Durand Jones has been around the world — traveling much further than his humble beginnings would belie. As a founding member of popular soul group Durand Jones & the Indications, the 30-year-old singer has packed the Hollywood Palladium and sold out European tours; he’ll soon head to Japan as a solo act.
Yet the independent artist wanted his debut solo album to be an evocative, almost visceral portrait of the unincorporated hamlet along the Mississippi River where he grew up. "I wanted it to sound like hot, musty, zesty, sweet magnolias on a hot July day," he says.
While that may be a highly specific sense tied to memory, it’s with good reason. Jones is from the sugarcane field-laden Hillaryville, Louisiana, a town in the Atchafalaya Basin wetlands about an hour from New Orleans. Hillaryville’s history, characters, sounds, and smells are the bedrock of Wait Til I Get Over, the singer/songwriter’s sonic memoir.
"Leaving Hillaryville for the very first time, I realized just how special it was, and how unique it was — the people, the music, the culture, the art of it," Jones tells GRAMMY.com. "I wanted to tell my story…but where does it begin? And it didn't begin with me. It began after the Civil War when these eight formerly enslaved men created this town. And so I wanted to start there and find a way to capture that musically."
The results are a cornucopia of Southern soul, from its roots in gospel and blues to fuzzy, muddy rock and spoken word. Throughout, Jones creates nuanced portraits of the characters that have populated his life — his grandmother, members of his church, a married lover — whose presence help Jones investigate his sense of self. Faith, queerness and determination all feature in the 12-track LP, which is equal parts earnest reflection and deep groove.
Jones has carried that bounty of emotion ground with him throughout his musical journey, yet Wait Til I Get Over (out May 5 via Dead Oceans) is the first time he’s truly dove deep. "Too many of us in places like where I'm from are often shut down, or just made to believe that you're not capable of doing something like this," he says. "But if I could tell my 17-year-old self that he’s worth it, I would."
Durand Jones doesn’t have his bags packed in the hours before flying from his home in San Antonio to Bloomington, Indiana — where he went to college with members of the Indications and where he’ll rehearse for his upcoming solo tour — but he was ready to dive into the baggage of youth, place and the concept of home with GRAMMY.com.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You went to college at Indiana University, Bloomington; it's funny that that's still kind of a home base for you.
I know! They have a little term in Bloomington: the Bloomerang. I just keep going back. I’m a Gulf kind of guy, so it's weird to me to fall in love with a place so landlocked. There’s something about it, got a little charm to it.
Home is obviously a major theme that runs through your record; when did you leave Hillaryville?
I left for the first time when I was 17 years old in 2007. And then I went back to Hillaryville around 2014. I didn't think that I was going to stay a while, but there were different plans from the universe. And I stayed there until the end of 2020.
I was just getting the small-town blues, honestly. It was nice to be at home when I was on the road for 200 days of the year, but being in Hillaryville during the pandemic every day, small town things started to get to me. It made me realize I still need to travel and see the world and do things.
Did you ever think you would be homesick or wistful for this place that you've spent so much of your life?
I never thought I would. I started to get real homesick once I started to realize just how special it was to me and to the people in the community, even though it's no longer what it once was.
Why was it important to you to put those feelings out and use this place as the setting for your debut?
Well, I wanted to tell my story. My work with the Indications is done collectively, so you're only getting a part of me — you're not getting the full thing.
I was really inspired a lot through books like Sing Unburied Sing and Mean We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward; Citizen, Claudia Rankine, Just Above My Head and Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; Grapefruit, Yoko Ono [and] Toni Morrison. These books really inspired me to tell a story in a memoir or a novel form, but through music.
So I wanted to hit these things that I was going through. I wanted to capture the essence of it all. [Secretly Group Co-Founder] Chris Swanson asked me what I wanted this record to sound like, and I straight up told him I wanted it to sound like hot, musty, zesty, sweet Magnolias on a hot July day in Louisiana. And he wrote with me with that [in mind].
I really wanted to have night sounds and the feeling of being next to the river. We gathered pictures of Hillaryville — specifically my father's trailer — we wanted these raw raucous sounds to be there as well as some sweet and tender moments. [We wanted to] capture the essence of my grandmother and the elders.
As somebody who's been following your career for a while, it's easy to follow the musical through lines from revivalist soul to disco to gospel and beyond. But when we spoke last about Colemine Records and I asked how this album was going, you sort of took a deep breath and said, "Man, I made a rock record." Why was that definition nerve wracking to you?
I really built this house of sorts with the Indications. We've been moving towards a sweeter and sweeter sound as our records progress, which has been really great for me because it's challenged me so much to learn how to change my voice and mix it up. It made me fall in love even more with artists like Luther Vandross and Dionne Warwick. But deep in my soul, I'm such a student of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. And those were parts of myself that I really desired to express.
So during this record, I really wanted to go back to my roots a bit and, and push myself a little more and push the band a little more too. I'm really, really proud of the outcome.
The album has all of these big, kind of operatic songs. As a whole, Wait Til I Get Over moves from somber and a little serious to rocking and exploding with joy. Was the expression of joy important to you?
