Although music fans are more used to seeing John Paul White in a debonair black suit – at his concerts, the award shows or in that Taylor Swift music video – right now he’s wearing brown overalls.
A few stains are on the bib.
Such is the glamorous life of co-owning an independent record label.
White hasn’t spent the afternoon polishing the Grammys he won a few years back as part of folk-pop duo The Civil Wars. He’s been caulking a neighboring Florence home he’s converting into Single Lock Records’ next recording studio. White is currently seated in a repurposed restaurant booth inside the downtown Florence home, located behind his own residence, that’s served as Single Lock’s in-house studio heretofore. “We’ve cut in probably every space in this house. A lot of my vocals were in the basement,” White says, referring to his lovely/dark 2016 solo album “Beulah.” A Steinway upright piano, Hammond B3 and a pump organ made in 1889, the same year as the house that now contains it, sit silently in the small room behind White. There’s an Elliott Smith poster in the hallway. “I’ll be happy to have some more elbow room next door,” White says, “but I’ll miss some of the banging against each other, trying to get from one room to another, knocking things over.
“If you have a big, nice really expensive perfect environment, I think it probably stifles creativity. You’re not looking for those angles because everything’s pristine.”
Thanks largely to sounds captured here in this house, Single Lock has become one of the most compelling outlets of handmade music to emerge in recent years. It’s the label that introduced the world to St. Paul & The Broken Bones, the soul-rock fireballs who went on to become an opening act for The Rolling Stones and besties with Elton John. The label has also released 20 or so other strong records, ranging in style from singer/songwriter and soul, to instrumental and atmospheric rock. Single Lock is based in Florence, a small North Alabama college town that might just be The South’s next great creative hub, and already home to famed clothing designer Billy Reid, perhaps Alabama’s best restaurant (Odette), a charming downtown and disproportionate abundance of musical talent.
The label was constructed by White and his two partners, Alabama Shakes keyboardist Ben Tanner and Florence financial planner Will Trapp, to give that homegrown talent a better shot at being heard. The label began as more of a co-op idea kicked around by Trapp and Tanner, melded with White’s post-Civil Wars itch to build a recording studio. White and his family were displaced from a home fire and living in a Florence hotel, when Trapp and Tanner pitched him the idea that became Single Lock.
"Being able to make a proper record in a proper studio with a producer and other musicians and not have the clock ticking over their head,” White says. “Not have it be so expensive they have to cram the entire record into an hour or studio time or have to make it on a laptop in somebody’s closet. Once you have that (well-recorded album), then it opens up so many more avenues where you just need to get out in a van and tour your ass off. And you have that calling card: here’s who we are, not a close facsimile of what we could be. With The Civil Wars and with the Alabama Shakes, we both were products of something that really was a grass roots, word of mouth kind of thing. So I truly believe that can happen for lots more bands to come, where people will pick you up and carry you along with them and you go places you never expected you could. But without that record, it’s hard for people to get hip to it. It’s hard to get people onboard.”
White is 45 years old but the handsome, longhaired devil looks at least 10 years younger than that. He grew up in The Shoals and in Loretto, Tenn. and has an authentically humble personality to match those origins. Tanner and Trapp had also grown up in the Shoals. Tanner was best friends with the younger brother of Trapp’s best friend. Growing up, they’d bounced the same trampolines and basketballs. After Trapp, a Muscle Shoals High School grad, moved back to Florence from Atlanta around 2010, to head up the Meryl Lynch office his father had founded 30 years earlier, he and Tanner, who was in like three bands at the time, including Florence rock outfit Belle Adair, started meeting up for coffee.
“You don’t have as much of the social pretense here,” says Trapp, who’s also resided in Chicago, Nashville and Connecticut. “It’s not like somebody in finance can’t be friends with somebody in three different bands.” Trapp has an uncommonly intense connection to music for a finance dude though, smitten since receiving a “Full Moon Fever” cassette around the age of 12, and continuing through an adulthood in which he's attended 40 or so Bob Dylan concerts. “A lot of people that are in finance play golf and fish and hunt and do all this, and I don’t do as much of that,” says Trapp, who is at a similar lifestage as White, as they each have three children.
