I don’t know how you hang onto a southern accent after living in L.A. for 35 years. I’d scrubbed mine by sophomore year of college. I thought I had to, to be taken seriously.
Chattanooga born-and-raised artist Wayne White proves otherwise. It comes through stronger in some words than others. Payne-ter. Knox-vull. But then again, his career – which ranges from the Emmy-winning Pee-wee’s Playhouse to iconic music videos for Peter Gabriel and The Smashing Pumpkins to bold reinventions of fine art – was built on a playful dismantling of seriousness itself. Defanging it, exposing it, and reminding us that humor is serious business too. And that being from the South is something you can own with pride.
Wayne appears on this year’s Big Ears bill as both a visual artist and frontman of the band Username Password. The day before our interview, Username Password dropped a 50-song self-titled debut album that had me breathing into a paper bag, flashing back to Stephin Merritt’s 50 Song Memoir at Big Ears 2017, until I realized the whole album was just 55 minutes long.
The songs range from a breezy 18 seconds to the longest 2 minutes 13 seconds of your life. They careen from banjo goth to holler-core punk to woozy, off-center psychedelia, all bleeding together like a run-on sentence. “I ain’t afraid of you! I’m from the South!” Wayne growls in one fever dream of a song that starts with a drive to jail and ends with a plastic box of melted cupcakes.
Naturally, I had a lot of questions.
LB: Username Password just dropped a freaking 50-song debut album, so let’s start with that! Of all the talents you have (painter, art director, puppeteer, set designer, animator, sculptor, cartoonist, illustrator), some people might not even realize you’re a musician.
WW: I’ve played music as a hobby since I was a teenager, mostly banjo, but like a lot of people my hobby sort of intensified during COVID. Music became more central to my stay-at-home world, and I started sending my music videos to my buddy Bob Stagner in Chattanooga, who’s a professional drummer, and to Jim Tate, who is also a professional musician, who plays guitar and bass and several other instruments.
I would send them the videos, and then they would play along to the video and put their videos in with mine and composite them, and I’d post them on Instagram. So that’s how we started as a band – long-distance. That was a fun kind of shut-in, isolationist activity. And then our friend Bryan Dyer, who is a frequent collaborator with me on my big art installations I do at museums, he’s also very musical and so I got him to come along for the ride.
After COVID ended I traveled to Chattanooga and we started playing together, and we started recording songs, and then we started getting gigs. And so I’ve made lots of trips back and forth, recording and playing live with them, which eventually led to a collection of 50+ songs. They’re all very short little songs. I have this aesthetic of playing short pieces, I’m just attracted to that. And so we put them together into this new album that just came out.
LB: The album is packed like a can of biscuits, as they say. With music, I guess you can make that choice of, like, are you a poet or are you a novelist?
WW: Yeah, I’m glad you picked up on that because I do consider myself a poet. And this music was inspired by my writing and poems that I wanted to put to music, and I do like the short-form like that. I think of Guided By Voices too. It’s almost like one piece. It’s kind of like a rhapsody, in a way, these little short movements that connect with each other. It’s kind of a flow.
LB: I was listening to it while falling asleep, and in my half-asleep mind the songs appeared as all these little shoebox dioramas all in a row. And then they turned into pinholes you could look down into and see these whole little worlds. Like, each song is its own vignette. But there are thru-threads running through them.
WW: Yes, there are definitely threads. There’s definitely a southern theme, an American history theme. I sort of see it as a journey through the South, both present day and the past, all the stuff I’m interested in, my own experience especially growing up in the South, the myths of southern history, and different musical styles that I’m attracted to. I didn’t want it to just settle into one genre.
I wanted to defy the whole preconceived notion of what a song is. You know: verse, chorus, it has to be two-and-a-half or three-minutes long … all those different rules. I just wanted to disregard them and see it as a book of poems or something like that. It just happens to be musical also. Somebody related it to one of my sketchbooks and I think that’s kind of appropriate – it’s a stream of consciousness kind of feel instead of the normal, conventional song structure.
