Who is Arthur White? (Part 1 of 2)

The following was written in January 2007 to introduce potential new band members to the origins and history of the Arthur White concept.

Arthur White was born in 1997 out of the ashes of a torrid, ill-fated love affair.  The first few songs written in this style were obsessive attempts to rekindle this romance, if only in some poetical sense.  At this time, I was playing organ in Le Triggers [sic] and living in our practice space in the Performance Center (which, I've heard, has since mysteriously burnt to the ground).  No one could make much sense of Arthur White since we were an indie rock band and there were few examples of this style of music in the Ann Arbor-Detroit scene or anywhere else for that matter.

This is not to say, however, that there was an absence of prototypes influencing me.  In fact, a longtime affinity for R&B had been growing and fusing with a newfound love of bossa nova.  Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, The Main Ingredient, The Dells, The Moments, and The Dramatics melded with the likes of Brazil '66, Antonio Carlos Jobim, João and Astrud Gilberto, Stan Getz, and Herbie Mann.

The name Arthur White first came about as shorthand between band members, e.g. "Are we having an Arthur White practice today?" scribbled on a post-it note and affixed to the door of our practice space.  The reference was to an apparent similarity between my voice and Barry White's.  Later, a band member's dad provided us with the name of our first band--"The Sweet World of Arthur White"--taking inspiration from yet another musically complex individual, Arthur Brown, and his band, "The Crazy World of Arthur Brown."

These archetypes intermingle in innumerable ways and are continually contemplated in the mind and music of Arthur White.  As much as anything, Marvin Gaye's album, Here, My Dear--with its achingly beautiful mediation on his marriage and subsequent split up--provides a psychic center and template for many of the songs.  Barry White's metaphysical "you" also finds expression in Arthur White: love songs are deepened to the point of becoming analogical expressions of desire for divine union, as in St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul.