Jessica Simpson Finally Takes Control

J
essica Simpson is sitting on a thrifted green banquette in her Nashville music room, wondering if Sister Rosetta Tharpe is trying to send us a message. We’d been talking about the late godmother of rock & roll, who Simpson just described as “the most badass” of all potential badasses, when the silver resonator guitar behind her rung out a dissonant note entirely on its own. Was it contact from the great musical beyond, or just Simpson bumping the neck against the window? Who even cares either way? Simpson, after more than two decades in the spotlight, knows everything’s better with a little bit of creative imagination.

“She’s agreeing with us!” Simpson proclaims, cracking a huge grin. “See, this is the kind of stuff that just happens here.” A picture of Tharpe stares at us from across the room, glued on one of three foam whiteboards where Simpson posted the inspiration for her first collection of original music since 2008, Nashville Canyon: Part I. There are quotes from Kurt Cobain (“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person that you are”), photos of artists like Bonnie Raitt, and plenty of opportunities for her dirty sense of humor. “That says ‘treat your girl right,’” Simpson says, laughing. “But the ‘t’ and the ‘r’ are whited out.”

It’s a Tuesday morning at Simpson’s rented house up on a hill, and she is cross-legged in a pair of leopard-print pants and silk western shirt, a Zyn nicotine pouch in her lip and a daisy ring, gifted to her by Burt Reynolds on the set of The Dukes of Hazzard reboot, on her finger. Nashville is not her permanent home, at least not until her three kids go off to college, but this modest mid-century place has become her refuge from the chaos of L.A.: the paparazzi around every corner, the pain of a public divorce, the pressure to be Jessica Simpson the popstar, whatever that means now. It’s here where she not only felt inspired enough to create Nashville Canyon, but, at 44 years old, became the artist she wanted to be, in control of her own vision for the first time ever.

“It’s been so amazing to remove myself from my life as it was,” Simpson says, “because it’s hard for me to be creative when I’m taking care of everybody. And it’s hard for me to convince myself that I needed to be selfish as a mother and as a business owner.  I had to literally uproot myself.”

It’s not an easy thing to do when everyone thinks they know exactly who you are — which, to be fair, is not entirely uninvited. Though she got her start as a pop singer, with 1999’s Sweet Kisses, her fame exploded with the release of her MTV reality show Newlyweds, where she became America’s domestic sweetheart and tuna or chicken queen (and Rolling Stone cover girl). People stayed interested, even where there wasn’t music to promote. A little too interested, maybe. Followers of Simpson often seemed to imagine themselves as her best friend and/or personal trainer/sober coach/nutritionist. Simpson doesn’t mind sharing herself with the world — her best-selling memoir was titled Open Book, after all — but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a challenge to figure out who she is away from all that scrutiny. “If I based it off comments or articles or anything like that, I wouldn’t know who I am, either,” she says.

Though Simpson never stopped writing music, she didn’t release it, short of a few songs tacked onto the end of the audiobook for Open Book. In the expansive break from making albums, she weathered a few very public romances, got married, had kids, quit drinking, and built a massive lifestyle brand, the Jessica Simpson Collection, whose name she didn’t even own until recently. Doing so required her to liquidate her assets and take out a major loan. “Now everything goes to paying back the brand,” she says, motioning to the chair next to her, which she thrifted for 20 bucks. “But I bought my freedom.” In line with that open book approach, Simpson plans to produce a documentary using 400 hours of footage she compiled in the process of “stopping drinking and buying my company.”

The attention hasn’t always been positive. There was the awful “mom jean” incident that still gives her “PTSD,” which stings a little more now that ribcage-dusting pants are in style. “That was literal fat shaming,” Simpson says. She was called a jinx when she dated Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, and worse when she had a relationship with John Mayer. She turned the experiences into knowledge for her brand. “I’d look at what every girl wore to be noticed by [Mayer], and I’d take pictures, and I was like, ‘This is what people wore in Wisconsin.’ I understood what kind of jeans they liked, where they wanted their pockets.” For the tabloids who followed it all, often unkindly, she offers a classic Jessica Simpson couplet: “People can walk all over my name, but at least they’re buying it.”

But when it came to music, few bothered to fully understand who Simpson was as an artist, or give her the credit she deserved as storyteller, which is exactly what her friend Willie Nelson saw in her. She’s a balladeer, for sure, able to hit those monster notes, and has a knack for a summery melody (Her hit “With You?” She wrote it). Simpson, at least, knew she was never destined to be a popstar or, as she puts it, “the manufactured pop star that abided by every rule.” She started out singing gospel in church, with no idea she’d end up chasing early 2000s TRL success.