Definitely. I almost named this record A Letter To My 17-Year-Old-Self, but in a way it's still a letter to not only that 17-year-old kid within me, but also to all of these other kids in the rural South. I hope that they will have a chance to see or hear this record and hear that joy and hear the seriousness, the pain, the triumphs, all of it, and know that they could do something like this.
Too many of us in places like where I'm from are often shut down or just made to believe that you're not capable of doing something like this. But if I could tell my 17-year-old self that he’s worth it, I would. Lose that impostor syndrome. You deserve any seat you get at any table.
Did you feel like you were put down or not encouraged in the way you would have liked to when you were younger? Or was your family generally pretty supportive?
It was very contradicting, it's so weird. My grandmother, from the beginning, really supported me. She was the light in the darkness for me and my siblings growing up, because we were estranged from my mom. I didn't know my mom. She left me when I was about 3 years old.
My grandmother really stepped in and really helped my dad take care of us. She was the first person that took me to get my very first musical instrument — a saxophone — and she always encouraged me to go beyond and do college and do music. [My dad] was like, "great, but I'm not going to pay for anything." And I appreciated that because it made me work really hard, but it did kind of sting.
Doing all of the recitals and all of those different things and seeing other friends’ families fill up and like my family, not, it really kinda hurt. Once I started to do stuff with the Indications and people started to ask him about what I was doing while he was at church, he started to get interested. Once he saw me on TV then really got interested.
Are the characters on this album — Gerri Marie, Sadie — real people?
Yes. I love starting this record with Gerri Marie, because it really embodies the spirit of her. She has such a welcoming spirit and presence. She has this pristine quality about her that feels expensive, but she's also like a Southern lady. So like she still has that hot sauce in her bag, you know?
I wanted to capture all those beautiful things about her. She's someone that I truly love deeply. I just don't know if I can be the guy for her that she wants me to be, because I'm such a rolling stone. I showed the song to her and she was really ecstatic about it; very tearful.
Sadie is a lady I met in New Orleans. And I was a young 20-something guy, naive and gullible. And once we met, she would invite me over to her house for crawfish etouffee. One thing will lead to another and we would end up fooling around, which was cool. But she was married.
I think I was looking for love in all kinds of crazy places. But I realized that those kinds of thrills lead to nothingness. And that's not what I'm looking for. [When] my friends hit me up about the music for "Sadie," I immediately knew I was going to write about this lady. But I wanted to do a turn in the lyrics and make it seem like the husband found out — he didn’t really find out.
We might not be having this conversation if he did.
Hell no! I'd be six feet in somebody's casket, for real. My homewrecking days are over.
Speaking of love in all its permutations, "That Feeling" is really tender and the first love song you’ve written about a man. I'm curious why it's taken you until now to come out with your music.
I'm starting to ask myself why it's taken me so long. And I think a lot of that had to do with I was so afraid of what my small little community would think. And in a lot of ways, I'm still afraid; I haven't been back to Hillaryville since that song has come out. But for the most part, I've been met with love and acceptance and empathy. It’s been such a beautiful process for me to come out as a bisexual dude.
I think the answer is why it took so long is, I had to unpack the trauma that I held deep inside of myself. I grew up in church and I love my pastor — he gave me my first car, granted it was like 1996 Honda Elantra, little rinky dink car, but he think me to be like, really exceptional — but also at the same time, nearly every Sunday, he was talking about how homosexuality was wrong. Being gay was bad, you're gonna go to hell if you do s— like that.
Anytime he would bring that stuff up, it always felt like a knife to the heart and it would make me so frickin' anxious and really sad. I remember just being an adolescent and like praying to God and being like, If you love me like why did you make me this way?
I had to unpack all of that stuff. And I've learned through James Baldwin that if I wanted to overcome this, one of the best ways to do it is to do art in vulnerability, because that's an ultimate form of strength. And if I wanted to tell my story, this had to be included within it.
Speaking of church, the title track features a choir to fantastic effect — but it’s really your voice layered multiple times, and recorded in your bedroom. Why did you choose to record yourself as a choir as opposed to using an actual choir?
There was a sound that I was going for that I knew couldn't necessarily be taught. There's like, knowledge and wisdom; you live to get the wisdom and you learn to get the knowledge.
I felt like doing it myself would be a real big challenge, but also I could try to honor the folks that are big inspirations for me vocally that were at home. Like this man Jardino, I tried to sing like him in there; I tried to sing like Miss Dawn, like Vanessa …. I tried to emulate these different voices. At first I was afraid it would sound like a bunch of Durands, but I've been surprised that people don’t know it’s all me.
There's also a line in that song that really stuck with me, "Getting by with just self-esteem." Can you tell me a little bit about what that line, or that theme, means to you?
At the time I was writing these tunes, I was literally getting by with nothing. Like I didn't have any money. At the lowest point, I was working a minimum wage job and they would schedule you like 37, 38, 39 hours a week just so they could make sure that you wouldn't get 40 hours so they didn’t have to give you health insurance. That job, and going back and forth to court to keep felonies off my record, and all of this bulls— that happened in Indiana, right when I was finishing grad school, which was insane.
All I had was the belief that I still was worth it. I still had something to give, something to say in this music, life, world, place. Sometimes for you to be successful, you need to fail. Fall right on your face. Maybe once or twice, maybe three times. I'm still falling on my face. And I feel like failures are just as important as the success.
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