Keb Mo recently released The Reflection, a dozen track collection, and his first album since 2006’s Suitcase, which both confidentally and consistently showcases the singer/songwriter’s wide range of influences. The work also appears to consolidate the diverse strands of his music into a single powerful focal point: the man’s vision, itself. Mo is an astute songwriter, and he surrounds himself with like-minded individuals who share his work ethic in the studio and beyond to craft that unique “song to last a lifetime.”
Jambands.com spoke with Keb Mo after the release of the album, and during his tours in support of the sublime record out on the road. Mo and his band are in Europe in late October, before heading back to America for a late 2011 run. Mo is a warm, loose, and intelligent conversationalist who manages to put the listener at ease, not only on record, but in person, as well, with his friendly tales of songcraft, musicianship, and life lessons. Whereas others may count the calendar pages which have flown off the wall, Mo does not, seeking instead to live in the inspired moment, always active, always focused on that next piece of work, which will help define who he is as a man and an artist.
RR: I’ve been living with The Reflection for a while now, and I know you definitely have, as well. Did you want to talk about the production of the album?
KM: It was like diving into the deep blue unknown sea. (laughter) I got the songs together and started making the record. I wanted a certain quality and a certain consistency, and it was harder than I thought it was going to be to get. It took me a good while to get it. I kept listening to it, kept recording it, kept changing things until I got it to where I wanted it. It was a labor of love.
RR: Why was it so difficult? Was there a certain sound that you were looking for, and you wanted all the tracks to meet that high standard?
KM: I listen to all my records. Whenever I do a new record, I listen to all my records in a row. I listen to them and I try to fix everything that I thought was wrong with all my other records. (laughter)
RR: That’s a very interesting approach.
KM: “What am I doing wrong with this record? What am I doing that is resonating, and what am I doing that’s not resonating?” Keep the good. I just wanted a different feel. I didn’t want to compromise on it. And I had heard so many compromises on some of my other records that I just wasn’t comfortable with it. I wanted to make a record that I could sit down and listen to it and not switch.
RR: Did you decide fairly early on to self-produce the record?
KM: Yes. I produce my records because I’m the only one who has time. No one has enough time, and I don’t have enough money to pay [an outside producer] with as much time as I put into it. If I could, I would. (laughs) I have the time, and nobody else does. Nobody else cares as much as I do, so I figure I better do it myself.
RR: How much was it a collaborative process with your engineer, John Schirmer?
KM: It was a lot. There was a lot in the sounds and the mixes. I’m the music guy and he’s the mix guy. As far as getting the sounds and what mikes to use like on the vocals, the vocal tracks, we did this thing where we recorded a lot of vocals and we did it in my studio in L.A.. When we got here [Nashville] we had an old RCA, an old Norman mike, and it was really exotic gear to record it, and then, we got to L.A. and recorded on a mike that they make here in Nashville called Miketek, one of these API lunch box series, and it just sounded killer, so we did all the vocals over again with this new mike. Sometimes, I used drum programs, which I hadn’t used on any records before, so that was new. “What? You’re using drum programs?” “Yep.”
RR: You offered many different sounds within the unified framework, but you also brought in a lot of guests who enhanced, rather than detracted, from the piece.
KM: I guess the thing I’m most proud of was that we got a nod from some bass web site that we had the “Who’s Who of Bass Players” on The Reflection. That was really cool. I used great drummers, John Robinson, Gordon Campbell, and my son is on one track. The initial tracking sessions included a group of musicians. They tracked on all the records, but as time went on, and I started to scrutinize the tracks really closely, I found that I didn’t like the way everything gelled. When you go into the studio and you cut tracks, like a three-hour session and you cut two tracks, sometimes you are in too big of a hurry, and you pay for it later. It’s also hard to get isolated and get everybody really locked in to what you want to do; it takes a little time. I was really persnickety, so I ended up redoing a lot of things, fixing things, and just really, yeah, there was major surgery on that record. Major. To do all that and maintain the feel and maintain the honesty was really difficult.
RR: Some musicians are rushing to capture that feel because they think they are going to lose the moment.
KM: Yeah, they think that, and I always tell them, “Look, you’re you; you’re never going to lose the moment. You’re you. You can’t lose it. I don’t care how many takes you do, you can’t lose it. It’s always there.” Some of them just don’t have the emotional stamina. And, also, they want to get out and they want to go. They want to know that they’ve done a good job and leave. Some will stay all day; some will be different. People are different. I stay until the party is done. I stay. I’m in, man. Even at somebody else’s session, I’ll sit there and stay. Sometimes, they’re like, “No, it’s good; go ahead and go,” and I hear the record later and I think, “Oh, man, you guys should have stayed longer.” (laughs)
RR: I love that. You have a lot to teach modern day artists because, even with all that work, the record sounds effortless, and I am aware of that challenge.