“I was never gonna win, because I had someone like Britney [Spears] and Christina [Aguilera] ahead of me, who were selling so many more records,” Simpson says. “I didn’t want to dance, I didn’t want to wear a head mic. But I agreed to do it, because I worked for Sony, and I didn’t want to let them down, and I felt like I was constantly letting people down. Even myself, probably because I wasn’t singing words I wrote.” She would talk a lot onstage, she says, to have some way of getting her voice out, and would constantly journal. It was her manager who urged her to start writing songs, and when she did, she got her first Number One.

While most people assumed she was a pop diva alone, or bought into the “dumb blonde” myth, Simpson’s musical tastes have always run deep, which is evident if you pay a little attention. She likes to cover songs like Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” and included a version of Patty Griffin’s “Let Him Fly” on her 2008 album, A Public Affair.  She loves rock, country, soul, bluegrass, punk. So much so, that, over quarantine, she started a habit of spending hours upon hours in YouTube and Spotify wormholes, loading a playlist with everything that resonated: rockabilly, rock & roll, artists like Sister Rosetta, foundational Sixties garage-rock band the Sonics, blues pioneers like Mississippi Fred McDowell, and modern Americana artists like Sierra Ferrell, Alabama Shakes, and Brandi Carlile. “I was so inspired when she performed at the Grammys,” Simpson says about Carlile. “I was like, finally! That’s how women should be!” She adds, cheekily, “I also had boyfriends who had really good taste in music.”

The playlist grew to over 12 hours of songs. Jack White, whom Simpson deeply admires, even followed it under a pseudonym. At some point along the way, it occurred to her that the music she liked to listen to and the music she could make didn’t have to be different things anymore. She owned her name, didn’t have a label, and didn’t have anyone (or more specifically, any man) asking her to sing a song that someone else wrote, while doing a little twirl someone else choreographed for her. And so, with a little Simpson-style cosmic urging from her kids, she came to Nashville.

When Simpson started writing, she’d send out the playlist to whoever she was going to sit with that day — which included beloved Americana artists like Fancy Hagood, Lucie Silvas, Natalie Hemby, and Jarrad K, thanks in part to the keen ear and local connections of manager Teresa LaBarbera — and had them pick a focus for inspiration. Her journals and poems, collected in binders, served as the scaffolding. Everything had threads of rockabilly or soul or Laurel Canyon dreaminess, totally different from anything she’d done before. Who could even produce this? While writing “Breadcrumbs,” Jarrad K brought up the artist JD McPherson, who had recently moved back home to Tulsa from Nashville. “I feel like he’s the only person who would understand,” he said.   

Simpson listened to McPherson’s music, and reached out immediately by taking the only option she could think of — sliding into his DMs. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a thing!’” she says. “I had never DM’ed somebody before.”

McPherson, off the road from touring with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, was eating with his family at Empire Slice House on Route 66 when a song by Simpson came on the television. It caught his daughter’s eye, and she asked her dad who it was. He explained that Simpson was a pop star who now mostly makes clothes and shoes, maybe she had a pair? The next day, he got a notification that Simpson followed him on Instagram. It freaked him out. “I was like, ‘What is going on right now?’” McPherson says. “Paranoia kicks in. Is Tim Cook listening?”

Simpson sent him three white hearts, he replied with three thumbs-up emojis, and agreed to produce the record. Now, they’re “like brother and sister,” she says. He calls her “cuz” and gave her a sticker of a corndog that she stuck on the back of her iPhone, because that’s what she eats before heading into the studio (it used to be a chicken fried steak, but that grew a little too intense on the stomach). Is it an odd musical pair? Only if you assume Simpson is not who she is, but who we wanted her to be. Even McPherson was unsure if he’d be the right fit.

“It wasn’t judgment,” McPherson says. “Because if you put me in a studio with everything available and said, ‘Make music that sounds like what she’d done up to that point,’ I would have no idea how to do it. I wouldn’t know what plug-in to use, what microphone to use, who to hire. And then she sent me her inspiration playlist. I was like, ‘Now we’re talking.’ Who knew Jessica Simpson was a Sonics fan? She has taste, she has chops, and she has something to say.”

