You’re looking at country

I’m getting spooked,” says Anna Matijasic, the 26-year-old fiddler for Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees, and I know the feeling, a dull pounding in my gut.

It’s a bit past 8pm on a Wednesday last September. Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees—Matijasic, bassist Jen Fleisher, guitarist Charlie Bell and bandleader Jim Waive—are on their third day of recording in the old Purvis General Store in Esmont, the house that Roderick Coles converted into a studio with separate, makeshift recording “rooms” for musicians to perform in so they can be microphoned individually. The space is dark, a bit drafty.

Coles sits at a sprawling, rickety wooden desk that supports his Apple computer, which bears a sticker that reads “Don’t fool yourself.” A cable for the microphone to Fleisher’s bass, the looming, dark-wooded instrument Waive calls a “bull fiddle,” snakes out from Coles’ desk on the right side, finding its way to the plywood-and-mattress-lined nook where she stands with her arms draped over her instrument’s long body. To Coles’ left, Charlie Bell stands in a light-colored polo shirt, khaki cargo pants and a cap; he has just replaced his dobro (a resonator guitar) with his pedal steel for another run through “House Full of Ghosts.”

The song is one of a collection of roughly a dozen that Waive wrote for the Divorcees’ second record, Strike a Match, an album of what both Waive and Bell think of as real country, the type of songs they bonded over and performed the first night they shared a microphone more than six years ago in Michael’s Bistro. Hank Williams country. Patsy Cline country. Johnny Cash country. And, for good measure, some Jim Waive originals.

“What I’ve always wanted to play was that old country music, and it’s kinda hard to find people that like doing that,” says Bell when I ask him about his connection to Waive’s music. “I definitely didn’t want to play ‘radio country,’ and there’s plenty of opportunities for me to be in bands like that, but that’s just not what I want to do.”

Jim Waive stands in a glass box holding the acoustic guitar he has used since he was 10. His beard is longer than I’ve seen it in months—since I last saw them play at the now-closed Atomic Burrito, a twice-monthly gig that sent well over one hundred audience members spinning like pinwheels into the center of the tiny space—and there is a sharpness about his beguiling blue eyes that makes him seem a bit anxious. Although the band has been in the studio for three days, today is the first marathon recording session, the members tracking songs from noon to 4, and then resuming at 7:30 to play into the night.

Matijasic shudders, visible through a window behind Waive’s recording booth; she is the farthest removed from the rest of the band, tossed into a room with a dismantled black drum kit and a set of tattered cymbals laying on a shard of carpet. The band has played “House Full of Ghosts” a handful of times now, but Waive wants Bell and Matijasic to trade spots in the songs where they’re taking solos, and the band is concerned about the song’s structure.

Bringing it all back home: Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees (from left to right, Jen Fleisher, Anna Matijasic, Waive and Charlie Bell) performing at the Charlottesville Pavilion in July of 2007, opening for Randy Travis.

“I want to make sure we don’t shift from Eastern Bloc to German schnitzelhouse on the rhythm,” Fleisher calls from her booth, nearly invisible to Matijasic from her position across the span of Coles’ dark, wooden studio. She bobs a bit behind her enormous instrument, easily the most energetic of the bunch, although nearly everyone is in a playful mood. A few takes ago on the title track for Match, Waive jokingly changed the lyrics for the chorus in a rare moment of humor among his lyrics, changing the word “burn” to “bird”:

“Strike a match/ Watch that baby bird.”

But Matijasic is still creeped out, and asks for company in her abandoned corner of the house; someone volunteers me, and so I step carefully past Bell’s collection of guitars and through Waive’s recording booth into Matijasic’s room, careful not to upset the cords strewn along the floor, plugged into just the right spots to get precisely the sound Waive wants from his band.

A few weeks from tonight, Waive and the Divorcees will get the sound Waive wants, the real country sound, and the recording of Strike a Match is wrapped; not long after, during the Divorcees’ gig with local bluegrass successes the Hackensaw Boys at Satellite Ballroom on New Year’s Eve, Waive announces the release details for his record: February 15, during a live concert at the Satellite Ballroom. A crowd of 200 or so cheers, then kicks up its heels and yips as Waive leads his band into the album’s title track.

“I’m free from you, baby, free at last,” Waive earnestly croons, his thin voice taking on the consistency of smoke and ash, “I’m free ’cause I torched my past.”

Tonight, from within Matijasic’s room, Bell is invisible and Fleisher can only be seen by straining. But I can hear everything from my spot, and the sound is eerily beautiful—dampened slightly by my seclusion in a far-off corner, but a congress of burbling electric guitar, Fleisher’s buzzing bass and the indomitable doom-THWACK of Waive’s ancient instrument.