KM: Yeah, and it sure wasn’t. (laughs)
RR: After all that, what was your sense of the record?
KM: I felt really good. I felt really good about it. Yeah. I really did. And that’s a scary feeling. (laughs)
RR: Why?
KM: I felt really good when it was mastered and done, and then afterwards, I didn’t listen to it for about two months after it came out. I couldn’t listen to it. I was scared. I had spent some much time with it—wow, I was immersed—so I was just scared because if it sucked, I was going to have to kill myself. (laughter) It would have been two years down the drain. It was like, wow, it was a real mind fuck in terms of how I worked so hard on it.
RR: Let’s talk about the collaborators on this record. How about Marcus Miller?
KM: Yes. I’ve worked with Marcus together before, and that was great. He was amazing. I’ve worked with him on his record, too [ Free ]. We just got really good. He’s a great musician, a great guy, and a guy that really understands music. Even though he’s a monster musician, he understands a simple guy like me. “Milky Way,” that we wrote, I think is one of my best kept secret works that I’ve ever done with anybody. If I get to do a record with Marcus Miller producing, I’d love that. If I could afford it. (laughs) That would be cool.
But in this day and age, when you don’t have the big budgets anymore to do a record—and I’ve never had one of those huge budgets—you’ve got to really get smart with your record making. I’ve got a studio at home with ProTools HD, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve, I’ve got my guitars there, I’ve got tools to work with, and I use them. I stay in there until it’s right. You could hire Quincy Jones to do a record, but I don’t think anybody could afford to hire Quincy Jones anymore.
RR: Well, you made some smart choices overall, including Vince Gill’s appearance on “My Baby’s Tellin’ Lies.” You two worked really well together on that track.
KM: Oh, yeah. We worked well together, we wrote the song together, and he actually let me produce his vocal; it was amazing. (laughter) He asked, “What do you want me to do?” And I was, “Well…uh…uh…O.K.” He was right there with me on it. That guy’s an amazing musician.
RR: He’s popular, but Vince Gill is also a musician’s musician.
KM: Oh, yeah. Yes. Yes. He’s not just a pretty face. He’s a bad ass. Vince is the kind of guy that if he likes you, he’ll come find you. He’ll come find you and say, “Hey, man, do you want to work? Do you want to do something?” He’s not living in some kind of rock star bubble. He’s very active. Around town [Nashville], he plays with this band, this Texas swing band called The Time Jumpers, that’s just amazing. He goes and does gigs. If you come over, if you want to say hello or something, he’ll bring his guitar and come play—you know, he’s just a regular dude. I met him when I was playing at the Ryman [Auditorium in Nashville], and one day I come backstage and there’s Vince standing in the dressing room: “Hey, man, how you doing?” (laughs) I said, “Oh…oh, man. O.K.!” If anything, I was probably standoffish from him because you never want to crowd a guy like that. I’m sure everybody would like to work with him, but he said, “Hey, let’s work together. Let’s do something.” I didn’t believe him, but he said, “No, really. I really want to do something,” so he’s a man of his word. He did it, he came through, we did it, and it worked great.
RR: It does. There’s a new cat in your band, Kevin So, and he wrote a beautiful song, “Crush On You.” Indie.Arie duoed with you on vocals on that album track.
KM: I know India.Arie. First came the song, “Crush On You.” That’s a song I heard of Kevin’s probably about eight years ago. I heard him do that song, and I said, “Man, that song’s amazing. What are you doing with that song?” He said, “I recorded it on my album.” And I said, “O.K., well, something’s gotta happen with that song. That’s a cool song.” And I was doing this record, and I asked him, “Can I have a crack at it?” He said, “Sure,” so he let me take a crack at it, and I just sung it. He ended up joining the band, too. After we recorded it, I thought it would be great to have a girl singer on the second verse, and I talked about who I could get, and he was talking about a couple of singers, so I said, “Let me call India.” Actually, I texted her, and she said she would do it. I e-mailed her a copy of the mp3 I was working on, and she said, “Yeah, I love it. Cool,” so she put on a vocal on it and sent it back.
RR: John Lewis Parker co-wrote “The Whole Enchilada” with you.
