A Beautiful Struggle

The band landed a major label deal with Def American and took off. In 1990, Louris felt confident enough to quit his day job. He also got married. The band was still not bringing in much income, but he figured that would come.

Two years later, the band released Hollywood Town Hall, which featured contributions from Louris on the standouts “Settled Down Like Rain” and “Waiting for the Sun.” They toured and wrote songs for two years, and in 1995, after several expensive months in a studio (an article in Worth magazine estimated they owed their label close to $1 million), they released Tomorrow the Green Grass. It was the first and last time in their careers they heavily promoted an album, but Green Grass, featuring the masterpiece “Blue,” was solid. They played it on Letterman and killed, and signed up to support their buddies, the red-hot Soul Asylum, on a major national tour. This was it. They were ready. He was ready.

Then everything fell apart.

Olson had fallen in love with songwriter Victoria Williams and wanted out of the band. Louris had fallen out of love (he divorced in 1996) and was clinging to the band. Two paths diverging at exactly the wrong time.

Louris was devastated. “To be honest, I don’t know how I got through it,” he says. He went looking for answers. When he didn’t find them, he did the one thing that always made him feel good: He wrote and played music.

The resulting album, Sound of Lies, which the remaining band members recorded under the Jayhawks moniker, was a source of bitter dispute between Louris and Olson for a long time. It’s a little frightening. There’s no folksy back-porch vibe; just blistering, angry pop. Many long-time fans were mystified. “I think some people found it interesting and others thought, ‘This is not the Jayhawks.’ At the time, I just thought, ‘What the hell, they can love it or hate it.’ ”

Louris limped into the twenty-first century with a chip on his shoulders worthy of Victor Hugo. His goal at the time was simple: land a hit. On the band’s sixth album, Smile, he tried his hardest to write one with “I’m Going to Make You Love Me.” Didn’t happen. The most exposure it got was in a Ralph Lauren commercial.

He reevaluated. Only this time it was different. Instead of approaching life as a results-oriented architect—form follows function, stardom follows great songs—he began to view life as a process. His wife, Julie—they married in 1999 and have an eight-year-old son, Henry Wilson—proved to be pivotal. “She’ll say, ‘Look at what you have and what you don’t have. You have a wonderful life and it’s not about chasing the almighty dollar,’ ” he says. “I mean, money is important to a certain extent, so that you can afford to live and have a decent house and send your kids to a good school, but that’s not the be all and end all.” Louris also found comfort in Tragic Sense of Life, a book by the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, which taught him about the universal and relative nature of pain. You can accept pain, he learned—you can also let it go.

In 2003, the Jayhawks recorded their most relaxed album ever, Rainy Day Music, which, with little promotion, debuted higher than any of their previous records. Go figure.

Two years later, Louris let more of it go. He left the band. “It was a tough decision,” he says. “There is just a lot that goes into day-to-day travel. It started to feel like a job.”