The day after I meet with White at the label’s house-studio, Trapp is seated in the green room of 116 E. Mobile, Single Lock’s intimate music venue, named for its downtown Florence address. Framed images of Spooner Oldham, Duane Allman, Bobbie Gentry and Rick Hall hang on the walls around him. After Trapp moved back to town, more and more of North Alabama’s top music talent, including Jason Isbell, was starting to breakthrough to larger audiences. And moving to larger cities. When the Alabama Shakes played a pivotal 2011 show here at now-shuttered Florence vinyl retailer Pegasus Records, Trapp was there. He could feel something was happening. “So Ben and I said we’ve got to do something to try and keep some of the resources here and build on this talent base that clearly exists,” Trapp says. “This is just a creative part of our state.” Around that time, The Civil Wars went on hiatus, White came off the road and was focused on his family.
The first record Single Lock put out was “Overseas Then Under,” by artsy local band The Bear, which Tanner recorded at the home of the group’s singer Louisa Murray and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Pitts, lugging his gear in a Mazda hatchback. Next came Belle Adair’s impressive, Wilco-ish bow “The Brave and the Blue.”
Those were both solid notable releases, but things went completely nuts with the label’s third ever release: the full-length debut LP from Birmingham band St. Paul & The Broken Bones, “Half the City.” Released in February 2014, “Half the City” went on to sell around 150,000 units, a number akin to going platinum 20 years earlier. St. Paul was a hot new live act with good songs. And it certainly didn’t hurt the group’s classic horns-based R&B was the sound most closely associated with Muscle Shoals, as depicted in the well-received 2013 documentary film “Muscle Shoals,” that was subsequently frequently streamed on Netflix. It was Single Lock that connected St. Paul with the band’s eventual management and booking. The band then came to the label about recording and releasing their first full-length recording. (There’s a personal connection between the label and virtually all the acts that have recorded for it.)
Tanner recorded St. Paul’s debut over just five or so days at Nutthouse Recording Studio in Sheffield, with overdubs at the Single Lock house-studio. “That St. Paul record, Paul’s vocals on that 90 percent of that were the live vocal with the band in the room,” Tanner says now, referring to singer Paul Janeway. “That was pretty crazy to be in the moment just like, ‘Oh shit, this sounds like a finished record immediately.’”
Photo of Ben Tanner by Tamika Moore/tmoore@al.com
St. Paul’s live-honed chops and appealing songs were responsible for how good “Half the City” sounded, but so was Tanner. Previously having worked at Muscle Shoals’ legendary Fame Studios and a student of records by artists ranging from The Beach Boys and Beatles to D’Angelo and Radiohead, Tanner is a truly gifted engineer and record producer. It doesn’t hurt he comes to music through the piano, an instrument equally adept at melody and melody and rhythm. He first started playing piano, on his own initiative, at age five or so. Now 34, Tanner graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis with a degree in philosophy and lived in France before returning to The Shoals to work at Fame in 2006. While Alabama Shakes singer Brittany Howard is a powerful, spellbinding vocalist, musically Tanner, officially a touring member of the band (a la Ron Wood with mid-70s Rolling Stones) may be the Shakes’ most critical instrumentalist. His biggest keyboard influences include Paul McCartney. Benmont Tench, known for his work with Tom Petty, is another touchstone.
Tanner’s time is the subject of an extremely dense, color-coded Google calendar. Blue entries are Single Lock, yellow are John Paul White gigs, green are 116 E. Mobile shows, red are personal and his schedule is also shared on Alabama Shakes’ internal calendar, as well as some Single Lock bands. “Everything I’m doing every day is stuff I want to be doing,” Tanner says though.
