Second wind

Jim Mize just retired from his day job, and now his pals in the music business want to see his long-simmering career really start cooking

Jim Mize works on a song in his recording studio at his Conway home.
Jim Mize works on a song in his recording studio at his Conway home.

CONWAY — A week after Jim Mize’s last day at Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Co. of Arkansas, he was sitting with his wife, Dana, at a sports bar in Conway, and showing a video of himself leaving the office after 34 years on the job. It’s a short clip, shot on a cellphone, and in it the 58-year-old shrinks into the distance, before doing a little dance as he heads toward the door.

photo

A copy of Jim Mize’s recent self-titled album sits atop one of his vintage amplifiers.

photo

Jim Mize released his second album, "Release It to the Sky," in 2007.

photo

Jim Mize, standing behind a screen on the front porch of his Conway home, is pursuing singing and songwriting full time since his retirement from the insurance industry.

photo

Courtesy photo

Jim Mize, circa 2000, works on a song in the recording studio of Bruce Watson near Oxford, Miss.

photo

Courtesy photo

Jim Mize takes a break in this 2000 photo shot in the recording studio of Bruce Watson near Oxford, Miss.

If all goes according to plan, audiences around the world may soon get a chance to check out Mize’s moves. One of the reasons Mize left Farm Bureau was to concentrate on his other gig: writing and performing country-rock songs.

Since 2001, Mize has been recording for Big Legal Mess, a subsidiary of the Oxford, Miss.-based indie-blues label Fat Possum. All that time, his day job has been a source of inspiration and an obstacle.

As a claims adjuster, Mize spent a lot of time surveying wreckage.

“I’ve been around after nine hurricanes,” he says, “And all kinds of tornadoes. You see the best and the worst … of situations out of something like that.”

When he arrived in Homestead, Fla., after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, “It was just a war zone for miles. No police. Looters. People wearing pistols, taking turns guarding the neighborhood. And then all these contractors coming down there ripping people off. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen.”

In other words, it was like the backdrop for a Jim Mize song: deeply sad, a little angry, and teetering on chaos.

Mize’s music is rooted in the culture of the South, with our half-proud, half-desperate characters. His albums combine tear-in-the-beer country ballads,

howling blues and juke-joint rock ’n’ roll. Fans of authentic Americana love Mize — that is, if they get a chance to hear him. The downside to Mize having had another, better-paying career is that he has remained one of the genre’s best-kept secrets.

“I’ve never had a chance to tour, per se,” Mize says. “To get some of the better gigs, you’ve got to be six months out, usually, to plan those. In my line of work, it was hard to plan three months ahead.”

Bruce Watson — Mize’s friend, producer and boss at Big Legal Mess — hopes that’s about to change.

“If he gets out there and starts playing and doing some touring, he’s going to be recognized as one of the great Americana songwriters.”

———

Though Mize’s lyrics are often compared to great Southern writers like Oxford’s Larry Brown, he confessed that these days he mostly reads biographies of musicians. “It’s a bad habit,” he says with a smile.

But it’s a habit that runs deep. Growing up in Conway, decades before it became a thriving college town, Mize scrambled to find ways to satisfy his hunger for music. With no record stores nearby, he gravitated to a shop that sold instruments and song-sheets.

“Remember those song-sheets? I loved those deals back when I was a kid. Take one with your favorite band and it would list all the personnel. I’d devour ’em.”

Mize learned how to play guitar, and brought that talent with him when he left home as a teenager and joined the Army. At Fort Campbell, Ky., and during his time in Germany, he spent as much time playing in bands as he did honing his marksmanship. In the mid-1970s, he was another scruffy young Allman Brothers fan, and he impressed the crowds in Europe with his big cowboy hat and his Waylon Jennings covers.

“Over in Germany, they love that waltz,” Mize says. “Waylon, that’s all that is, really.”

He returned to Conway after his hitch was up, and attended the University of Central Arkansas with the help of the GI Bill.

“School was hard for me,” Mize says. “I had dropped out of ninth grade. I had to regain my old study habits. It helped that I read a lot when I was in the Army, but the math and stuff was hard.”

Unsure what he wanted to study, he became a business major. While taking classes, he got a job with the Veteran’s Administration, where he discovered he was good at helping clients navigate through the bureaucracy to get what they needed. He’d found another calling, more lucrative than music. He never put his guitars away, but when he started in the insurance business in 1981, Mize put aside his childhood dreams of going pro for the better part of a decade.

