Former Knoxville Songwriter John Paul Keith Finds His Music Home in Memphis

In Music, Music Stories by Matthew Everettleave a COMMENT

Memphis has been good for John Paul Keith.

During the late 1990s and early ’00s, following his departure from Knoxville big-league contenders the Viceroys, Keith was a wandering singer/songwriter, spending a couple of years at a time in different cities (Nashville, Birmingham) and different bands (the Nevers, Stateside) and flirting with label deals and mainstream rock success.

Eventually, in 2005, when he was 29 and emotionally, professionally, and creatively exhausted, Keith landed in Memphis, where his sister lived. He said he was giving up on the music business—which is hard to do in a city with as distinguished a musical history as his new hometown.

“It’s just the right niche for what I do,” he says. “I’ve always been a student of Memphis music, even well before I got here—Sun Records and Stax Records, all that stuff was stuff I was first getting hip to when I was in high school.”

After a couple of years away from music, Keith was convinced by his new city to pick up his guitar again. Soon after that, he was leading a new band, the One Four Fives, and working on his debut solo album, The Man That Time Forgot, released in 2011. That was followed, in 2013, by Memphis Circa 3AM, an album that summed up Keith’s personal musical journey and his artistic vision—12 songs that stir up a West Tennessee mix of early rock ’n’ roll, pop, and country. (Think Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, and the Beatles’ Please Please Me.)

“The creative spirit here in Memphis is completely open,” he says. “There’s no such thing as genre here, so you can do anything, as long as you mean it. The musicians are very open that way—everybody’s cool with everybody and that spirit has always been there.”

Around the same time, Keith joined Amy LaVere, a Memphis singer known for her Mississippi River Gothic style of Americana, and drummer Shawn Zorn for an old-fashioned duet record under the name Motel Mirrors. Their self-titled debut album, also released in 2013, wouldn’t sound unfamiliar to fans of either Keith or LaVere. But Keith says the collaboration—the first time he’d worked with another songwriter since his time in the Viceroys—brought out new dimensions of his songwriting.

A couple of years ago, the collaboration took a further step when LaVere married guitarist Will Sexton after she met him on a tour with Nashville songwriter Shane McAnally.

“They got married about a year after they met so he was always around,” Keith says. “He started coming to Memphis all the time when they started seeing each other, and then he moved here and he was here all the time—he was at all the gigs, so I was like, you might as well be put to work.”

Keith, LaVere, and Sexton wrote and recorded a second Motel Mirrors album last year; they’re looking for a label to release it. Keith is also writing new material for a follow-up to Memphis Circa 3AM—he tossed a whole album’s worth of songs after writing the new Motel Mirrors album with LaVere and Sexton.

“I’d go over to their house every evening and we’d sit around their kitchen table and we’d write a song—we did that every day for eight days,” he says. “Writing that intensively and that quickly, with other people and with a deadline like that—I liked what we got out of that and decided to scrap my solo record because it wasn’t as good as what we came up with.

“I felt like that was a breakthrough for me,” he says. “I liked where it was headed, I liked how we made the record, and I liked the process of it, and I just want to keep doing that.”

There’s a lot about Memphis that Keith likes: the history, the opportunities to play, and there’s a blossoming analog recording industry (“It’s the way records used to be made, it’s the way we do it, I don’t have any interest in doing it any other way, and if I have to do it digitally I lose interest very quickly,” he says). But it’s the relationships and partnerships he’s found there that have allowed him to reclaim his career.

“I like where I’m at,” he says. “I like the people I’m working it, and it’s all good now. Things line up to where you feel like you can do what you do the best you can. I feel like there are elements in place that are lining up to where I can really make the records I want to make with the people I like working with.”

Senior Editor Matthew Everett manages the Knoxville Mercury's arts & entertainment section, including the comprehensive calendar section—Knoxville’s go-to guide for everything worth doing in the area. You can reach Matthew at matthew@knoxmercury.com.

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