Having access to producer like Tanner, and increasingly John Paul White too, who’s been involved with making many records, is just as big a resource for Single Lock artists as the label’s well-geared recording studio. “Playing your songs or being in a band and then making a record are kind of different skills,” Tanner says. “And I think it really helps have somebody like me or John who’s just done it a lot and you sort of learn from past successes and failures in the studio of how to capture something. It helps to have someone steering that. And it takes reps. Even a really prolific artist is probably only going to put out a record every two or three years so in a decade they’ll make four or five records, but in that same decade I’m going to make, I don’t know, a hundred records, involved in some level. It’s not like I have any particular magic powers or anything, it’s just having done it a lot.”
Photo of Nicole Atkins by Anna Webber
Working with a skilled producer also gives bands a nuanced, outside point-of-view: when to stop obsessing over a snare drum sound; when to redo a guitar solo and when to not; when to save a song for the next album and when to include it on this one. “I get as obsessed as anybody,” Tanner says. “But I think when you’re the artist it’s easy to get lost in the process and it’s almost like you’re underwater and you don’t know which end is up.”
My conversation with Tanner also takes place in the 116 greenroom. He’s wearing glasses, T-shirt, jeans and his dark hair and beard are cut office-job short. He could just as well be an IT guy, if you didn’t know he was one of the state’s most talented musicians. When I first meet Trapp the following day, it’s at Rivertown Coffee Co., the sort of place where everyone from local guitarists to city council members come to get their morning jolt. At first I actually think he’s Tanner, just kicked up a few notches sartorially with a sport coat and button-up shirt. Turns out this is a running joke at Single Lock, which the three partners have nicknamed Single Look because of their shared propensity for eyewear and facial hair.
Whereas most Single Lock Records are produced by Tanner, White or both, Nashville singer/songwriter Nicole Atkins’ endearing Single Lock Records release “Goodnight Rhonda Lee” is an exception. She recorded the LP in Ft. Worth, Texas’ Niles City Sound, the same studio retro-R&B singer Leon Bridges cut his critically lauded “Coming Home” debut album. Tanner did mix “Goodnight Rhonda Lee” though. The record features Atkins accomplished and emotive vocals and aesthetically draws from classic pop and soul. Atkins had previously recorded for a major label (Columbia) and indies (including New York’s Razor & Tie). Her first connection to Single Lock was through performing at 116. “I really liked how everything they were doing was real grass roots and in-house and it was run by people’s whose careers I really admired,’ Atkins says. She’s vacationing in her Asbury Park, N.J. hometown when reached for this phone interview. “It just seemed like a really cool, tight-knit family that I wanted to be a part of. I think that’s what I was always looking for in a label after I left Columbia, a label that was run more like a family.” There was also an allure to putting out a Muscle Shoals style record - “more based in songwriting than in style,” she says - through a label that was actually located in The Shoals.
Photo of, from left, Ben Tanner, Will Trapp, John Paul White and Reed Watson courtesy of Single Lock Records
Being from the Muscle Shoals area opens a lot of doors for Single Lock, says the label’s manager Reed Watson. “It’s an honor to make music here, to be a label here,” Watson says. “Yes, we trade on that name all over the world, but we count that as an honor and try to honor it with what we do. It’s really important to us. That’s why I think what we do is really unique, because it’s filling in the blanks on history a little bit, and showing a lot of reverence to it.”
While the area is rightly known as a recording Mecca, Muscle Shoals hasn’t really been much of a live music town, something Single Lock is trying to remedy with 116 E. Mobile. “I think it’s probably the most important public thing we do,” Watson says, likening the venue to a billboard for the label. “If we don’t have this venue and you play original music you’re not playing in The Shoals, and that’s a tragedy, you know?” While the venue is by no means a financial windfall at this point, Watson believes that will eventually improve. And 116 is also how Single Lock has found some of its recording artists, in addition to Atkins, country singer The Kernal and vocal duo Penny and Sparrow have come to the label this way, Watson says. Blond and passionate, Watson has been working for Single Lock since 2014. He’s also a hell of a drummer, and a full-time member of Belle Adair, who will finally release their excellent sophomore album “Tuscumbia” in January. A Max Weinberg disciple, he’s also bashed his red sparkle Ludwig kit for Single Lock artists including gifted singer/songwriter Dylan LeBlanc and atmospheric-rockers The Pollies live, and on records by John Paul White and Shoals icon Donnie Fritts.
