Jonell Mosser has been in the music business long enough to know that timing can be everything, so it should come as no surprise that Little Black Dress, her newly released CD, is finding a wide audience now, all songs recorded during a performance by Mosser and John Hall in May 1991 at Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, New York.
The performance took place when Mosser was spending time with Hall, of the band Orleans, and his wife Johanna as they were teaching her how to write songs, Mosser says.
She says, “For many years I considered myself more of an interpreter of songs because I had friends like John Prine and Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. . . . I thought I was wasting my time trying to write when these guys were writing. It was Johanna and John that convinced me otherwise.”
She explains that the Halls had written with Janis Joplin in the late sixties. “At that point Johanna was a journalist and a literary writer but not a songwriter. John played all these songs for Janis in her apartment in 1968 or ‘69. John suggested that the first songs he was writing back then were ‘pretty puerile,’ a little immature. But Janis was so taken with Johanna and how smart and wonderful she was. They’d been to lunch. She said, ‘You’re a woman. You’re a writer. Write me a song.’ And that’s how they wrote ‘Half Moon.’
“Johanna related that story to me when we first met around 1986. The first song she and I wrote together with John was “Dance of Life” that’s on this album. The first time we got together to talk, I walked into their living room and saw the New York Times spread around her where she was reading. I’m a newspaper reader too. She had the Book Review open in front of her, and I saw a review of the book Dance of Life about the mating rituals of all kinds of critters. I went ‘Oooh, That looks like a good book.’ And so we wrote a song about it.”
A tape of the show that became Little Black Dress was rediscovered by Johanna. Mosser said, “Johanna’s the one who had the presence of mind not to just throw it in a machine and listen to it but wait until she could get it digitally recorded.” When listening to the recording, Jonell says, “I hear in my voice a quality, a newness that endears me to the person I was.”
The music from this CD is evidence of Mosser’s strength in collaboration. Describing the energy that comes from songwriting and performing with others who have a similar vision and a complementary set of skills, she said, “It makes one exponentially better. If you’re on stage with somebody and you’re working in tandem, it’s just better than just about anything.
“My heart breaks for people who feel the need to compete on stage rather than collaborate because they’re missing so much. In writing too—having Johanna’s beautiful mind and creative turn of phrase—she made me feel like I could say something stupid and she could make it smart.”
She talked about the dynamics between her and John Hall, whom she described as a great singer and songwriter—and a great guitar player. “Being on stage together when that creative things is going—particularly with John and me—it is just the joy of my life to play with friends.”
Playing well with others—with friends—could be a theme for Jonell Mosser. In 2018, she performed songs of the late Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark with her good friend Maura O’Connell during what they called their “Old Friends” series, with the final performance at Nashville’s 3rdand Lindsley, a stage Mosser said was “built for me.” She took the same stage again with a full range of performers, including her ex-husband John Cowan, for sold out performance called “1971: The Greatest Year in Music.”
Jonell Mosser can easily command a stage alone but seems at the top of her game in collaboration. Over the last several years, she and Tom Britt have evolved as a duo. He’s known for his distinctive guitar playing, so when he’s on the road with Vince Gill, she has had other guitarists offer to sub for him.
She says, “I didn’t ask them to imitate Tom or not be themselves because they could hear how strong a guitarist he is.”
She also found that she and Britt could write songs together too. “I didn’t believe I could write songs with Tom at first, but then I evolved from writing with John and Johanna to writing with Tom in a completely different way.”
Mosser expected a different response to the songs she had co-written with the Halls when she first brought them back to Nashville, noting, “I was expecting everybody to go, ‘Wow, Jonell! Aren’t they great!’ ” She realizes now that she didn’t get the kind of approval at the time because they weren’t like the songs being written then.
One of those songs, “So Like Joy,” was a kind of catharsis after the death of her mother, the words coming out of her so quickly that Johanna Hall had to write them down:
It’s good to remember and it’s good to forget,
but it’s best to let go of all the regret.
But when she took “So Like Joy,” which she felt was very honest and simple, to a friend she considered smart about songs, he listened and asked, “Yeah, but what’s the payoff?”
She says that looking back she sees the same reaction to other people’s music as well. A friend she respected listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland when it first came out and didn’t get it. He asked, “What’s all this chaos?”
Mosser said, “He wanted a nice slick Paul Simon record, and he gave us that marvelous Carnivale that is Graceland—so you never know.”
“When you’re younger,” she admitted, “you live and die by other’s opinions. Now I certainly do not.”
In 2020, these songs are getting a second life—or a long-delayed first life—on Little Black Dress.The title came to her first, she says. Around 2010-2011, having come through a divorce, she says, “Several producer friends—such as Buddy Miller and Gary Nicholson and John Hall—had each produced one song for me, like a designer making one outfit for you. And I call it a ‘little black dress’—‘Here’s your version of that little black dress…and here’s your version. . . .
“I had told Johanna about that before, but then when we realized we had this tape and we had “Ordinary Splendor” on there, I said I felt like I had opened the closet and pulled out the perfect black dress. So when I told her what I wanted to call the record, she said, ‘You can’t call it that. We’re going to call it Little Black Dress. It’s better,’ and she talked me into it.”
