JD McPherson digs deep on his latest album with a little help from Nashville A-listers and his wife

In September, Rolling Stone Country debuted the new song “Crying’s Just a Thing You Do” by JD McPherson, an Oklahoma singer-songwriter and bandleader now based in Nashville.

But McPherson, who plays Visulite Theatre Wednesday, doesn’t see himself as a country artist. He’s a rock n’ roller at heart.

“I’m from the country, but our self-described label is a rock n’ roll band,” he says a couple of days before Thanksgiving. “There’s a lot of blurred lines. I certainly appreciate Rolling Stone Country for doing anything on us, and the Outlaw Country Sirius XM station plays us all the time. We’ve been fortunate enough to fit into a lot of different-shaped holes. We’ve opened for Queens of the Stone Age and Robert Plant.”

Maybe McPherson’s ability to fit in with different crowds is due to the disparate sources he draws from. In making “Undivided Heart & Soul,” his latest album, he co-wrote with seasoned writers like Butch Walker, took advice from and jammed with QOTSA’s Josh Homme, and worked with producer and Lucius’ drummer Dan Molad, who comes from more of an electronic background.

And the process of moving to Nashville and writing “Undivided Heart & Soul” opened McPherson up to a lot of new ideas, including writing with others.

“I just wanted to work on writing as a craft,” he says. “The more people and more kinds of writers you write with, you learn something from everybody. I’ve written with a couple Nashville hitmakers. It’s so different to see how their brains work and how quickly they pull things out of the air.”

“I don’t write that way personally,” he continues. “I tend to go a little weirder or left of center. When you get around those people that that’s what they do for a living, they just have this different mechanism. I wrote with Eric Church one day. Two and a half songs in one sitting. He was so incredibly fast. He thinks about the narrative arc and wordplay and soft rhymes and internal rhymes, and all these things I’d never thought of before.”

McPherson also co-wrote a track with his wife, Mandy – a first for the couple.

“I found a batch of lyrics she had stowed away and wasn’t showing anybody. I was like, ‘You’re hiding these great lyrics from your husband who is struggling with these songs?’ ” he recalls. He ended up using them to introduce the album’s closer, “Let’s Get Out of Here While We’re Young.”

For McPherson, it was yet another incident of digging deeper.

“If you find the right writer,” he says, “they can get in your head and help you bring out things you hadn’t thought of before.”

“When something quality would happen, it was really more of a relief than anything else,” he adds. “Man, it feels good to finish a song, especially when you’re in the middle of making a record.”

This story was originally published November 29, 2017 at 5:54 PM with the headline "JD McPherson digs deep on his latest album with a little help from Nashville A-listers and his wife."