Southern man.

Imagine Harry Dean Stanton saying this: “I knew these people, these two people. (Clears throat). They were in love with each other. The girl was very young, about 17 or 18 I guess, and the guy was quite a bit older, and he was kinda raggedy and wild. And she was very beautiful, y’know?’ And together they turned everything into a kind of an adventure.”

I keep thinking about the film Paris, Texas when I listen to some of the songs on Billy Bob Thornton’s album Private Radio. It’s not just that Billy Bob and his wife Angelina Jolie could easily play the principle parts in any remake of the Wim Wenders/Sam Shepherd classic, it’s that their own lives could easily provide the backbone for any of the latter’s screenplays.

So, inevitably, there’s a story behind the title tune of the album. Before Billy Bob met Angelina, his fifth wife, she once stood on the Broadway Bridge in Portland, Oregon, thinking about diving into the water and ending it all. Thornton occupied the same spot at a different time, coming to terms with his own demons, realising that if he didn’t deal with them he’d never amount to anything. The two later revisited the place together, and their experiences provided the inspiration for the song.

“‘Private Radio’ is essentially a song about when the voices in your head and your fears and everything won’t stop, to the point where you want to jump off a bridge,” Billy Bob explains. “But I figure a song like that, if you put it out there… for some reason there are people out there who listen to people like me and value my opinion or they kind of pattern your life after you sometimes. And if they see my life is happy now and yet there was a time in my life like that, maybe it’ll give somebody some hope. So I can feel good about putting a song like that out there because it’s not just a song about suicide or something, it’s a song about: ‘Y’know what? You can be at the bottom of the barrel and yet you can live and you can actually turn your life around’.”

You know Billy Bob Thornton’s face from any amount of film roles: the filth-covered mechanic from Oliver Stone’s U Turn, the blank canvas of the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, the simple-hearted brother of Sam Raimi’s morality play A Simple Plan, and of course, the simple-minded killer of Thornton’s own Slingblade. But the voice is almost as familiar, a slow, considered twang that could be bottled and sold as an antidote to stress. The effect is like talking to a cousin you always got on with but haven’t seen in years.

Anyway, one thing leads to another and we end up discussing the strange kinship between parts of Ireland and the deep south – the penchant for yarn-spinning, the language, the black semi-alcoholic humour. After all, there’s only a handful of letters separating Frank and Flannery O’ Connor.

“Ireland and the southern part of the United States are storytelling centres, that’s the vibe there,” Thornton says. “I mean probably any Irish artist who ever came out, whether it’s music, writing, wherever it is, it’s all based on growing up with storytelling, y’know, that’s what happened to us in the south. Plus Arkansas, where I was raised, it’s settled by Irish and Scottish, in the Ozark Mountains that’s the language.”

You don’t need me to tell you that Billy Bob Thornton is not your regular actor boy moonlighting as a rock star. He played music in his native Hot Springs, Arkansas from the age of nine, when he got his first drum kit and formed a band called The McCoveys (after baseball legend Willie McCovey). His first public appearance was at a PTA meeting, performing – ironically enough – an instrumental version of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s anti-peacenik ‘60s hit ‘The Ballad Of The Green Beret’.

Alongside his brother Jimmy (now deceased), Thornton grew up listening to everything from Jim Reeves to Captain Beefheart to the British Invasion acts. By the time he hit his early 20s he’d already played with a whole slew of chicken wire combos, and in 1974 formed the ZZ Top tribute band Tres Hombres, opening for acts like Ted Nugent, the MC5 and Hank Williams Junior, and working as a roadie during downtime.

Then, after seven lean years of trying to make it in rock ‘n’ roll, Thornton moved to California to try his luck in Hollywood (his first film was a documentary of the Athens, GA band Widespread Panic). And while he never made a conscious decision to give up on music, it gradually got sidelined.

The rest is a matter of public record. Billy Bob struggled through small film and stage parts before winning an Oscar for his Slingblade screenplay, not to mention rave reviews for his acting and directorial skills. After 20 years of struggle, his name now had enough currency to snag character actor parts in big budget features like Armageddon, jobs which afforded him the luxury of also taking on more offbeat roles as well as financing pet projects like his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All The Pretty Horses.

During the Slingblade shoot, Thornton hosted jam sessions as a means of letting off steam after the day’s filming. Pretty soon he started thinking about making a covers album of his favourite songs: hillbilly standards, British invasion classics, garage nuggets. However, friends like Tom Petty and Marty Stuart talked him into recording his own material.

“I always wanted to sign a record contract to somebody who took me seriously,” he says. “The reason I waited ’til now is because these days I have the luxury of having a little more time if I want to have it, like I can take off for a bit and not starve to death. Also this Lost Highway label really wanted my music, they were interested in that and not my name so much. If you’re on a label with Lucinda Williams and Robert Earl Keen and those kinda people, at least you know it’s just about the music, it’s certainly not ’cos they wanna sell a zillion records.”

Since its release last autumn, Private Radio has done respectable business, particularly here in Europe, where it’s considered halfway between alt-country acts like Will Oldham and The Handsome Family and elder country mavericks such as Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris and the aforementioned Marty Stuart, who co-produced the record. American country radio, predictably enough, won’t touch it with a bargepole.

Thornton describes the album as “a conglomeration, sort of like my love of dark moody rock and The Byrds and Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits and Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. Tom Waits is fantastic, there’s a song called ‘On The Nickel’ from Heart Attack & Vine, it’s such a moving song I can’t even listen to it. Y’know, it’s a shame, probably the things I love the most are movies that I can’t watch and songs that I can’t listen to.”