The songs on this new release may also represent the wardrobe range one might find in the closet. They all spotlight Mosser and Hall’s strength and style, with each song standing alone. “Circle,” the first release promoted from the CD, is particularly timely now not just for the way the lyrics speak to this time, but for Jonell Mosser’s extensive career, addressing the way life keeps circling around:
We live on a circle
All we live comes back again
Got no way of known when it will end.
We all share this circle
We all share a single cell
Dancing spirals parallel
Stories that we tell. . . .
Another track on the CD “I Like That in a Man” is an upbeat song whose bluesy acoustic guitar licks belie the notion that the lyrics suggest an end to the blues as she sings:
I’ve been gone so long that my blues are indigo. . .
and he’ll be waiting when this plane finally lands.
I like that in a man. . ..
The woman, taking a jet back to her man, sings about “his quiet dignity,” noting:
His actions always speak much louder
than his words do to me.
He doesn’t have to say where he stands.
I like that in a man.
One of the lovely surprises on the album, “Ordinary Splendor,” could easily pass for an old classic torch song. Jonell said, “I have people say, ‘I love that old forties song,’ and I say, ‘You mean that song that I wrote?’”
When putting the CD together, the three agreed that “Ordinary Splendor” was easily the most pitchable song but they wanted a simple vocal and piano or guitar rendition, which Johanna was able to find.
Mosser says she and John had to work through their vision of that song. “We had the verse going and then when we got to the bridge, he went into jazzland for a moment and I said, ‘Oh no, John. There are rules about songs like this.’” She said while she “didn’t have the theory to explain it to him what [she] meant, [she] went over to the piano and showed him what she had in mind for melody and chord changes in the verse and hook. And he got it.”
Then she had to convince John that Johanna’s beautiful line fit: “You catch my drift and throw it back to me. It’s conversation poetry.”
Jonell says, “That was one of the times I think I couldn’t say exactly what I was trying to do, but once I musically played it for him, he understood, and I think that brought a little more respect because I didn’t’ have the language. I did have the ability.”
Mosser’s Louisville, Kentucky, childhood certainly influenced the writing of songs like “Ordinary Splendor.” After she lost her father when she was three, her mother, whom she describes as “a very beautiful girl,” started dating again when Jonell was six. She explains, “You could go out with my mother one time by yourself, but the next, time the kids went–my brother and me. That was the real test. Consequently, I got to have a lot of nice meals at supper clubs.”
She says that while her stepfather played music, though not professionally, “he had a good tone, and he had a lot of musician friends, so I’m one of those weird kids that remembered the words to things. I knew all the words to ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘Autumn in New York’ and ‘Secret Love.’”
When they went to dinner, she says, “if we had to wait for a table, we’d go in the lounge where lady with the toxic cloud of Chanel No. 5 was playing. And they’d say, ‘Let the little girl sing!’ and so I’d sing ‘Embraceable You,’ and everybody’d clap and then we’d go eat our dinner.”
She also credits her choral director Brench Broden with early inspiration—and with convincing her mother not to let her have her tonsils removed at thirteen when her voice was just developing. Under his direction, she learned to sing Bach cantatas and pieces by William Byrd and Benjamin Britt, and a collection of carols.
In high school, she landed a role in Godspel at Trinity, the local Catholic boys’ school, the only girl cast who wasn’t from Assumption or Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, the local Catholic girls schools. She worked to overcome stage fright and even organized a band for a while in high school. Mosser went on to study theater ar Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.
Mosser came to Nashville around 1985 and was encouraged to “have a persona,” which she says fell flat. Some people advised her “to be more aloof or you’ll never be a rock singer” or told her, “If you’re going to do this kind of song, why don’t you go ahead and be a country singer?’ It never felt authentic to me.”
She said there were many female singers she admired —Bonnie Raitt, Streisand, even Janis Joplin, to whom she has drawn comparisons–but few to emulate. She says she found was influenced more by male singers, including Otis Redding with his strength and ability, but total honest and lack of artifice.
She also mentioned Lowell George, who “could have a really strong kicking rock chorus and then some weird, funky little fun melodic thing in the verse. I don’t know. He didn’t put limits on his music because of other people’s expectations and Otis didn’t either. And so for me, that’s where I went.”
Over the years, she’s found herself working both on stage and in the studio. Meanwhile, Americana Music has been coming of age, with a big enough tent to shelter a wide range of musical talent.
“I kind of thank God for Americana because that’s honestly the only place I fit these days, and it’s been a gift. Americana didn’t exist when I was first in Nashville, so I was in demand as a session singer but I wasn’t being offered deals that I thought I could sign. “
In her first record, Around Townes, which brought her to the attention of producer Don Was, she sang the songs of the late Townes Van Zandt, and, she says, “I believe that brought me genuinely under the American umbrella.”
Now while facing the challenge of promoting a new release during the current pandemic, she misses “playing with the guys.” She hasn’t been able to play as much with Tom Britt since his recent cancer treatment makes him vulnerable to Covid-19.
After this time of sheltering at home, she says she most looks forward to hugging again and going to a “good bar with a really good glass of wine,” perhaps sharing a “big boozy girls’ lunch” with Maura O’Connell. She’s also eager to see more of her two sons, the oldest a nurse at Vanderbilt Hospital.
Meanwhile, she is biding her time, listening to a great mix of music—Van Morrison, Candi Staton, Joni Mitchell—and looking forward to being back on stage performing with friends and promoting Little Black Dress.