And Waive’s back is visible, his body shaking ever so slightly with the force of his palm’s impact against the bronze strings of his guitar. His voice, a thin shiver, runs through the song’s chorus again. ’Cause when I needed you the most/ You up and left me in this house full of ghosts.

Before another take of the song, Matijasic murmurs to me. “Feel like I’m summoning the ghosts,” she says, then begins bowing lightly, her careful tone evoking the sounds of friction, knives, weeping, nails, hurt.

Country music’s rag and bone romantic image is a blend of violent tragedies and stoic figures—Cash’s addictions, Williams’ overdose. Patsy Cline, raised in Winchester, Virginia, was thrown into the windshield of her car during a head-on collision in 1961; one month later, she recorded a hit with Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” which the Divorcees frequently cover during gigs.

Waive, drawn from a young age to what he calls the truth and honesty of country music, has experienced his share of loss, but not so much as to threaten the end of his career. Yet Strike a Match is a product of those achy, breaky, so-lonesome-I-could-cry country albums, a record that is a document of the dusty-eyed cowboy’s feelings of loneliness. It may also be his best damned record yet.

Grief and guitars

Jim Waive was born on October 17, 1963, the youngest son of his parents’ five children. When Jim was 10 years old, his father died, leaving his mother to care for her three girls, two boys and their home in Portsmouth, Virginia. His mother returned to work as a nurse to support her family, but Waive says money was scant, especially as Christmas approached.

During a night out window-shopping with his mother, Waive noticed an advertisement for a raffle to win a guitar. He entered and waited, through Christmas, then received a call on New Year’s Eve to say that he had won.

“Growing up in a big family, there’s always people to listen [to you], but you kind of internalize tragic events and find a way to deal with them,” says Waive. “And fortunately, the cosmos put a guitar in my hand.” The guitar—a warmly wooden acoustic—is the same one he uses today, and the finish has worn through in spots where his palm beats the body. Guitars are like some of those old country musicians—they have character beaten into them.

Waive worked through high school as a member of a Rolling Stones cover band and started his studies as an English major at Roanoke College in Salem, where he founded the band Echoes Farm, a psychedelic country and blues group, with drummer Kent Raine and harmonica player Fritz Berry. Berry owned a club there, and Echoes Farm nabbed gigs opening for jam bands during the late ’80s, groups like Phish and Blues Traveler, that stopped through the club.

Echoes Farm gave Waive his first experiences touring regionally and dealing with a booking agent. But after six years spent performing an average of 200 shows annually, Echoes was ready to become just that, a reverberation, the sound gone. “We were never really at home anywhere and that’s just brutal,” says Waive. “And I can see why a lot of bands just don’t make it with that living.”

Waive returned to Portsmouth to live with his brother Bob in his childhood home and wound up writing the music for a solo record that he says “never really became anything” due to what he calls a “sour experience” at a recording studio he doesn’t name.

“I just felt like they weren’t really listening to what I was hoping to get,” he says. Waive still has the masters for the studio session but never released the album.

After a few months in Portsmouth, Waive was invited by Stu Gilchrist to share a house in Charlottesville—specifically, a chicken coop that had been converted into a home off of Hydraulic Road. Gilchrist, the house sound manager at now-defunct venue Trax, had worked as a soundman for Echoes Farm and convinced Waive that he could get a job at Trax. Waive was close to family but far from a good number of friends that lived in Charlottesville. “There really wasn’t anything going on for me down there [in Portsmouth],” says Waive. “It all seemed like a good idea at the time.”

So Waive packed up his guitar and moved to the coop to live with Gilchrist and Craig Dougald, drummer for local band Indecision. “There were holes in the ceiling—you could see the sky while you were inside,” says Waive. “There were six showers and three toilets in each bathroom. It had a beautiful deck. It was awesome. And my rent was $125!”

Waive also picked up odd jobs, taking tickets and hanging posters for Trax, cooking at Rococo’s and for John Spagnolo and Mark Thompson at Starr Hill when the venue was first earning its stripes. Starr Hill quickly became an overtime endeavor; Waive says he was putting in 80-hour weeks. After a year and a half, Waive left to devote more time to music.

After he left Starr Hill, Waive began playing music with Megan Huddleston as an acoustic duo named Cracklin’ Fatbacks, adding her washboard to his guitar and crooning away in places like the Blue Moon Diner, where he released his first and only solo record. The album featured many songs that Waive wrote in his childhood home with his brother, who died not long before the record’s release, an event that worked its way into a few songs on the album, now long out of print.

“The genre of heartbreak”

Blue Moon Diner was where the Divorcees began to take shape. Waive found a regular gig playing on Thursday nights for tips, $20 and a meal. He also found Charlie Bell, the fit, tall guitarist that had cut his teeth as a member of the Hackensaw Boys.

