Pop's Great White Hope

Pop: Great White hope

Take one fed-up country singer and a tub of hair dye, mix them together and what do you get? A soul-singing sensation, says Robin Eggar

To make a great soul album requires more than just a voice. It demands emotions actually lived: to have experienced pain and longing, love and lust, triumph and despair. Which is why the finest soul album this year comes not from Devon’s teen prodigy Joss Stone, but from Lari White, a 38-year-old mother of two, failed country singer and occasional actress.

Green Eyed Soul is a home-made album. White wrote or co-wrote all the songs, cajoled her favourite musicians into playing, produced it at her home studio just outside Nashville and started her own label, Skinny White Girl Records. Radio 2 is already behind her first single, Nothing But Love.

It is a grown-up record, forged by White’s frustration with the straitjacket that country imposed upon her. “I wanted to create a vibe record, not the sampler of different styles that I’d done previously,” she says. “It has elements of sensuality and melancholy, with a groove.” The standout, Right Here Right Now, started as a song about sexual frustration. “I had two children under the age of three, and it had been a very long time since I had had sex with my husband,” she says. “I felt this was wrong, and I wanted to throw him down in the middle of the kitchen floor and make up for lost time.” Apparently, the sentiments she expressed did work outside the recording studio.

White was born in the Florida panhandle on May 13, 1965. Her grandfather was a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. In church, her Aunt Gloria played gospel piano and everybody sang. Her father, a schoolteacher (as was her mother), supported himself through college by playing guitar in a rock’n’roll band, which caused something of a rift. White made her stage debut, aged four, with the family band, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

When she was 13 months old, an accident with a fan severed the little finger of her left hand. She considers it one of the best things that ever happened to her. “A small thing, but it made it impossible for me to be normal,” she says. “So many little girls think too much about being pretty and perfect. That was not an option for me; I was always a little weird.”

It did not affect her piano-playing, however: she won a state-wide Chopin competition at 16.

Her father always stressed that she could become anything she wanted to be, and she won a scholarship to the University of Miami to study music engineering, which gave its students unlimited studio time at night. “That was a culture shock,” she says. “It was the Miami Vice days, with lots of crime, cocaine and bands doing Madonna covers. It was ugly.”

Growing up, she listened to all sorts: Ray Charles, Al Green, the Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as classical and gospel. She supported herself by singing sessions, notably on Robin Gibb’s “really awful” single Boys Do Fall in Love, and with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra.

She tried living in LA, New York and Chicago before winning a talent contest on a Nashville television station in 1988. White drove her battered van for 12 hours straight and picked up a speeding ticket as she entered Nashville city limits. Despite that, she knew that “Nashville would be a good town to starve in”.

“I lived below the poverty line — the first year, I made $8,000 — but I had a little apartment in a safe, cool part of town. I had a beat-to-hell car with cockeyed headlights, but it ran. Winning the talent competition gave me a little chunk of cash, so I never had to wait tables. It cut a good year of dues-paying and introduced me to an inner circle of struggling songwriters.”

After four years on the breadline, she toured as a backing singer with Rodney Crowell, who co- produced her debut for BMG. Her second album went gold (500,000 copies), and she had a Top 5 country hit with Now I Know. But by the mid-1990s, Shania Twain had moved the Nashville goalposts. Girl singers had to bare their midriffs and have crossover pop-and- country hits. “What was working on country radio was not what I did,” says White. “I tried to fit, but I couldn’t change myself enough and be happy with it.”

Backed by BMG, she kept busy singing on three gospel albums, each of which won a Grammy. She married her fellow songwriter Chuck Cannon (whose hits include Boyzone’s I Love the Way You Love Me) and had two children, M’Kenzy Rayne, now six, and Jaxon, four. Ever since her below-the-breadline days, White has acted. She played the sculptor Bettina Peterson in the Tom Hanks vehicle Cast Away. Her next film is the indie production No Regrets, out at Cannes this month.

In 1998, after an album for Disney’s new country label failed to get anywhere, she considered quitting the business. “At that low point, I had a choice between whether I became an artist or an entertainer.” So she dyed her hair red. “People treat redheads differently,” she says. “They believe we are uninhibited, assertive if not aggressive, earthy, more physical and sensual. There had been a redhead in there, trying to get out, so I decided to give her free rein.” And then she cut Green Eyed Soul.

From The Sunday Times UK
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article851224.ece