Jay Buchanan is a lover, not a fighter. If you spend some time listening to the soul-stirring songs he’s made with blues rock band Rival Sons, you’ll find a window into his heart. The blistering “Electric Man” comes off like a love letter to the very craft of rock ‘n roll while “Shooting Stars” (recently spotlighted in a Parisian ceremony marking 10 years since the attacks at the Bataclan) is a powerful ode to humanity.
So, it comes as a bit of a shock that when it was time to write material for his long-awaited solo album, Weapons of Beauty (out February 6), Buchanan found himself in an all-out war. For months, he hunkered down in a windowless, underground bunker deep in the Mojave Desert, writing by the dim glow of fire light. He was miles away from his wife and kids back home in Southern California and sleeping on a cot on the cold, hard floor.
“I know it sounds romantic,” Buchanan joked, “But I was only doing it because I needed somewhere to be alone and just focus on writing.”
Living off nature wasn’t exactly new territory for the 50-year-old. Buchanan was born and raised in the San Gabriel Mountains in the rural community of Wrightwood, where cabins and cattle ranches were the norm. When his family moved to Long Beach years later, the water lured him, too. In fact, Buchanan’s love of the outdoors is so rich, he will quote passages from the original naturalist Henry David Thoreau on Instagram.
Even the cover art for Weapons of Beauty is seemingly a tribute to his pioneer heart, featuring a rugged, bearded Buchanan dressed in a frayed woolen blanket and feather-tipped hat while standing atop a mountain that he looks to have conquered.
But even with all the ammunition Buchanan had, it was a real battle to find his footing with his solo material. “The whole time I was out there, it wasn’t like I was so prolific and inspired,” he admitted. “I wasted so much time just staring at the wall or distracting myself with hike after hike, thinking maybe a song will come to me.”
Part of it admittedly was self-applied pressure after putting off the solo album that everyone—his family, his bandmates, and his long-time producer Dave Cobb—naturally expected him to write. “I think that I just grew sick with myself for not having done one yet … as year after year went by,” he shared.
To be fair, it’s not like Buchanan was sitting idle. Rival Sons have put out eight albums since 2009 (a couple of them Grammy nominated) and toured the world with the likes of Black Sabbath, the Rolling Stones, and AC/DC. Buchanan has also done a range of collaborations on his own merit with Jason Isbell, the Bee Gees, Miranda Lambert, Massive Attack, the Bloody Beetroots, and Brandi Carlile. And maybe you caught him making his other recent debut, an acting role as the frontman of the Stone Pony house band in the Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere.
It’s been, in a couple of words, “a lot,” said Buchanan, calling it a huge undertaking to shift emotional gears away from all of that and write with the depth that Weapons of Beauty needed. “Because ultimately what I was really trying to do was get over myself,” he admitted. “I feel like I’ve walked around for the last 17 years being a rock and roller with this caged bird in my chest that wants to write and wants more space. And I don’t say any of this to shit on rock music, because obviously, I love it. And I’m the one who put that bird in there.”
It’s no coincidence that he personifies his struggle as bird-like; his childhood nickname, Jaybird, has been kicked around since he first began to sing. As he added, “I wanted to pry that cage open and get that bird to fly out because it had been stuck in there for so long. I had just kept putting the record off and building this whole thing up in my mind that when it is released, it’s really going to have to be something.”
Weapons of Beauty is not only “something,” it’s everything you could hope to get from Buchanan. Across 10 genre-sweeping tracks, from Americana to rock to gospel, the album bleeds with Buchanan’s innate authenticity, vulnerability, and heartfelt narratives that find their pulse through hyper-realistic storytelling. And, of course, Buchanan’s super-human vocals quite literally tip the scales and blanket each song with overwhelming conviction.
The album opens with the folk-gospel soliloquy “Caroline,” and like the surroundings in which the song was made, the music video is filmed in an abandoned cave, amplifying a message of love and loss that’s as old as mankind. As Buchanan lights the way with a match, viewers see home videos screened on the dirt walls, showing a couple in good times and bad, before a final crescendo crashes through where Buchanan promises, “I’m gonna burn up all my time, until the Lord brings me back to you.”
The emotional gravity of the song only took on more weight in recent weeks after Buchanan revealed that his wife is battling breast cancer and he has understandably put off any big touring plans while he helps her heal. In the meantime, he hopes his music can be a salve for anyone else who may need it.
“I just hope [the music] is going to get out there and hit somebody who feels that they are less alone,” Buchanan said. “Because music can do that. It does that for me. And if I can be that for somebody else, then I’m paying it back in some way.”
That theme continues with the self-reflective ballad “Shower of Roses” that reveals a poignant inner monologue: “When the crowds have all gone, lights go out on the stage, when the curtain comes down, you just want them to say, that you never took more than you gave.” Written with Buchanan’s friend Charlie Peacock, it’s a tribute to the human beings lurking behind the façade of stage performers.
