: That has been nominated for an Emmy. They asked me to write some stuff for some certain themes, and they sent me those scenes. Started doing the music right here at home in the home studio. When I lay out a record I just use the same studio and I just started recording all that stuff for that. They also used a couple of tracks off of a couple of different records and the score of certain scenes throughout the movie. The film is about five guys from different wars — World War II, Vietnam, Iraq and the 2nd Iraq. I was really pleased with what they did when I saw it ‘cause I’ve seen the scenes and I’ve seen the rough cut without music in it that was a lot longer. That was still great but man, wow, they made a powerful documentary.

JPG: The music you did for that, was it more atmospheric?

JJG: Oh yeah, definitely more. One of them was called “Helicopter Fear.” It’s the guy telling the story of when he finally knew that this is real, ‘cause life can be that way. Life is sort of like a dream unfolding in front of you. It was when he was flying one of the Hueys (helicopters). He was a helicopter pilot and he could see the tracer bullets just coming at him and hitting the windshields all around him. Being in a helicopter, you can’t get down in a foxhole or hide behind something. You’re just up there.

Do something to bring attention. Actually used a cigarbox guitar, a Flynn made from Mississippi, and it sounds kind of banjo-ish. I just started to pick up the pace as he’s talking, playing along. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll just look at the screen kind of just play along until something started to materialize.

Pages:« Previous Page