Nashville Canyon was recorded at studios like East Nashville’s Creative Workshop and RCA Studio B with live musicians, the first time in her entire career that Simpson had done so. “I’d only worn headphones and had a track in my ear,” she says. “I never got to feel the unearthing of a song and breaking it down.” McPherson urged her to explore her lower register, especially for the vulnerable songs about her personal heartbreak. The band followed her lead, instead of her following orders. Simpson stocked the studio with candy and McPherson describes recording as “the most fun I’ve ever had in a studio situation. Everybody kind of felt like we were giving her some new experience that she deserved but hadn’t had yet.”

It took a beat for Simpson to get past the need for everything to be perfect, that early-Aughts pop music instinct kicking in. She’d mess up a little and apologize profusely. Says Simpson: “My vocal producer was like, ‘Jessica, why are you apologizing? You fart and burp and don’t apologize. But you’re apologizing for missing a word?’” It was an important lesson. “When you sing through the mistake, the beauty is right there, and you have your best take right after that,” she explains.

It wasn’t just in the studio where this kind of thinking paid off. In her personal life, things were falling apart. She and her husband, Eric Johnson, separated. When you’re as famous as Simpson is, even your heartbreak feels like public domain, but this time she channeled that emotion into songs. “I’m not comfortable with anger, so you won’t hear much anger in any of my music,” Simpson says. “You’ll hear frustration, but it’s strong. I deserve to love the way I love, and I love so deeply and so fully and in a committed way. Maybe there are others out there like that. Who knows?”

The songs on Nashville Canyon aren’t exactly angry, but you can hear the loss, the frustration, and the reclamation. Tracks like “Use My Heart Against Me,” which was inspired by the blues boogie of Bo Diddly’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover,” show how easily her voice settles into this newfound niche. And fear not, she hasn’t abandoned the power ballad: “Blame Me” hits that mark but in the soulful way she’d always hoped to create, and the scorching “Leave,” about an unfaithful partner, brings the vulnerability and honestly of her public persona straight into her music. “Did you do to her what you did to me?” she sings. “Was she on her knees?” She calls that vulnerability her “superpower.”

Silvas, a co-writer on “Blame Me” and “Leave,” remembers being struck by just how vulnerable Simpson was willing to be in the studio. “I felt like I’d been sitting with a girl I’ve known a long time,” Silvas says. “She wrote from a very true place and has this incredible bravery.  It was wonderful to be with someone who really wanted to write from the heart, and show people who she is. I think she felt like she hadn’t gotten to be that yet.”

At one point during a recording session, the band broke out in applause. It was validating, as people had always clapped for Jessica Simpson when she was being herself on screen, cracking jokes on reality TV. Now they were doing it when she was singing her own songs. “A lot of people are like, ‘I didn’t really listen to your music in the past, but I respected you as a singer, and I feel like this is the most you you’ve ever been,’” Simpson says. “To me, that is success.”

Those around her — McPherson, Silvas, Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne, Ashley Ray, musicians like Sista Strings — are what inspired the concept of a “Nashville Canyon,” a place like L.A.’s Laurel Canyon that overflows with creativity and collaboration. “I was talking about Laurel Canyon and how in Nashville I felt those vibes of support,” Simpson says. “A community of friends and people who just supported my dream. They understood it and wanted to help. It pushes me to better and step into taller shoes. If that’s possible.”

There is a Nashville Canyon: Part II in the works with McPherson, which includes surprises like a Chris Isaak co-write, and plans are in motion for a lot more music under her own label, aptly titled Nashville Canyon Records. She recently took the stage for the first time in 15 years, at South by Southwest, popping up at Nelson’s Luck Reunion. In fact, she’s due to rehearsal in 30 minutes, and she’s nervous. It’s a good feeling. And, for the record, she still likes that Rolling Stone cover shoot, down to the little white tank top and Swiffer Wet-Jet she was holding.

“I was really just being myself,” Simpson says. “I picked up a Swiffer again recently and, my gosh, they’ve upgraded these things! Every time I said Swiffer back then I got $30,000. I would just work it into any conversation. I’d be like, ka-ching!” It’s a classic Simpson quip. Now she’s on a journey to show the world just what a classic Simpson record sounds like.

“When I’ve had success in my life is when I’ve just been honest and real,” she says, getting up and preparing to swap her slippers for a pair of towering heels. “I’ve never gotten a chance to do that in music until now.”