As Single Lock manager, he has much more in his hands than drumsticks though. He’s constantly on his laptop and smartphone dealing, coordinating with venues, press, artists, vinyl pressing plants, retailers and more. Much of this takes place while in a tour van, gig or hotel room. “I used to, people I was on the phone or emailing with, try to maintain the illusion that I was at a desk and in a town,” Watson, age 32, says. “But I felt like the minute I started saying I’m in the back of the van, I’m on the road, I think people find it so charming they give me more leeway and work harder for us because of that. I just think people identify with that underdog, clawing in the dirt thing that we have going here.” Sometimes Watson’s work involves super-cool things, touring with White, having iconic songwriter Dan Penn’s call interrupt his lunch with Fritts, other times more mundane, like sorting through misprinted CDs and replacing the discs with corrected copies. As a fan of indie labels like Merge, Fat Possum and Daptone, he knows what he signed up for though with Single Lock and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Single Lock’s only other full-time employee is 21-year-old Addy Kimbrell. She graduated May 2016 with an entertainment industry degree from Florence’s University of North Alabama, and has known she’d wanted to work in the music business since was still a middle schooler looking for new bands on MySpace. “For me it has more to do with the people making the music and artists and relationships than it has to do with the music business,” Kimbrell says. At Single Lock, her primary tasks including accounting and social media. The latter is trickery than you might think, with tone and timing of posts paramount to the label’s music and news reaching listeners. On a recent afternoon, Kimbrell is in the back room of 116 printing off mailing labels, which are piling up at her feet. Boxes of Single Lock vinyl and CDs are nearby. Her favorite of the label’s releases thus far is LeBlanc’s captivating 2016 LP “Cautionary Tale”: “I love the strings, I love the way it sounds, I think it’s absolutely beautiful and I also think the songwriting is second to none. The packaging is really cool and I think it was really well executed.” From Oxford, Ala., which is about halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta, Kimbrell adds: “I think the stuff we’re doing at Single Lock has longevity to it. I think you could listen to any of those records 10 years from now and it would still be just as good and mean just as much.”
Physical copies of Single Lock records are available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all of Europe. Fritts’ album was the subject of a large in-store display at Tower Records in Japan. After “Half The City,” the label’s top selling releases are White’s “Beulah” and LeBlanc’s “Cautionary Tale.” But digital, a worldwide vehicle, is where the real action is. About half of Single Lock’s revenue from music sales come from streaming and downloads. A third is from vinyl. CDs make up the rest, Watson says. “John’s record has seen blinding success on Spotify and the streaming world, and I know other people will disagree with this, but the money it’s brought in in that world has been substantial for us,” Watson says. “We love that stuff. There’s no hesitation for us to put any of our music on a streaming service and let people listen to it and fall in love with it and if they decide to buy a record, cool. They’re probably going to go to a show. By industry standards people would go, ‘Well that didn’t sell as much as much as Civil Wars,’ but by our standards it reached people. It reached millions of people and we have the statistics to prove it. And that kind of what we’re building the future of the company on: if we just reach people and share with them the vision and idea behind what we’re trying to here, they’ll buy in.”