Thornton reaches that level of torment and tenderness a couple of times on this record, most notably on ‘Starlight Lounge’, a beautiful barfly duet with Holly Lamar. The effect of the song is not far from the short stories of Ray Carver, or Bukowski with his guard down.

“She was just a friend of mine, a songwriter out of Nashville,” Thornton says of Lamar. “We were just sitting around one night at the Sunset Marquis, which is kind of like a second home, I used to live there before Angie and I got married. And she and I were talking about writing a song, we actually had the title first, she was saying, ‘You know how there’s always a Starlight Lounge in every town?’ And Dwight Yoakum dropped by and threw a couple of lines in there, and it was fun ’cos he’s my buddy, and next thing y’know we had it. There’s a very specific place in Hot Springs, Arkansas that I had in mind.”

That sense of place is paramount. Thornton’s songs – like his screenplays – are infested with southern ghosts.

“You know, my movies have generally been called southern gothic and that’s sorta what they called this record,” he says. “If it’s not out and out country, it’s definitely southern music, and Marty Stuart is also from Mississippi so he and I had no communication trouble, it’s like we knew exactly the animal we were dealing with all the time. I remember when we wrote that song ‘Forever’, we were saying, ‘God it would be great to write a song about the waffle house’, and I just started singing these lyrics and goofing off, and we just wrote it in the control room and cut it that night.”

The song in question is narrated by a character who proclaims himself “under the influence of Merle Haggard” (a moment’s silence please) while wearing his girlfriend’s feather-fringed panties under his jeans. Ask Thornton if he’s bothered that the specific references to his wife in such songs might make it onto the cover of the National Enquirer, and he says this:

“Y’know what? They’ve talked about me so much at this point it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing that they can say… y’know, some of the stuff they say is hurtful and untrue, I can’t be dishonest about it, I don’t like to be talked about, especially hurtful stuff about how our marriage is so weird, and actually we’re best friends and we love each other very much and we’d like to be treated as normal people, because we really are.

“And as much as we may have played up the edgy sides of ourselves coming up early on, we’re actually kind of regular, and we don’t really have a dungeon, and we don’t really drink blood and none of that stuff’s true. But that’s what sells papers. So some of the stuff is hurtful, but in terms of them taking a song like ‘Angelina’ and turning it into something, it’s all true, so I don’t care. This is the way we met and how we feel about each other, and that’s fine if they want to do that. And it’s not too personal for me to put out there ’cos it’s something I’m proud of.”

Much of Private Radio was recorded in Billy Bob’s own basement studio in his Beverly Hills home, christened The Snake Pit by its previous owner, former Guns ‘N’ Roses guitarist and reptile lover Slash. Upon buying the property, Thornton hired an expert to comb the place looking for snake eggs. This air of paranoia, of not being at home in your own home, is writ large in the record’s spooked opening track ‘Dark And Mad’, a sort of country noir take on ‘Working Class Hero’ by way of Townes Van Zant.

Thornton: “I wrote this song at a time when I just didn’t want to deal with anybody, going through one of those periods of time… Just so you know, I’m half Irish, my father was Irish, the rest of me is American Indian and Italian, so it’s kind of an intense combination, y’know? My uncle used to say, ‘Lock up the liquor, the firearms and the white women…’ And so, there are times when just the sheer intensity of living in your head prevents you from being able to go out and deal with people, and you just wanna sit in there and write a screenplay or whatever it is. And I was going through one of those periods where I just couldn’t go outside, and that’s how that song originated.”

Private Radio’s closing nine-minute talking blues ‘Beauty At The Back Door’ is a similar study in isolation. Over the sparest backing, Thornton describes his childhood home, and a strange tryst that occurred between his father and a younger local girl. A whole host of ghosts spring to mind, most of them known to Harry Crews.

“We were just in the studio one night,” he recalls, “the lights were all off and we were just sitting there with Kim Mitchell the engineer, and Marty just had the guitar and started playing and he said, ‘Why don’t you talk about that house you grew up in?’ And I started talking and that’s what came out. It was almost like automatic writing, just saying what comes off the top of my head, but based on an initial seed of something: the idea to talk about the house I grew up in.

“There seems to be something in that whole recitation that deals with some sort of child molestation, I dunno, some weird subconscious thing. When my father was on his death-bed, which was when I was 17, 18, he would talk to me about certain things, mention things to me that were shocking in a way. He wasn’t the most loyal guy in the world, y’know? So that’s really memories I had of growing up in the house in the woods there, and my father as a figure I never really knew, (but) I knew he had some dark secrets.”

The stuff of the Freudian void and the Jungian jungle. Thornton admits that as an actor and performer, the work sometimes acts as therapy by default. Does he find himself giving stuff away when he’s improvising on film, seeing it later and going, ‘Jesus, what was I saying?’

“Oh, there’s no question about that!” he laughs. “Ad-libbing is really dangerous! I’m not a stranger to looking inside myself at all. I think I’ve confronted myself a lot more in the last couple of years than any other time because my life is very happy now so it allows me to do it. I think if I were in the middle of that sort of depression or melancholy or fear or whatever, I don’t know I’d be able to confront it, but these days I can look at it like, ‘Well thank god that’s over, I’m gonna write about it now’.

“You know, a lot of people say you need to be a tortured artist, (but) I’m really enjoying not being tortured. People always say, ‘Don’t you need that to write?’ I say, ‘Look, I’ve got such a backlog, it’s all in my back pocket, I don’t forget about it’.”