Photo by Dino Perrucci
How does this new music compare to what you guys have released before?
You know what? It’s funny because everybody always says this but this is definitely our best studio record. It’s so hard to beat the live things, [2002’s] Live at the Wetlands and all of that. This one is just a little bit more edgier, you know? A little bit more energetic in that way. We’ve written some great songs, you know. Co-written with some guys, and we kinda all got together in a studio, in a room, and really got some great things. I’ve written so many songs over the past couple of years, collaborated with so many guys, from Eric Krasno to Carlos Santana, all these different guys. I’m sure I’m forgetting people. They’ll be like, “Hey, you didn’t mention me!”
I actually wanted to ask about your relationship with Krasno. How did that come about?
Just years of playing music together and knowing each other. He’s great, man. It’s funny how we’ve all gotten kind of older. It’s weird how it all happens, man. Even if you look at Lettuce. We opened our first show for Lettuce. Then, we always teased them guys because they had like eight bands. It was like, “What the hell, man? How many bands are you in?” We didn’t know nothing about the scene. It was like, “Kraz with Goapele,” “Kraz featuring Javier,” “Shmeeans and the Squad,” “Lettuce.” Like, damn, man.
As the years have passed, everyone’s made music and everything has gone to another level. You look at those guys—Lettuce and Soulive and Kraz. Everybody is sort of slowly climbing, everybody’s just gotten better. It’s kind of funny to learn to accept that. You’d rather have that sort of career. Because we all love playing music anyway, so you’d rather have that [kind of] career. It’s just real musicianship and real collaborations and being steady. We all used to complain, like, “How come your song is such a hit and mine’s not? Look at this band—why is that band a hit?” And then next thing you know, those bands are gone. Nobody will show up to watch them play or buy their music.
In a Relix interview two years ago, when you switched to Blue Note, you were talking about how you felt like you were kind of going in the wrong direction with Warner Brothers, how do you feel about your trajectory now?
Well, with Sony, it’s a much better vision. I think Blue Note was just a transition. It’s a company, you know—so many of these companies are in transition, and sometimes we can all kind of get caught up into their thing. But sometimes it might not be the right thing for certain artists. And Blue Note is a great company, but it just wasn’t the right thing for us then. Warren Haynes was on Blue Note too; he’s not on there anymore. It’s just changed; a lot of these companies change. Some of them really don’t fit the kind of the artists who have already been around. They like to work with newer artists, you know, unknowns, so it becomes another process, I guess.
You also mentioned that you were opening up a school in New Jersey?
Yeah. It was a music and arts school. We’ve actually since shifted. It was just a lot of politics, so we shifted to this great online school, because there’s so much bureaucracy with the Board of Education and all these different people. It’s a whole other deal, which actually became a better idea than me going out and fighting with the school boards and all that. This is a much easier thing that basically everybody in the world would be able to access and have every sort of learning tool. And not just music—arts, dancing, you know, all these different components to it. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful thing. The website is going through beta testing right now, but it’s actually something that’s really going to change the world, it really is. It’s a big idea, a big thing.
Can you talk about it at all?
Not really [laughs]. It’s just a great online music school. That’s all I can really say. You’ll hear about it very soon. Shmeeans is involved, which is something really great, Roy Hargrove, Warren, so many other guys have been involved, so it’s going to be a big thing.
You’ve mentioned your relationship with Santana, and how he sat you and Derek Trucks down at different times and talked about your careers and how you both needed to tweak some things to take the next step. Did you take that to heart?
Well, you know, I think it’s just like advice, kind of, that really helped us all grow. You can see what it’s done for Derek and Susan. They’re a success. You know, you like to be surrounded by those guys that give you that kind of helpful criticism and advice. Just career things. Because you kind of forget that those guys have been around. We think we’ve done a lot of stuff, but then you think, “Geez, man, I can’t imagine.” You don’t even know what those drugs will do to you. They used to just take them and party and play. He’s like, “Man, we played 200 gigs and we don’t even know any of them, what we did.” So it’s always important to learn musically, taking all of the criticism and the advice. It’s all helpful to me, so it’s great.
Do you feel that you’re at a point in your career where you can give that sort of advice to younger artists?
Oh yeah, yeah. You know, once you’ve been doing music this long, as long as we’ve been doing it—I mean, we’ve played over a thousand live shows, and we’ve done all these TV shows, and just being on the road, life, and this and that—we kinda like to give advice to people. But then you have guys like Santana who will tell you like, “Man, you’ve only been doing this fourteen years. You still got another forty years to go!” So it’s kinda funny when you think about that. When you think about guys like Santana, Gregg Allman, Warren and all these guys that have been playing music so long, it’s like “Wow, man.” You never really think of that. It’ll pop into your mind every now and again, like, “Man, I really wanna be playing music till I’m 70,” and then five years later you’re like, “Man, I’m only 35.” But you go through all these phases, you go through these fun phases of life and new music and new inspiration, you know? You know, we just had one of the guys that worked for this venue out in Texas, he let me hear this old set we did at Bonnaroo from like 2005 or something, and I was like, “Woah, man.” You know, there were a couple songs that we don’t even play anymore, and I was like, “Wow, we gotta start playing those again!” But I don’t even know if we could play them any better than that, man. I don’t know what was going on that day!
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