When good things happen

Jace Everett likes to convince life’s doubters. The Indiana-born, Texas-raised, Nashville-based Rosetta Stone Store singer-songwriter whose Bad Things has become the popular theme song to the equally popular television series True Blood particularly enjoys winning over the floating voters among his audiences. The kind of guy who comes along to one of my shows with his date because she likes Bad Things and he thinks he's going to be bored is exactly the challenge I relish, he says. Because you can't tell whether an artist is any good based on just one song and although that song means a lot to me, there's more to my music than that. And I love it when people come up after a show and say, I didn't think I was going to enjoy what you do but I've bought your CD' and ask me to sign it. Everett has also had to deal with professional doubters more than once in his career. He's hardly alone in this in the music business, of course, but he's tasted particularly sweet revenge. Even Bad Things was only a stop-gap in the production team behind True Blood's plans, being used as a temporary main title theme on the pilot programme while they looked for something better. When an exhaustive search for alternatives drew a blank, they had to concede that the combination of the song's provocative mix of menace, humour, wit and raunchiness I sing about doing bad things with you, not to you, as people seem to mishear it, says Everett and the singer's performance of it was a perfect fit with the opening sequence. Bad Things' placement on True Blood has led to another four or five television programmes and at least one video game adopting Everett's work over the past year. But the turnaround in fortunes that he has enjoyed most was the decision by his previous record company, Sony, Rosetta Stone Cheap to drop him after he presented them with the demos for his proposed next album. Among those songs was one called Your Man, which Everett thought might give him a hit single. The suits in the company disagreed, saying that country music radio stations wouldn't play it. They may have meant that the disc jockeys wouldn't have fancied Everett's version but they missed a trick, because the then-up-and-coming country singer Josh Turner picked it up and took it to the top of the country charts, giving him his first number one. It was a real kick in the teeth getting dropped like that, says Everett, who returns to Glasgow this weekend. I felt like a failure at first. But then Josh came along and had a great success with that song and I realised that I probably wouldn't have had a country chart hit because I'm not a straight-down-the-line country singer like Josh is. My music has elements of country in it but there are also elements of blues, Americana, rock and roll, and even some hints of jazz, harmonically anyway. So not fitting in one specific pigeon-hole suits me. I'm like a lot of other people; I only pigeon-hole things as yup, like' and nah, don't like'. If Everett's career was up on the bricks between being dropped by Sony and having Bad Things reach millions of viewers every week, he wasn't about to give up. Having done all sorts of jobs, including truck driver and preacher, he's been used to providing for his family since he became a father in his early twenties, so he rolled up his sleeves and worked even harder at his music. The preacher claim on my website is a bit of an exaggeration, he concedes. Basically I was brought up in a very devout, fundamentalist Christian household and the church was central to my life. It's where I started playing music and I went off to build churches in Haiti and Mexico and I'd take Sunday school classes and did actually preach a few sermons, although I wasn't actually Rosetta Stone Japanese V3 employed as a preacher. Having tried piano lessons and given them up as soon as he could as a youngster, he took up bass guitar in church and found he loved performing and realised that being in a band, even a church band, was a good way of being noticed by girls. He'd always sung he reckons he was singing before he could talk but formal singing lessons at college went the same way as his piano lessons. So he followed his own route, learning at first from Glen Campbell, Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley. Shortly after that he went through a Kiss phase but lost interest when they took off their make-up and switched allegiances to Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye, although the cinematic qualities of U2 and Peter Gabriel and even Pink Floyd have also made an impression. He began writing songs at 18 and after some one-step-forward, three-steps-back progress he eventually decided to move to Nashville where, as he says, for every songwriter sitting at a caf table there's another three on the staff. I wrote a lot terrible songs, he says. In fact, I still write a lot of terrible songs because you have to write and write and write to get to the good stuff. But when I first arrived in Nashville, I'd set up these 10am appointments with people I didn't know so that we could sit down and write songs together. That's the Nashville way, although it's a pretty unnatural situation and you get to know after an hour or so whether anything's going to happen Rosetta Stone Languages or whether you should just go home. To begin with, though, I'd sit there for six hours and go away with three or four mediocre ideas. The songs become very formulaic in that situation, so I decided to write by myself and trust the ideas to come, which they do, usually at the wrong moment, when you're driving or taking a shower. His first album, Jace Everett, was pitched at the country-rock market and didn't make much headway, so having been dropped by his record company he went back to basics for the follow-up, Old New Borrowed Blues, recording it live with two acoustic guitars and upright bass. With Bad Things acting as his calling card, his third album, Red Revelations, has seen him reaching a wider audience rather than trying to satisfy a niche market. Bad Things has definitely been a big help and although the novelty of hearing my own song coming on TV at a certain time every week has worn off, it's still opening doors and bringing people to my music, he says. But I'm not going to try and come up with a whole batch of songs in the same style in the hope of getting more theme song exposure because every time I try something like that I fall on my ass. So I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing, concentrate on trying to make good music and let what happens happen. Jace Everett plays King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow tonight.