about a year went by and I had some friends in Asheville North Carolina that I was writing with and playing with at the time, and I didn’t know but we had mutual friends with Warren and they were all school buddies with Warren you know? So they introduced the record to him and he dug it and really he’s taken us under his wing ever since then.
Yeah, he sure did, I was so happy to see that. You and him together seem like a pretty good team actually. Tell me this about the new album, it's already get- ting rave reviews. I’m hearing things in the press that I haven’t heard since the Allman Brothers at their peak. It's kinda like when Derek Trucks first started too, with media folks calling you a prodigy and all this kinda stuff. So on the new album, how would you describe your style of music? Well, that's how we’ve always been, we’ve never liked to conform to one particular genre. It's a lot of different styles of music that go into what it is that we’re trying to say. That wasn’t something that we tried to do consciously, it just kind of happened as far as the different styles that everybody grew up listening to and the similar styles we grew up listening to. We all have similar upbringings musically a lot of us came up studying a lot of jazz, and a few of us grew up in pentecostal churches playing that gospel you know? But we all had very different upbringings in a way. So you can feel that similarity of south- ern rock thing but you can also hear the dif- ferences between all of us stylistically I think.
Well you know, there's a lot of horns on this album, I love it. I just wondered if you always played with a horn sec- tion or is that a recent thing? After the last record I was like, man we need some horns (laughing). Justin was still in col-
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lege but he would come and sit in with us oc- casionally and when we finally got the horn section together I felt really at home because I wanted that big sound to be able to encom- pass what it is we were trying to say.
What's the difference to you personally between playing in a guitar based band and playing with a horn section like Blood Sweat and Tears or Chicago or something like that? I’d say it's different in the fashion that me as a vocalist, I can kinda separate between the ideas of playing and singing because I’ve got a full band behind me with the Hammond and the horns and our bass player and our drum- mer are locked in, you know. So if I have to take my hand off the neck for a second to re- ally get a point across vocally, I'm able to do that a little easier with a full band. But there's also something really beautiful about just having a trio and really carrying all of that yourself, like the early Gov’t Mule stuff. You can't beat it. There's no definitive way to say a six piece band is better than a three piece. A good friend of mine, a drummer from Greenville told me “if you’re a three piece band you’ve gotta sound like a six piece band. If you’re a six piece band you’ve need to sound like a twelve piece band. And if there's anymore than six of you need to sound like an orchestra.”
That's probably true. You’re making me wonder what drummer that was now? It was Jeff Holland.
Oh, Jeff. He’s a good one. Yeah you know Jeff, you gotta love Jeff.
True. He hung out, well he worked at Freddie’s Palmetto Drums for a while. Freddie is another good one to talk to.
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