G
reater Cincinnati’s Jasmine Poole is the first to admit that she’s hardly the life of any party. She’s the quiet girl who finds an equally quiet corner and loses herself in the pages of the book she brought along for company. On the other hand, Wonky Tonk, Poole’s Country-music alter ego who has been compared to Lucinda Williams and Lydia Loveless, takes a stage like an occupying army, storming in with purpose, confidence and conviction.
But don’t mistake the division between Poole’s personal and professional personae as some first-year psychoanalytical Jekyll/Hyde disorder. She’s no shrinking violet who requires a stage in order to bloom. Poole has led a fascinating life, moving to far-flung locales with an insatiable desire for new and exotic experiences, and making friends and connections by virtue of her eccentrically infectious personality.
Although Poole, the niece of legendary Cincinnati Jazz pianist Kenny Poole, has been tearing up stages as Wonky Tonk in and out of town for years, she has only just now released her first album, the stellar
Stuff We Leave Behind . It certainly doesn’t seem like a calculated maneuver to wait until fans clamored for a release. In conversation, Poole seems incapable of that level of calculated deliberation, preferring to live in a moment that is perpetually new and unexpected. When asked about the evolution of her career in general and the new album specifically, Poole’s first inclination is to laugh.“Do you have enough tape for that?” she asks.
After a fairly rugged Kentucky upbringing, Poole began songwriting and playing guitar mostly as a joke for a high school chemistry project. But when people responded to her work, she chose to take it seriously. Upon graduation, Poole drifted from place to place, landing briefly in California before returning home.
“I’m pretty shy, believe it or not, and Wonky Tonk was a really great person to get people to talk to me so I didn’t have to go out and talk to anyone,” she says. “One day, I was fed up with not having any friends, so I decided to tell people I had a 30-minute set. No songs. I waited until I got booked and I wrote a 30-minute set. It picked up and evolved, and CityBeat loved it. Who knew?”
Early on, Poole played in a duo with friend Annie Stephens as The Wonky Donkeys. Poole acquired her stage name from an out-of-town duo that found the Donkeys on MySpace and came to play with them, asking upon arrival, “Which one’s Wonk and which one’s Donk?” Poole accepted “Wonk,” which soon morphed it into Wonky Tonk.
In 2009, Wonky Tonk’s debut EP, Super Holy Fantastic, was released. Her fanbase was growing and the EP was well received, but it was also a document of a turbulent period.
“The difference was the EP happened and then I fell in love, and that was a long, treacherous path that led to (the album),” Poole says. “It was Neverland and Peter Pan and Kit Kats and candy, then it was ghosts and heartbreak and the road. The loss of innocence, for sure.”
By that point, Poole had expanded her sphere of influence, which laser-guided her musical direction from then on. Her avowed inspirations are a laundry list of the best of Country and Americana.
“I was inundated with Guy Clark, John Prine, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris — my heroes, and I can’t believe I lived without them,” Poole says. “But I had relied on the fact that I could play guitar and make things up for my frivolous, fun lyrics. Then it got to this album, where it was more meaning-based. Show not tell, but also with your words.”Six years ago, Poole was approached by guitarist Eric Cronstein with an offer to record. She was still treating her “music career” less seriously and was both chagrined and intrigued.
“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is all a joke, but sure,’ ” Poole says. “So we tried. But as anyone knows, recording’s a whole different beast. I got overwhelmed and it didn’t work. I don’t understand click tracks and it’s very glaring when it’s in your ears; you can’t wing it like you do on stage.”
Shortly thereafter, Poole moved to Denmark and, just before relocating to Montana, she decided to revisit the songs with local guitarist Jake Tippey behind the board. When Poole returned from Montana, she connected with Mike Ingram (of late Indie Pop band The Seedy Seeds), who agreed to help her with the record. Poole then went back to work with Cronstein and finished the album with local musician/producer Brian Olive.
With six years and four engineers behind the project, perhaps the most amazing aspect of Stuff We Leave Behind is its cohesion. The album hangs together as a tight collection of disparate songs — either Country-tinged Indie Rock or Indie Rock-tinted Country — but nothing seems out of place or forced.
“I just knew the hearts of the songs were meant to be together as part of Stuff We Leave Behind and what it’s all about,” Poole says. “You know how you can collect all these souvenirs and you go through a box and there’s this little piece of paper that meant the world to you and now you have no idea? You’ve got to throw it away. It was more of that emotional realm of the stuff I’m holding onto, and I have to let it go. These songs all comprise that. I don’t know how it became cohesive except that I was the one constantly working on it and developing it. We basically have all of Cincinnati playing on it and they added their flavor to it, but I was in there going, ‘What about this?’ and putting the sprinkles on.”
Poole didn’t need to overthink the running order of Stuff We Leave Behind — the song titles are largely a travelogue of the places she’s lived. She arranged the order almost spontaneously.
“I thought about it for maybe five minutes, then I wrote it down and listened to it, and it’s the perfect order and exactly the story and journey that needed to happen,” Poole says. “I couldn’t believe how it started with the a capella song (‘I’ll Turn My Radio On’) and finished with the suitcase song (‘Keri On’). I did not mean for that to happen, it was just the feeling. I went on heart alone; maybe that’s why it took so long.”
WONKY TONK’s release party for Stuff We Leave Behind is Dec. 4 at Northside Tavern. More info: wonkytonkmusic.com.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2015.
