Songwriter Thomm Jutz on Turning a Dark Inheritance Into Something Beautiful

**Lee C. Camp** (0:05)
Hello friends, I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
We have a subscriber community called Nse+, and there in that community, we share weekly reflections, have several bonus series, and release other additional resources, all related of course to exploring what it means to live a good life that you won't get here on the primary No Small Endeavor feed. And today, I wanted to share a partial excerpt of one of those bonus conversations from Nse+. We talk on the show a lot about truth, beauty and goodness, and this holding together of these so-called transcendentals is important in numerous ways, because they help us explore things otherwise we might not. Truth, for example. Many of us academics often want to prioritize mere words in getting at truth. And for sure, words are one fruitful, perhaps indispensable way of getting at truth. But when we push ourselves, say, to remember beauty alongside truth, we get reminded that things like music and song are yet another way of getting at truth that perhaps mere words cannot accomplish. Which is one reason we celebrate getting to have conversations with artists and to be captured by their songs and music, both in our live shows and like today, sharing with you studio sessions like this one with Thomm Jutz. Thomm has had the courage to look right into the depths of the difficult challenges he's been handed. A grandfather who died by suicide, apparently after that grandfather was unable to come to terms with the fact that he'd been a Nazi, or Thomm losing a best friend to alcoholism, or his own perfectionism and self-criticism. Instead of turning away from all these challenges or being consumed by them, Thomm has done the slow, disciplined work of turning it into something beautiful. Thomm is a Grammy nominated songwriter, producer, and professor at Belmont University. He was born in Germany, and there in Germany as an 11-year-old boy, he saw the legendary Bobby Bear on a television show, and he knew from that moment what he wanted to do with his life. In time, he moved to Nashville and has done what he envisioned as that 11-year-old boy. His new record, Ring a Belling, is where all of this comes together. You can get the full conversation with Thomm on Nse+.
To subscribe, go to our website at nosmallendeavor.com and click the button that says Join Nse+. In the meanwhile, here's an excerpt of that conversation with Thomm Jutz.
Welcome, Thomm.

**Thomm Jutz** (3:02)
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:03)
So when you think about your storytelling, your songwriting, it seems to me pretty consistently, you're trying to point to some sort of transformative possibilities in the human experience. When did that kind of first capture you, or when did you begin to go down that road?

**Thomm Jutz** (3:23)
Well, I think it captured me when I was 11 and saw Bobby Bear, but I just couldn't put a name to it. My parents are devout Catholics still, so I grew up in that environment. Then I have an older brother who was a successful business man, and then decided that that was not enough, and he just went on this spiritual quest and ended up becoming a doctor. He introduced me to a lot of alternative ways of thinking when I was in my early 20s and really only interested in playing rock and roll, and playing as many gigs as possible.
I started reading a lot of stuff about Buddhism for a while, and he introduced me to people like Herman Hissen, I started reading those books, and then from Hissen's, it's a pretty short distance to Carl Jung, and I heard that name, and I got interested in that. But so I've always been interested in things of, I don't know what you want to call it, metaphysical nature or psychological nature or whatever. But probably the Jung thing became really important to me, probably about I was on tour with Nancy Griffith in Australia, and we'd been gone for six weeks, and it was a really grueling tour.
I can't remember where I bought it, but I had Memories, Dreams, Afflections with me, which is Jung's autobiography. It's not really an autobiography because somebody else wrote it down, but he narrated his life basically. And that's sort of like a gateway drug for a lot of people when it comes to Jung. And it just piqued a lot of interest. It answered a lot of questions. It made me very curious about that and just followed that.

**Lee C. Camp** (4:55)
Yeah. If you had to point to two or three big ideas from Jung that have been helpful to you in a recurring fashion, what might some of those be that are most important?