KM: I’ve written a lot of songs with John Lewis Parker—“More Than One Way Home,” “Henry,” “As Soon As I Get Paid”—and he’s a great writer. John Lewis Parker was also the co-writer on the big Chicago hit, “Hard Habit to Break.” John and I roomed together when we played back in the day with Papa John Creach. I’ve known him a long time, he’s a great writer, and he’s the kind of guy—he’s like me—that he’ll stay there until the job’s done. (laughs) We’re like that. We’ve written some really cool songs and, because we’re friends, we write songs together as an excuse to hang. We hang out and write a song. I’ve watched his kids grow up. One of his sons just got a gig as a college professor, and he was the son that always just did O.K. in school, and I was worried about him, and now he’s a college professor. (laughter)
John is an amazing guy, and a really hard worker, too, a talented guy, and I just got a lot of history with him. I love working with my friends, and writing is very intimate, so I like to write with somebody I know, and then we can go to really intimate places in songwriting to really get a song. We wrote “Just Like You” together [the title track from Mo’s second album, released in 1996] and he pushed me on that. The reason I wrote “More Than One Way Home” was because of him. He said, “Hey, man, why don’t you write a song about Compton.” I said, “Write a song about Compton? Nobody wants to hear about Compton.” (laughs) He said, “Yeah, come on; write about Compton.” So I sat down and wrote this lyric out, and at the end of the day, we had the whole thing done. The chorus—we kept going back to the chorus I’m on my way back home, you know what I mean? (laughs) Things like that, and then one day he called and said, “How about this— more than one way home, ain’t no right way, ain’t no wrong. ”
We really stayed in there is what I’m trying to say. Stay in there until the laundry’s done. John Lewis Parker is a very important collaborator for me.
RR: That’s why I brought up John because you have some experienced collaborators working with you on The Reflection, and you also brought in some new collaborators, too. There is a fine blend and contrast to that mix on the album.
KM: Maia Sharp.
RR: Exactly.
KM: Maia Sharp opened for us for a few years and I got to know Maia. She would come out and play sax with us, too, because she plays sax. She’s great, man. She wrote some Bonnie Raitt songs, too. If I work with Bonnie, if I hang with Bonnie, she’s around there, too, and I got to know her on a couple of levels like that level, and the fact that she did some shows with us. We worked on “All the Way” [on The Reflection ], and it was really, really a lot of fun.
Writing with me is hard because it’s not a one-day thing. You might have to do two days with me to get the song. I think a song that’s going to last a lifetime is worth three days of your time, as opposed to a few hours. You might get it in three hours. When I wrote a song with the Dixie Chicks, that was like a two or three day process. First thing, you’ve got to go in and talk. You have to go talk the first day. You have to have some tea, you’ve got to find out what makes everybody tick, and get comfortable because you might be going to an intimate place, especially during that time when they were having all of that controversial stuff with the George Bush statements, and we had to get it all in there and figure out what needs to be said. So, it’s a very intimate experience that you’re getting into with people that you don’t know that well. You don’t just jump in. There’s got to be some songwriter foreplay, I call it.
RR: Let’s follow the thread that you’ve been laying down. You talked about what makes a person tick. You talked about your work ethic. You brought up Compton. Obviously, you grew up in South Central, and you are now part of the Nashville scene, as well. Why is The Reflection’s “Something Within” important to you?
KM: That song is kind of like a tribute to my family.
RR: You’ve got everybody on there.
KM: Yeah, it’s a tribute to how we became who we are as a family. There’s a lot of back story in there. My uncle, Herman [Wyatt], had actually recorded my grandfather [Victor Wyatt] on a boom box—the recording on the record—back in the 80s, on a cassette. What I did was that he sings the whole song, he sings the whole two verses of something a cappella, and I didn’t have to tune it or nothin’. His vocal was right smack in the key of E. We just had to take out all the [Mo imitates a tape hiss sound], you know, all that stuff out. (laughter) Took it out and ran it through a couple of nice tweeds, and it just fluffed right back up. He’s got this amazing voice and a big vibrato in there [Mo imitates his grandfather’s vibrato]—he was a blues man. So, I took that, and I feel like, in a sense, my grandfather justifies who I am. I didn’t just become who I am. There are people who came before me. There are people who did things. There are people that made sacrifices and grew up and made mistakes and did some stuff right and lived before me, so it’s a tribute to all of that—both sides of the family; all of that. It’s not just me standing here on my own. I’m surrounded by legacy. Your legacy, where you come from—there is power in that, and so I wanted to celebrate that: that he was there and he was a singer. He wasn’t a professional singer, but he was a great singer that hardly ever sung a lot.