“I had known who Charlie was from when he was in the Hackensaws; I had opened for them a couple of times,” says Waive. “And he started playing with me at the diner.”

Bell had been fired from the Hackensaw Boys around the time that he and Waive began to play together regularly at the diner, but he rejoined the group in 2003. Waive was left by his lonesome at the back of the Blue Moon until a day four years ago or so when Anna Matijasic arrived with her fiddle.

“She didn’t just say, ‘Hey, I want to play,’ but just kinda sat there, enjoying it,” says Waive. “I asked her if she played, and she said that she was classically trained, but enamored with this type of music.”

“I was like, ‘Well, shit, you oughta come over and see how we play together,” says Waive with a laugh.

By this time, Waive had found a cottage in Scottsville; “I could sing at the top of my lungs in the morning and not bother anybody,” he says. Matijasic brought her fiddle over and the two personalities clicked. Not long after, Bell quit the Hackensaw Boys, later telling me that the band’s huge tour ambitions “precluded a day job,” and rejoined Waive and Matijasic for gigs.

Waive had seen Jen Fleisher playing bass in Las Gitanas, a country/roots fusion band led by local Alex Caton, and asked her to practice with the band a bit. “We had been talking about adding a bass player,” he says. “And so I approached her.” Given the marriage stats of a few members in the band (“We chose the name,” he tells me, “from the majority of the band being divorced. And, at that time,” he laughs, “young.”), Waive christened the group The Young Divorcees. “A tip of the hat,” he says, “to the genre of heartbreak.”

Waive had a steady job working as a contracted recycler for numerous restaurants along the Downtown Mall, a job he holds currently, and so he had some money to put towards recording. In 2005, the quartet holed up for a week in Purvis’ Store, Roderick Coles’ shack-turned-studio in Esmont, and knocked out their first record. “It really was a blitzkrieg,” says Coles, a tall, dark man with a laugh that bucks his chest. “A classic, rushed bluegrassy kind of scenario. I think he knew that was the only way he could pursue that first record.”

The Young Divorcees’ self-titled album packs 10 of Waive’s songs into 35 minutes filled with fiddle-guitar battles from the band that he hand-picked and songs harvested from his love of Hank Williams on vinyl and his own late-night loneliness. The group recorded around a central microphone, Bell leaning in to share vocals with Waive on choruses, or leaning out to let Matijasic lean in to play a solo.

“I was really of the mind to try and get it to sound like the old country 78s, that really thin spectrum of sound, where you only really hear the instruments sometimes,” says Waive. “And, I feel, mission accomplished.”

It took The Young Divorcees a long year and a half to sell all 1,000 copies of their first album: to their monthly crowds at Atomic Burrito, dancing atop the wooden bars; to the mess of listeners at the Charlottesville Pavilion, where the band opened for Dwight Yoakam in August of 2006 and for Randy Travis in July of 2007. But Waive nailed the authentic tone of the waltzes and swerving bluegrass riffs of ’60s and ’70s country, and you can hear each instrument joining force with one another, uniting under the commanding, convincing twang of his voice.

Sarah White, who performs in the (All New) Acorn Sisters, a folk-and-country duo that also features Waive’s girlfriend, Sian Richards, first saw Waive perform in 2004 at the Tea Bazaar on the Downtown Mall. Since then, the (All New) Acorn Sisters have made semi-regular appearances at Divorcees’ shows as an opening or guest act, and both White and Richards have performed a number of Waive’s songs with him (as well as recorded backing vocals for songs on Strike a Match, including “Since You Been Gone” and “Old Dominion Girl,” a song which Waive wrote for Richards).

White is careful to describe Waive. During an interview, I try to ask her how Waive first appeared to her, hoping that she might’ve seen the same western specter I first encountered, but she calls him a “stand-up, regular, down-home, real person.” When I ask her for comparisons to other country musicians, we wind up talking about the merits of comparing musicians to their predecessors and inspirations, and agree that it’s best not to assign someone too derivative an identity.

“You’ve gotta put him in a context,” White says. “But Elvis is a context, Hank Williams is a context, Buck Owens is a context…[P]eople need a frame of reference.”

I think a bit about my first conversation with Waive, about the sorrow in his lyrics and the swagger in the tunes, during the Young Divorcees’ set on New Year’s Eve, the anniversary of the day that Waive got his first guitar, which pops and snaps in his hands as I watch. Waive and Bell wear dark suits and light-colored cowboy hats, while Fleisher and Matijasic wear form-gripping gold dresses. The crowd swells as the time for the Hackensaw Boys draws near, but every person that steps through the door gravitates to this opening band, their steps gaining in swagger and shoulder-shimmying enjoyment as they press closer to the stage.