“I was thinking about all of us who do this, who are in this part of the craft and in the arts, and thinking of what compels us to perform,” said Buchanan, noting the track was loosely written about himself. “I wanted to make a theatrical illustration of these feelings because I’m on stage all the time, and I’m trying to be as authentic as possible, but it’s still show business.”
It’s a struggle Buchanan has felt since early on, when he started getting more exposure as a performer. As he climbed the ranks from coffeehouses and busking on the streets of Long Beach when he was a teen to major label deals and world tours, he “philosophically” wrestled with it all. “What’s wrong with me that I have to write songs and what part of me demands to be looked at? I’m a very private person, so what’s with this exhibitionism,” he pondered. “But I reconciled all of that with the fact that I love music that much.”
It was coupled with another so-called “hurdle” that Buchanan had to deal with when he was starting out—the constant comparisons to Jeff Buckley.
“I would be playing in coffeeshops long before Grace and people would come up to me and be like, ‘Oh man, you really remind me of Jeff Buckley. You should listen to Jeff Buckley.’ And of course, me being like 17, I was like, ‘Fuck this guy! I don’t know who this Jeff Buckley is, but I certainly don’t like him,’ because it was so important to me to strike my own way and forge my own path. He was older, so handsome and so, so talented. And I was just like, this is so unfair. What am I supposed to do? This guy’s fantastic,” Buchanan recalled with a twinge of embarrassment. “I was just obviously enamored and jealous of everything he was doing. And I think it took me a while to admit that to myself.”
Of course, he’s since come around to be a big fan of Buckley’s work and now, comparisons are met with gratitude. Such as when we talk about how much Weapons of Beauty’s title track and songs like “Sway” have the same heart and vocal profundity of Buckley or how Buchanan also opted to brilliantly cover a Leonard Cohen song for his new album, opting for the complex “Dance Me to the End of Love.” It’s a composition that fronts as a love song but was also inspired by the Holocaust and concentration camps, where it’s been said string quartets were forced to play while prisoners died.
“Leonard Cohen is the patron saint of the Sacred Heart for us in the craft. He has an authority that very few have wielded over the years of reaching into your chest and just holding the heart for a little bit,” Buchanan said of trying to do service to Cohen’s songbook while also taking some creative liberty. “I understand, of course, all of the imagery when Leonard Cohen was first inspired to write the song. It’s very macabre and it’s terrible. It’s also very real. But joy is also true and I wanted to make room for that. I wanted to take the lyrics and rewrite the melody and rewrite the cadence, rewrite the chord structures and put it all in the company with revelry and joy, and see how it stood as a celebration of love,” Buchanan further explained. “I told Dave [Cobb], I wanted it to sound like the music that would be playing at the party that I wanted to go to.”
In addition to being one of Nashville’s go-to producers for Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, and Jason Isbell, among others, Cobb also served as the executive music producer of Deliver Me From Nowhere and was the one who brought Buchanan into the fold. Though, it must have been an interesting pitch.
“Biopics are usually dog shit,” Buchanan declared with a smirk. But he saw something different in Scott Cooper’s script. “He was writing something from a very different place. He wasn’t glorifying all of this bullshit. The movie didn’t lead with Bruce’s mythology,” said Buchanan (he later worked with Cooper on the sequencing for Weapons of Beauty). “The movie led with a person. A human being going through things and it wasn’t there to perpetuate the rock and roll fantasy thing that so much of these biopics always do.”
There are a handful of artists that seem too sacred to even try the formula with; one being Ozzy Osbourne, someone Buchanan has held close to his heart for many years, ever since Ozzy and Sharon hand-picked Rival Sons to open for Black Sabbath’s The End Tour in 2016 and 2017 and exposed the band to a whole new league of fans. “What Black Sabbath did for Rival Sons and did for me, I still can’t believe it. They picked us out, and Ozzy and Sharon said, we want you guys,” Buchanan recalled. “The education that we received was unparalleled. Black Sabbath said, you guys are an arena band. Use our stage every night. Get comfortable. This is where you belong. We got that diploma from Black Sabbath. It was handed to us from our heroes.”
Last summer, Rival Sons (who are also going to be working on a new album soon) had another special invitation to perform at Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning benefit concert in Birmingham, England, which of course, sadly ended up being Ozzy’s last show. “I’ve never experienced something like that, and I never will. You had all of these artists with no ego. Everything was so altruistic. If you weren’t on stage, you were side stage watching, and it was just all of us high-fiving each other and hugging and rooting each other on. It was a beautiful experience,” Buchanan recalled, adding, “And then when Sabbath and Ozzy played … there wasn’t a dry eye in the whole place. I wasn’t expecting that. I was out in the audience with my family thinking, this is so uncommon, watching the sun set on this monolithic presence in my life. I’m just so very thankful for everything that Ozzy (rest in peace), Sharon, and Sabbath have done for Rival Sons and for me,” Buchanan concluded, making sure to count all those that have helped him along the way to keep up the fight.
