'70s SoCal singer-songwriter is back , catch him while you can

"It's kind of like being kicked by a giant mule," said J.D. Souther last week from his wheat farm outside Nashville.

A week earlier, the 65-year-old co-architect of the Southern California '70s country-rock sound had been happily touring, promoting his fine new album, "Natural History," when he was struck down by kidney stones.

Souther didn't waste any time feeling sorry for himself. He was scheduled to appear in Seattle on Sunday, as planned.

That's good to hear, since Souther has been known to disappear. The last time, it was for 25 years.

After writing multiple hits back in the '70s — "Best of My Love" and "New Kid in Town" for the Eagles and "Faithless Love" and "Silver Blue" for onetime girlfriend Linda Ronstadt — he went on hiatus for a quarter century.

Fed up with the music scene, and swimming in a stream of royalties, he built a dream house in the Hollywood Hills, rescued a couple of dogs, rode horseback on pack trips and skied in New Zealand and Colorado. An admirer of the late Northwest poet William Stafford and a friend of beat writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Souther also wrote poetry, though he's reluctant to publish his verses.

"Absent the musical landscape, the bar is a little bit higher," he explained.

This is the man who wrote (in "I'll Be Here at Closing Time"), "Is that a ring on your finger / Or just a thin and fading line?" — which in two lines pretty handily conjures the image of a lonely man eyeing up a waitress. But it does sound better sung — certainly when he sings it.

It's on his latest album, which compiles 10 songs — including his own 1979 Roy Orbison-inspired hit, "You're Only Lonely" — in a minimalist, noir setting, featuring his pristine guitar, tenor voice (sharpened to pure crystal) and occasional solos by jazz players.

Souther came up playing jazz drums and saxophone in Amarillo, Texas, and, remarkably, never picked up a guitar till he was 22. When he did, he applied a jazz harmonic sense to it (like that weird repeated chord in "Silver Blue"). His 2008 comeback album, "If the World Was You," had a jazz twist, too.

But for Souther, it's a straight line from the Great American Songbook of Cole Porter and George Gershwin to latter-day standards written by James Taylor, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Souther himself.

"I can do 'Faithless Love' and follow it with Fats Waller," he said.

Which is apparently what he does in his show.

By all means, check him out before he decides to take another sabbatical.