Hey, Jude - interview with Jude, a musician - Interview

Interview, March, 1999 by Dudley Saunders

The buzz is on this rising romantic

Jude wraps so much whip-snap verbiage around his riffs, it's hard not to blame it on hip-hop. But a closer listen to the twenty-nine-year-old's naked falsetto and down-home acoustic guitar reveals less another Beck-style "Loser" than a male Ani DiFranco. Jude's Maverick debut, No One Is Really Beautiful, is as translucent as a classic Liv Ullman performance: Everything he feels seems to fly to the surface of his songs, be it anger or artless romanticism. Jude, the son of an itinerant folksinger, hit L.A. five years ago. Fresh from the laid-back Boston coffeehouse scene, he quickly found his innocence squashed by music-business politics and the humiliation of practically every demeaning day job known to Southern California, from dishwasher to casting-agency janitor. Somehow, though, his anger only deepened his tenderness, making his songs a natural for the soundtrack of not only the adult romance City of Angels but even the teen-angst TV hit Felicity.

DUDLEY SAUNDERS: You perform with such openness. Was it rough doing that before an ironic Los Angeles crowd for the first time, in 1994?

JUDE: Actually, it wasn't. I wasn't intimidated. Being open was what it was all about for me; there was no other reason to perform. If they wanted to make fun of me, I didn't care. You know, I read a lot of beat literature when I first got to L.A., which you can see in the street-life images in my songs. But more and more I find myself turning back to the poets I read in school, like Tennyson. Telling the truth, being really straightforward, is what's important to me. It's about having a conversation with the audience.

DS: Are those your folkie roots talking?

J: I don't really think of myself as a folkie.

DS: Well, a lot of folkies these days seem to suffer from folkie-shame, dressing up their music in trip-hop garb and refusing the name.

J: I know what you mean. My dad was a folkie, and to me that means doing traditional songs. My stuff is more personal.

DS: Do you think mainstream audiences will take to your emotional directness?

J: The people I love, like Liz Phair, Elliott Smith, and Gillian Welch, are just as direct, but I guess they don't sell like Celine Dion. It's funny that a lot of people aren't comfortable with all that pointed emotionalism, but they'll happily cry to a Celine Dion song about something romantic and kind of generic.

DS: I'm impressed that you've maintained your bitterness about the music business in the face of your current acclaim.

J: Well, it's a pretty sleazy business, but it's really no sleazier than any other one - the cleaning business is probably the same way. But I accept that now. I don't take it personally; I think of it as kind of a game. My anger on this record is more about our culture's fixation on beauty, and how destructive that is.

DS: Oh, come on. People always say things like "Beauty is only skin deep."

J: Yeah, but I think most people buy into it more than they realize. Like this MTV model search-type show I saw: All these people really seem to think that if they are beautiful, then they are somehow more worthwhile. It's horrible.

DS: That's a pretty folkie theme for a non-folkie.

J: I know. I probably am just suffering from folkie-shame.