Single Lock hasn’t borrowed a dime. There’s nobody to pay back – yet. However, the label’s limited resources must be spent super efficiently. That means what they say no to (college radio promoters, in-store display posters, etc.) is as important as what they say yes to. “There is still a lot of pay to play stuff on radio, just writing somebody a check to get songs on and then getting an invoice in the mail for 1,200 promotional coasters,” Trapp says. “So, saying no to that.” He adds, “Nobody’s really piling up the money at Single Lock but it is paying for itself and it is on a sustainable course. Honestly, that’s all we’re trying to do, to set it up to go for a long time.”
John Paul White grew up listening to his parents’ Ray Price and Johnny Mathis records. He then gravitated towards heavy metal – Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Pantera – before arriving at the dramatic singer/songwriters the music he’d make as an adult often echoes: Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, etc. Away from music and a family he walked away from Civil Wars big bucks to spend more time with, his interests include baseball’s Detroit Tigers. After the Civil Wars broke up in 2014, the singer/songwriter wanted “to do nothing but hold my babies and go to dance recitals and sleep in my bed.” When Trapp and Tanner, who he knew from songwriting at Fame, initially presented the idea that became Single Lock to White in that hotel, he told them he needed to think it over for the night.
“John loves music, he just doesn’t love the music business,” Trapp says. Now it’s difficult to picture White without Single Lock. It’s enabled him to bring passion projects, like Fritts’ special “Oh My Goodness” LP, which White produced, to light. He’s still figuring out his style as a record producer though. “The people that I was always fascinated with were the guys that knew how to fill the room with the right people,” White says. “Not the guys that were micromanagers that told everybody what to do and what to play and when to stop and when to start and when to stand.” He personally researched and tracked down the Studer broadcast console the Single Lock studio is built around, but considers his trusty 1930s Gibson and 1950s Martin acoustic guitars the label’s most precious pieces of gear. Many Single Lock artists, including White, provide backing vocals and instrumentation on each others' recordings.
So why does White stay in Florence? Why not do all this label stuff in Nashville or Austin, Texas or whatever? “I’ve traveled to most places that a musician might relocate to and I’ve spent lots of time in all those places,” White says. “The more I traveled the more I realized that I’ll never leave. And being able to travel helps, but I have zero urge to live anywhere else. The only time I have any urge to live anywhere else is when it’s 110 degrees in the summertime or when I’m getting fed up with something politically, but outside of that this is where I’ll die.”
Being in downtown Florence, one can definitely feel an energy here. The music. The food. The Billy Reid stuff. But the city is still small enough and not a glaring destination that it’s not an overwhelming place to be. Yet. But that could change as cities like Nashville become increasingly crowded and expensive, potentially causing musicians and creative types to relocate here.
“This town is growing up,” White says. “This town is getting more eclectic and there’s a lot more culture here than there was even five years ago, definitely 10 years ago and you can get a decent bite to eat and you can buy decent clothes, and all these things change a community. In most ways, it’s better. We’ve got people moving to town and that’s great but there’s also other people that see opportunity and see that there’s a lot of things going on here, 'Maybe I can get a piece of that.' And that’s not so great. But they’ll figure out pretty quick that you’ve really got to want to be here. You don’t come here because it’s Austin or it’s Nashville or anything like that. You come here because you want to strip stuff away and deconstruct and simply your life and focus.”
Watson feels the relationship between Single Lock and Florence couldn’t be more symbiotic. “The success or failure of this business will mimic the success of failure of this community,” the label manager says. “I do believe very, very strongly that we are writing the next chapter in a very long storybook about this area. There is a thread that winds through everything artistic and musical that’s ever happened in the Shoals area and I feel honored and humbled that we are in that thread."
Photo courtesy Allister Ann
More on Single Lock Records
John Paul White talks new solo album, Civil Wars, social media
Dylan LeBlanc is the next must-hear Muscle Shoals musician
The Pollies: Florence band’s buzzed-about new LP
Belle Adair Q&A: Florence band talks Alabama Shakes tour
St. Paul & The Broken Bones singer talks debut LP, Billy Reid, Nirvana
Donnie Fritts, John Paul White on their must-hear album
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