“If you listen to my songs, they’re sad,” said Waive the first time we spoke. “I think those things that happened when I was young and discovering music kind of affected my songwriting. So when I’m feeling sad I write sad songs, but when I’m happy it’s less likely I’ll write a song because I’m more likely out enjoying the happy feeling.”

Doom-THWACK, doom-THWACK, doom-THWACK.

“Happy is more of an immediate sensation of now,” Waive said, and the last words out of his mouth from that first conversation in September ring in my head. “Loneliness lasts.” Onstage at the Ballroom, Fleisher shucks and jives behind her bass while Matijasic and Bell attack the limits of their searing instruments. Waive stands front and center, his body piston-straight, guitar raised, head down, hat over his face, doom-THWACK.

Ghosts on record

It’s a lip-chapping 28 degrees when I meet Roderick Coles at a gas station on Route 20, a few miles to the east of Purvis’ Store in Esmont. We’re headed to Full Moon Studios, a recording studio at the Scottsville home of Ron Ruane and the place where Coles mastered the new Divorcees record, to listen to Strike a Match. Coles asks me to follow him “three or four miles” down the road, then tears off in his Chevy pick-up, doing 50 miles per hour down paths as narrow and tightly wound as guitar strings.

Roderick Coles spent three weeks recording and mixing Strike a Match, the latest record by Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees, in his Esmont studio. “Jim’s music is always an ode, a throwback to a certain era,” says Coles. “But that’s just kinda the nature of his music.”

Inside Full Moon, I meet Ruane, who grew up playing drums with Tom Keefer, leader of the ’80s metal act, Cinderella. Keefer’s studio space is the antithesis to Coles’ haunted house, all polished wood and orderly instruments, and the speakers Coles connects to Ruane’s computer dwarf the speakers in Waive’s conversion van, where I first listened to the record. It all seems modern, better suited to “radio country.” Coles hits Play.

“Since You Been Gone,” the opening track, opens the record in a logical step from the last Divorcees album, with backing vocals from the Acorn gals giving the track an expansive, Carter Family feel. But, through the studio speakers, the big, bucking beast of the Divorcees springs out at me—Waive’s palm-smacked guitar matching the pulse of Fleisher’s bass, Matijasic soaring upwards like some Eastern mystic while Bell burbles a bit lower only to break free with riffs of steel and heat. What’s more, the sound has depth; not the sensation of things uniting on one level, as with the previous record, but an all-systems-go kick, old country tunes through new technology like the channeling of old spirits.

I’m waiting for that same haunted cowboy sense when Coles and I hit “Crooked Man,” a minor key rave about an incorrigible criminal of a man that lives with a family “in a house of crooked logs.” As Waive sings, “You better get this crooked man in line” in the chorus, his voice splits into a shout and its echo, like soul and body parted. The effect was a “happy accident” during the mixing and mastering of the record, according to Coles.

“So you actually have Jim Waive with a little modern vocal double,” says Coles, smiling. Then he corrects himself, as if Waive were standing beside him realigning his vision: “Well, not that modern. But it makes the song amazing, really adds a lot of power, a lot of spook.”

Coles walks me through the songs I heard at Purvis’ Store months earlier and explains his efforts to put a “gloss” on the Divorcees’ sound—doubling Waive’s acoustic guitar and vocals in most places. “That added an element of polish that he was looking for, and that’s all it really took,” says Coles. “[But] working with Jim Waive is kinda staying out of the way—he’s got a pretty linear vision of what he wants it to sound like.”

And what Jim Waive wanted Strike a Match to sound like is the old-time country music. Sure, the digital recording software and high-end mic jobs led to Waive’s ghostly vocal effects and tracked a few other surprises—harmonies from the Acorns, the whimper of a saw bowed by Matijasic. But the skull-rattling sound of bone on wood, Waive’s hands smacking his guitar’s bass string and body, pounding his loneliness and love into rhythm, runs beneath everything else—a sound that reminds me of something Sarah White told me about Waive’s playing style.

“The way he plays with his thumb, the bass notes,” White explains. “You think you love music, but what you really love is the thump that’s in your stomach. You think it’s in your heart or in your brain or you think it’s ’cause you’re drunk, but really it’s because it’s actually pounding your stomach, your intestine lining. That’s what I like about it.”

I remember my nights spent with the band and Coles at Purvis’ Store—nicknames tossed around for band members, everything from tea to Butterfinger bars to Coles’ homegrown jalapeño peppers consumed as pick-ups between takes, Waive drawing an American Spirit cigarette out on the porch and lighting up, match reflecting in his dusty blue eyes. But my strongest memory is the band running through “House Full of Ghosts” in Coles’ dusty old house in Esmont on black and silent nights, repeating the song like an incantation as a rumble courses through the pit of my stomach. Now, as Coles cues the song on Ruane’s speaker system, I close my eyes and submit to Waive’s ghosts, vague and persistent.