On Saturday afternoons, when his wife’s gone grocery shopping, he can be found pacing the front porch of his house, cogitating over chord changes and the other makings of new songs. Despite Conway’s bucolic college town status, in true outsider fashion Mize prefers keeping to himself. And while the dirt road he grew up on is now paved, little else has changed. Mize still lives in Conway, although he spent time in Germany after faking his ID to enlist in the Army at age 17. All of my tunes boil down to one thing, and that’s observations.” … “I saw two guys carrying a rolled up carpet with a pair of legs sticking out of it after Hurricane Andrew in Florida … and all kinds of people pushed to their limit. “I’ve been through nine hurricanes and I don’t know how many tornadoes, and seen way too many car wrecks where people got killed,” Mize says in his big, bawling voice.
“Let’s go to Amsterdam!” Weinheimer says eagerly.įrom Mize’s label, the Fat Possum-adjacent Big Legal Mess: “Surely, you’ve got all kinds of vacation time, though?” bassist Jason Weinheimer interjects. “Ehhh, maybe I’m chickenshit,” he finally says, laughing. When asked over beers recently at the Oyster Bar why he doesn’t tour more, Mize takes a few beats to think about it. In large part, Mize’s relative anonymity surely stems from a lack of touring. “Promises We Keep,” the album’s highlight, rivals anything Springsteen’s ever written.
“Disappear in America” charts the promise of release across the miles of the U.S.: “Thunder, it hides as lightning/the sun rides the horizon/Once we get out of here/disappear in America,” Mize wails. You’d be hard-pressed to find a song that better captures the feel of post-Katrina than the woozy “After the Storm,” inspired undoubtedly by Mize’s repeat trips to the battered Gulf Coast for Farm Bureau. There are genre workouts, like the two-stepping “Acadian Lullaby” that opens the album, and the lumbering blues of “Delta Land,” but most of the album is made up of huge, chill-bump inducing songs of American unease. “Release It to the Sky,” the new album, frames Mize’s lyrics in epic arrangements. I’m not talking about some damn stupid words, like five syllables. In other words, it’s got to be simple enough to where I can remember it and sing it. I figure if you can remember it, it’s more worth keeping. “With all that windshield time, it’s kind of like taking a phone out and plugging one in,” he says. Mize says he’s always writing, always tinkering. And she wants it all.”įrom Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar, in 2007:
And you’re sitting there just looking at her. And you got this radio playing some song where you can’t quite make it out, but you hear it. Mize, who when I asked him about the latter song explained, “This is my vision of it: It’s dark, you got your honey over here sleeping, only the hall lights are on.
Jim Mize, approaching 60 years old and only getting better at wrenching real, auditory human pain out of minor moments and private emotional nuances: “I was like the wasp,” he sings on “Empty Rooms,” “beating against the screen.” Here is Jim Mize, purveyor of ragged and startlingly honest songs like “Let’s Go Running” and “Emily Smiles” and “Promises We Keep,” songs that belong near the top of the Arkansas canon. Here is Jim Mize, an insurance claims adjustor who has spent the bulk of his time driving to disaster sites all over the South for over three decades, writing melodies in his head while he surveys the aftermaths of hurricanes. Here is Jim Mize, king of the sensitive dive-bar grunge-country rock anthem, a touring songwriter since Vietnam and the satisfied resident of a Faulkner County swamp. He was such a great man!!”Įxcerpts from our archives and from elsewhere follow.įrom former Arkansas Times entertainment editor Will Stephenson: He could make the coldest heart smile with his humor. He loved spoiling his grandchildren, Jaxon Mize and Gage & Gracie Waller. Adoring father to the late Zach Mize and stepped into that role for me at the age of 10. “Loving partner to my mother, Dana Rankin, for 38 years before her passing. “He had the kindest heart but was a force to be reckoned with at the same time,” Jim’s stepdaughter, Leslie Rankin Waller told us today. Jim Mize (May 21, 1957-April 27, 2022) of Conway, Arkansas - an eternally undersung songwriter and a longtime insurance claims adjustor whose work commutes often traced the wake of natural disaster - died today of heart complications, his family reports.