The Daily Times

By Americana standards, the departure of Mark Olson from the band The Jayhawks in 1995 was the equivalent of John Lennon leaving The Beatles.

The Paul McCartney of that band, Gary Louris, carried on without him, releasing several Jayhawks albums that, despite Olson’s absence, still rank as some of the finest examples of the alt-country genre. So when the two reunited for an album and a reunion tour several years ago, Jayhawks fans crossed their fingers that the band behind such landmark albums as “Hollywood Town Hall” and “Tomorrow the Green Grass” might gather once again to make a new record.

“Mockingbird Time” is the realization of that dream. Only, to Olson, the Beatles comparisons are amusing. He’s grateful for the band’s diehard following, but given the lack of a No. 1 album or a Top 10 hit on the band’s resume, he’d hardly qualify his departure or the recent reunion as an Americana phenomenon.

“I’ve never been up on the big pedestal in life, because once you’re up there, people like to come around and throw rocks and knock you off,” Olson told The Daily Times during a recent interview. “We’ve always been below the radar. When I was in the band, we were not, by any means, the most popular band, which is why the Lennon-Cartney comparisons are laughable. We were mid-level, at best.

“Now that it’s happening again, maybe we can rise up a little bit. I’ve never experienced that, being in a band that’s super-duper popular, but we do have a core following. Maybe we can rise up a little bit, to maybe being one of the bands people like in the world. Of course, if we do get a big following, people will want to knock us down and stomp on us.”

To followers of the Americana genre — or at least, the style that developed out of the late 1980s, when the band Uncle Tupelo reintroduced the Depression-era music of The Carter Family and other Old Time musicians, infusing it with a contemporary spirit and youthful energy — The Jayhawks already do have it.

Olson and Louris, along with bass player Marc Perlman, formed the band in 1985 from the fertile musical grounds of the Minneapolis music scene. At the time, the country-rock scene in that city and beyond had grown stale; mainstream country was all about rhinestones and country-pop hits that bore little resemblance to the sounds of the early 1970s, when musicians like Gram Parsons and bands like The Byrds created a bridge between the earliest forms of country and modern-day folk.

The Jayhawks helped change all of that. The harmonies by Louris and Olson had the power of distilling the extreme emotions of the human heart onto a recorded piece of music — love and loss and ache, hope and despair and yearning all came together over the course of four records together, starting with a self-titled album release in 1986. “Blue Earth” followed, but the two albums the original incarnation of the band made for the Def American label — “Hollywood Town Hall” and “Tomorrow the Green Grass” — are considered a one-two punch of what defined Americana in the early 1990s.

During that time, the band added Tim O’Reagan on drums and Karen Grotberg on keyboards and background vocals, the two members who complete the 2011 version of the band. And while “Tomorrow the Green Grass,” released in 1995, was a critical home run, it didn’t sell as well as label executives hoped. By the end of that year, Olson had left the band to move to Joshua Tree, Calif., with his then-girlfriend, singer-songwriter Victoria Williams.

Louris and Perlman kept the band going, releasing “Sound of Lies,” “Smile” and “Rainy Day Music.” the first two taking the band in more of a pop-rock direction that was jarring, almost, to fans of Louris and Olson as the leaders of the band. The latter album seemed to herald a return to the band’s rootsy origins, but after its 2003 release, the group seemed to slip off the radar. The various members pursued solo and side projects, and The Jayhawks seemed destined for the annals of American pop culture history.

Then, in 2005, Louris and Olson started talking. And touring. Intermittent shows over the next two years led to a deepening friendship and musical partnership, and the two released an album, “Ready for the Flood,” in 2009. Those tours together, Olson said, became the catalyst for reassembling the band.

“During that tour, we got a lot of requests for Jayhawks material,” Olson said. “I think what it is, is that people have an idea of what a band sounds like. Musicians have a lot of different ideas, so they go off in left field sometimes. And we said, ‘OK — let’s come in from left field. Let’s go into second base and catch that ground ball. Let’s put that band back together.’”

During his time apart, he said, his career with Williams was fulfilling in its own way. He thought of his old friends fondly, but as he described, he wasn’t sitting around wishing he was a part of the band again.

“I wished those guys the best in that time, and I never had a harsh word to say about them,” he said. “That wouldn’t have been the way I was brought up, to whine and moan in public. Plus, I didn’t have anything to whine and moan about. I was so busy with my life, and oh, what a life it was.”

And is. Since divorcing Williams in 2005, destiny seems to have slowly, imperceptibly steered him back to a time in his life when the band of which he was a part crafted music that would have a lasting impact on Americana as a whole. And when he and Louris started crafting songs together, first for “Flood” and later for “Mockingbird Time,” it was almost as if he’d stepped through a portal back to those years.

“It was like a horse going to water, man — there it was,” he said. “We came up together. We know how each other thinks, in a way. We don’t really have to talk about it, too much. It didn’t feel like deja vu as much as I felt like, ‘We can do this again. We can get this done.’”

Certainly, both men have changed and grown as musicians. For Olson, playing with Williams taught him to play more in the moment; Louris, he said, is a broader musician who “paints with a wider paintbrush.”

Still, any celebration of greatness regarding their reunion and the band’s reformation is something that’s slightly unsettling for Olson. The path they walked all those years ago is a divergent one, he pointed out, and to say that they paved it is a misleading thing.

“There are bands I know that are labelled Americana, and they certainly didn’t follow in our footsteps,” he said. “When I think of Americana, I think of Steve Earle, of Gillian Welch, of Iris DeMent, of Lucinda Williams, of Victoria. There are so many people who were already involved in music during our time, and we would listen to these people play and sing songs. They’re just great singer-songwriters with a lyrical gift of looking at the world, and they affect people.”

The Jayhawks, then, fall in that same category. They may not be known the world over like The Beatles, but there’s plenty of time for new fans to discover them and for the uninitiated to be won over by the beauty of the music. Will they ever approach the popularity of the Fab Four? Unlikely, but hey — stranger things have happened.

“We should be so lucky,” Olson said with a laugh.

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