———

Mize has recorded three albums: 2001’s No Tell Motel, which introduced his thick, raspy drawl and his uncanny ability to synthesize decades of insights into Southern characters and Southern music; 2007’s Release It to the Sky, which built on the first record by working in more hooks and a fuller sound; and last year’s self-titled recording, a short collection of songs partly inspired by the death of his son Zach, an Afghanistan veteran who had post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to Watson, Mize’s songwriting process has been exacting since they first met in the early 1990s. It has taken six to seven years to assemble each album because Mize comes to Watson with only four or five songs in any given year, which they then work on together in the studio, trying to decide which ones are good enough.

“Hopefully now that he’s retired he’ll have a lot more time to write than he normally did,” Watson says. “I hope he brings me four or five songs a month.”

To help with that, Watson has set Mize up with Pro Tools software, so he can start demo-ing his songs at his Conway home. Always something of a gearhead when it comes to music, Mize is having fun fiddling with the new technology, though he doesn’t know if it’ll speed him up.

“The writing process is not glorious,” he says, laughing. “It’s just up and down the back porch. That’s most of it. Writing one word at a time.”

While picking out tunes on his guitar, Mize thinks constantly about how the music might sound live. And as he develops the melodies, he starts to get a feel for what kind of song he’s writing, and consults his notebooks for appropriate lyrics. “I keep the antenna up,” Mize explains about where he finds his words. He’s constantly leaving himself notes and voice-memos, although he added, “I think if it’s a really good lyric, you can remember it.”

It’s that attention to detail in every aspect of his songwriting that led to Mize’s big break more than 20 years ago. He went to Watson’s studio to record a couple of his songs, and when the producer heard Mize play “Let’s Go Running,” he thought, “There’s something pretty deep here.”

For the session, Watson brought in Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt of the popular local alt-country band Blue Mountain, who’d go on to do “Let’s Go Running” on their 1995 album Dog Days. Looking back on that moment, Stirratt says, “That was the first time I’d heard his music and his songs were so good. He just has such a unique quality to his voice and his style.”

———

Mize’s return to playing music professionally happened just as gradually as his songwriting process.

In the 1980s, Mize sold his old electric equipment to buy a dobro, thinking he might try his hand at bluegrass. He’d drive up to Mountain View to play with the folkies who gather in the town square, but “I noticed that the groups were all leaving me. I had to chase them around the courtyard. I knew I was getting the hang of it when they stopped leaving.”

Making music as a hobby rekindled Mize’s interest in writing and performing his own songs. He bought new gear and started gigging in Little Rock, first playing mostly covers and then working in more originals. Though he’d been writing since he was a boy, he found that as a middle-aged man he had a lot more to say, and a bigger musical vocabulary.

In fact, Mize worries sometimes that he thinks too hard about about the best way to express himself. For all the time he spends on his songs, Mize is proudest of the ones that took no time at all. “The quick ones that just land in your lap are usually the best ones,” he insists. “If I get to editing too much I’ll start taking the soul out of it.”

———

Because Mize just left Farm Bureau, he’s still figuring out what to do next — although he does have a wish list. He’d like to go back to Europe, maybe with his label mates Jimbo Mathus and John Paul Keith. And he wants to get up to the Northeast, where there’s a strong Americana fan base and an interest in having him play house parties.

“I like those,” Mize says. “They pay good, and there’s usually some potluck. You take a break and eat and visit and answer questions and all that. It’s a lot of fun.”

To some extent, Mize is in an advantageous situation compared with musicians 30 years younger than he is. He has a good pension, and will get by just fine even if he breaks even on his tours and records.

On the other hand, the business today is different from the one Mize knew in the 1970s. He knows he’s behind the times when it comes to social media — his wife maintains a Facebook page for him — and he laughed when recalling a recent show in Oxford where his merchandise table looked pathetic in comparison to the other acts on the bill. (“They had bright lights and stacks of stuff. Mine was just a stainless-steel table with CDs. They were all like, ‘Yeah, Mize, could you move down a bit?’”)

Stirratt thinks Mize will be fine. “Even though these days the youth culture is a huge thing, I think if you’re a good enough songwriter you can break through in certain genres and really get some attention and have a good career, even later in life.”

As for Watson, he has been waiting two decades for his friend to have his moment of wider recognition. “I’m ready when he’s ready. That’s our deal.”

In the meantime, Mize will continue as he always has, taking one small step after another and hoping to end with an unexpected flourish.

Upcoming Events