JD McPherson’s new music shakes off the shackles, gets irreverent and fuzzy

JD McPherson is in a car, headed away from a music festival in Tahlequah, Okla., in search of something edible.

“All they had to eat there were make-your-own chicken salad sandwiches that had been sitting out all day. And we elected not to take a risk with our lives today,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune in a phone interview.

He’s used to such things by now. Problems to be overcome, that is — not botulism or salmonella or food poisoning.

When McPherson last played Salt Lake City in May 2015, he was little-known but quickly gaining attention for his retro-rock band’s audaciously entertaining opening sets for no less than Robert Plant. He returns this Monday for a sold-out headlining performance at The State Room, in advance of the imminent release of his third studio album, “Undivided Heart & Soul.”

As for the time in between, though …

“I’d say that things weren’t going really that great for a little while,” he said.

He painstakingly rattled off the low spots: his family’s hurried and harried move from Oklahoma to Nashville and their difficulty acclimating; growing tensions among band members; pressure to record a new album sufficiently intriguing to rekindle touring (and therefore moneymaking) opportunities; and devoting a big chunk of the budget to hiring a big-time producer to helm the studio sessions, only for him to declare the band unready to record and bail after just a day or two.

But, I followed up, I read that after you stopped recording, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age invited you to come out to L.A. and play with him, and you had some sessions out there that kind of got you in a better frame of mind. Is that accurate?

McPherson’s initial reaction was to downplay it, chalk it up to overblown grandiosity as a result of compounding thirdhand hearsay retellings.

“It’s funny — this got out, and it’s a question I have to keep answering. It’s a thing that, at the time, it really wasn’t …”

But then he trailed off into silence for a moment, and you could almost hear the mental gearshift take place: You know what — screw it. It WAS a big deal.

“I mean, it really was kind of a life-changing thing for me, because it got me out of a bad headspace. I consider him somebody I really look up to, but he has also just been a real friend to me — even after barely knowing me, he treated me like an old friend. He was just worried that I was losing my zest for it, and he was absolutely right. He was like, ‘You know what you need to do — you need to lock yourself in a studio with a couple crazy guys for a couple of days and play through a bunch of fuzz pedals, and remember what it’s like to be 15 years old and just have fun with music again.’ So that’s what we did,” McPherson said. “And yeah, after that was over, it was like a musical spa, and I came home feeling like I’d shaken off some shackles a little bit. ’Cause I had all these ideas that I was actually afraid to sort of follow — some of the new song ideas were a little left of center from what we had done before, and I was worrying about that. I worry a lot — I’m a worrier. So after that experience, it was kinda like, ‘Well, alright, I’m just gonna try to let some of these things breathe for a minute and see what takes root.’ Anyway, it really did sort of help, I wouldn’t say steer the direction of the record, but it definitely did take the blinders off a little bit.”

There were still those issues to work through, of course. He estimated it took about a year before his family felt fully comfortable in Tennessee. As for his other family, his bandmates, well, that took some time, too.

“There were actually points where we couldn’t even be in the same room together, certain people,” McPherson recalled. “It was just kind of … Well, here’s the thing: If you have any kind of problems, being stuck in a van with each other for six hours a day can really only magnify those things! So there’s a point where you’re like, ‘Man, this is really tough.’ ”

The modern realities of the music industry didn’t help.

There was plenty of internal pressure to craft an album that would generate enough public interest to make another tour feasible.

“These days, people aren’t really buying records, people aren’t even really buying downloads — the touring thing is really the only thing you can count on to earn a living. And after touring on a record for a couple years, things start to die down a little bit, and you kind of have to keep momentum going,” he noted.

That made the aborted recording session — and the money spent on it — sting that much more.

Of course, in hindsight, he sees that producer was actually right.

“We weren’t completely ready yet. And the producer at the time was like, ‘I just don’t have the time to work on these songs this way.’ He was used to working on two, three songs a day. And truth be told, we weren’t really ready,” McPherson said. “It was no big deal [in retrospect], but at the time it was pretty daunting.”

In the end, the musical issues turned out to be nothing that couldn’t be overcome by an L.A. jam session, a legendary Nashville studio and a new old guitar.

Interpersonal issues resolved, the band decided it was ready to give recording another go. But where to do it?

“A quick email to the Country Music Hall of Fame later, and we found ourselves in RCA Studio B,” McPherson noted with amazement.

RCA Studio B just happens to be the birthplace of the “Nashville Sound,” the place where the likes of Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson recorded.

There was just one small problem.

“RCA Studio B isn’t a functioning commercial studio, it’s a museum attraction for Nashville,” he said. “There’s no equipment set up there, so every night we had to haul everything in, set up, record and then tear down. And that’s not the optimal way to do it.”

But the place had a vibe, an aura that couldn’t be ignored.

Until, of course, it was decided it would be better to ignore it.

“So when we got into RCA Studio B the first day, we were like, ‘OK, we’re gonna do stuff that sounds like RCA Studio B material, like Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, big Nashville production-type stuff, lush timpanies and stuff like that,’ ” McPherson recalled. “But the longer we were there, it just felt less genuine somehow. And the more time we spent in that room, the more irreverent and fuzzy everything got. Almost like the room was shaking off some kind of thing itself. I know that sounds really corny, but … it’s like ‘The Shining’! If Jack Nicholson stays in that hotel long enough, he’s gonna start doing some crazy stuff. And that’s what happened to us.”

That aforementioned six-string certainly helped in that regard.

While acknowledging he’s not the type to add a new guitar to his collection on every tour, he conceded that one fateful tour stop in Austin yielded a different outcome.

“I went into this music store, and there was this guitar there … it was like a ’61 Supro Dual Tone. If you’ve ever seen pictures of Link Wray holding this white guitar, that’s the guitar. And I’m a huge Link Wray fan, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the Link Wray guitar!’ ” he said. “And it looked like it had never been played, I actually thought it was a reissue. And they were like, ‘No, that was actually under somebody’s bed for 50 years.’ It had the original case, the original strap, it even had an old guitar cable in it. And I just had to have it. So I got it, and that guitar really made me want to do more stuff like that, more garagey-sounding, ratty-sounding stuff.”

The end result is that “Undivided Heart & Soul,” due out Oct. 6, sounds a bit less like the vintage rhythm and blues McPherson has made his calling card, and instead drifts “more into the world of Link Wray, and The Sonics, and The Stooges even, and, man, bless our hearts, even just a little bit of British rock ’n’ roll, like The Animals.” He laughingly recalled a phone conversation with New West Records’ increasingly concerned and confused A&R rep, in which “I just was kind of describing it as a romantic garage-rock record. ’Cause the songs were a little rough around the edges, they were a little more personal lyrically, and they were starting to branch out.”

They’ll be playing most of “Undivided Heart & Soul” at The State Room, and McPherson said he’s genuinely excited for the opportunity.

He distinctly remembered an early show in SLC being the “first time people jumped on the stage [with me]. And I was like, ‘Wow. Salt Lake City is a really wild place!’ ” And so it holds a special place in his heart.

More important, perhaps, given his amateur food connoisseur status, it also holds a special place in his stomach.

“Also, the best meatball sub I ever had in my entire life was in Salt Lake City,” he said, “so we’re looking forward to hitting Moochie’s again!”