LB: There’s one song I want to ask you about in particular. I was excited to see “Revenge of the Knoxville Girl” on the track list, referencing the Appalachian murder ballad. Because the Knoxville Girl, she never really got her #MeToo moment. All this time she’s just been at the bottom of that river, feeding the fish, you know? So I was like, ‘Great, Wayne is giving our girl her power back.” But I got a little lost in the lyrics:
I met a little girl in Knoxville /
she dropped on me in my in my sleep /
a 400-pound floor sander that knocked out all my teeth /
She dragged me down to the river to a tall and shaky shell mound /
And there I gummed all the mussels that flow through Knoxville town /
A Chris-Craft full of Vol dolls floated past my shame /
They laughed and pointed at my bleeding mouth then went to the game
WW: It’s a reference to the Knoxville Girl and also an homage to Cormac McCarthy’s book Suttree. There’s a scene in Suttree where they’re having a bar fight, and somebody brings in a floor sander and throws it across the room. So that’s that part.
And then when he goes down to the river to a tall and shaky shell mound – in the book Suttree retreats from Knoxville and goes up the river and he encounters some people that are living like early Native Americans, like shell mound cultures, where they lived by the river and ate mussels and put the mussel shells in the big shell mounds. So he kind of reverts back to a Neolithic lifestyle for a while.
And then, of course, the Vols reference. You can’t talk about Knoxville without putting in the Vols. So a Chris-Craft boat full of Vol dolls, which are women Tennessee Volunteer fans – they’re coming into town on their fancy boat for the big game, and there’s this poor bastard gumming mussels with his bloody mouth by the riverside.
It’s like a mishmash of the Knoxville Girl, Suttree and Tennessee Vols culture.
LB: You really crammed a lot into seven lines.
WW: Yeah.
LB: So the other component of your Big Ears presence is your word paintings, which you’ve been doing for over 20 years now. What’s your relationship with that work nowadays?
WW: I’ve been doing them a while and they are sort of associated with me in a way. They got me into the art world. That was my ticket to start showing in galleries, and they became associated with me in a big way, almost like my brand. And so I’m very grateful to the word paintings for opening up a new world for me.
I’d been working in television almost 25 years prior to that, dreaming of the day that I could be my own man and be my own artist and show at galleries and be in the art world. That was always my dream from the beginning, but I had to make a living as a commercial artist. I found a way to kind of bridge the gap in that the word paintings communicate very much like commercial art. Yet they’re these weird objects that kind of defy description in a way also.
I’m still doing them, and I’m still finding ways of expressing myself through them, finding new ways of saying new things. Like I said before, I do consider myself a poet, and I think those word paintings, like my songs, are just another way of writing poems or very short little prose pieces. So it’s just another way of sneaking my writing into the art forms.
They’re an ongoing project for me, and I’ll do them for years to come. There’s always something new I want to say, and I’m glad that they are distinctive as mine, which is a very hard thing to get in this world because it’s a very crowded and busy cultural scene. It’s good to have your own little stake. So I’m very grateful for the word paintings and the joy they’ve brought to the world. I’m happy to do it.
LB: You and the Knoxville Museum of Art have got some stuff up your sleeve for next year. So that’s really exciting that we’ll get to see more of you around.
WW: Yes, I’m looking forward to it. I’m going to be bringing the big puppet energy. That’s always a big element of my artwork is doing big puppets and doing big figurative installations with big figures, mostly puppets. Think big, big characters that move. I like art that moves around and goes out into the world.
For me, it all begins with drawing and writing. Those are the two. That’s the default position for everything I do. It’s just simple pencil and paper. And I always say, if you can draw it, you can make it. If you have the vision to put it down on paper, you can translate that into any other media you want. And the same challenge with words, if you can get your thoughts out on the page, then you can make that into a song or a painting or anything else.
LB: Well, we can’t wait. There’s so much buzz about you being here. A lot of us in East Tennessee feel a kinship with your work.
WW: I’m so happy and grateful that I can reinvent myself as a musician at this point in my life and career. I’m a very lucky guy to be given this opportunity. And it’s a great way to expand. I mean, I think that’s the word for all artists: expand. You know, that’s what we’re all looking to do.
I always say an artist is not an intellectual. An artist is a set of nerve endings. And that’s all we have to be, you know, just exposed nerve endings. And those nerve endings should expand like the branches of a tree and grab everything they can and creep and grow like a vine over experience and just absorb it all and give it back.
Username Password performs as part of Big Ears Festival on Thursday, March 27 at The Standard. Visit the Big Ears website for more info.
“Wayne White: BIG WORDS” is on exhibition at The Emporium Center through March 30. Admission is free. Visit the Arts & Culture Alliance website for more info