By putting the family around him, putting my younger sister singing [Rochelle Rawls], and my cousin, Mark Wyatt singing that second verse, and my son, being a musician and a drummer, picking a sample—I don’t know how to sample, but I did say to my son, “What should we do with this, man? This is pretty cool,” and he put it together—it was just perfect. My son’s a drummer and he can do that stuff—slap things together like that. He just knew what to do it with it, and I took it from there and, for the next three years, proceeded to figure out how to make it sound like it was put together. I had to put more of my vocal on it because, at first, I didn’t have enough of me in there. It was all about everybody else, so I figured if it was going to be on the record, it needed a little bit more of me, so people would know that it was me. (laughter) Just so they would know.
It really sounded like a jam at first, but I got that balance and I’m just really happy with it. Easter Sunday [2010], I had everybody at my house. Had my mom there, had all kinds of friends. Everybody wasn’t related, but just all the friends and family that were there hanging out, I got them in the studio and did the song. Just a lot of fun. I wanted that spirit of family to be on there, right there, in the song and, with the title of the album being The Reflection, it just all worked together really well.
RR: It does. You have a bit of field recording, which reflects the past, and you’ve got a modern feel with the mash up, too. That coda symbolizes so much to me and, as a closing track, it’s a fantastic finish to a complete work.
KM: Thanks much. I really appreciate that, man. I’m the last one to try to toot my horn here, but I just put a lot of effort into it. I always hoped that the effort will somehow in a way inspire something special in the one that heard it. That was my wish.
RR: Moving from the record to the road, let’s talk about your band, which includes some veterans, as well as new members we’ve discussed like Kevin So. You’ve also got Jeff Paris on keys, guitar, mandolin, and background vocals, Les Falconer III on drums, Vail Johnson on bass, and Michael B. Hicks on keys and background vocals.
KM: Let’s start on the drums. Les Falconer III has been with me for a while; he’s a staple in the band, and we’ve played together back with the Rose Brothers. He played in my band, the Harvels back in the day. He’s been with me a long time.
Jeff Paris was the keyboard player, and he’s playing guitar, now. Jeff and I played with A Taste of Honey together back in the day, and he’s a very interesting musician. He actually had a hair band. (laughter) Go on YouTube and punch in “Jeff Paris,” and you’ll crack up. He’s a guitar player and a great keyboard player. I asked him to play guitar and he did it and it was really cool. He’s a great singer and songwriter. He’s had hits writing with Lita Ford and Jeffrey Osborne—he’s really got a great discography.
Kevin So, you know. He’s a great guitarist, great keyboard player, singer, and all around musician and effective performer, and it’s really a pleasure to have him in the band. I was like “Wow”—I couldn’t believe that he was in it.
Vail Johnson joined the band after the last four or five years playing with Kenny G. He’s a masterful bass player. He’s played with Chick Corea, which is no joke at all. He’s played with MC Hammer, Con Funk Shun, Jeff Lorber—he’s a musician’s musician. I call him [Mo scats a really fast bass sound]. (laughter) Because he plays so fast. Here he comes! [Mo scats an even faster bass sound] (laughter)
Michael B. Hicks is a 28-year old guy who lives in Nashville. He’s from Georgia. He’s an amazing singer, and he’s got a 12-piece band called The Funk Punks out of Nashville, and he’s very much trained in the church. He plays organ, he plays piano, too, and he’s a great singer. Great guy. Great character. He’s just an amazing dude.
We’ve got old dudes, we’ve got young dudes, we’ve got crazy people, not so crazy people—it’s a really good mix; I’m really having a lot of fun on the road.
RR: Speaking of age, I just spoke with John Scofield who reaches a milestone in December, while you reach one this month in October. How old do you feel inside?
KM: (pauses) Well…I know I don’t feel my age. I know I’m turning 60, but I don’t really feel my age. When I say I don’t feel my age, what I mean is that I don’t feel time. I feel the moment. And I’ve been waiting for 60 for a while because I think when I was about 45, I said to myself, “When I get to 60, when I reach 60 (and it seemed like a long way away, you know, and here it is like 10 minutes later [laughter]), when I hit 60, I’m just going to throw it in, and just play the blues. I’m just going to play the blues. I’m just going to go around—you know, the old guy who everybody wants to see playing the blues.” (laughs) Then out comes The Reflection, and I go, “O.K., there goes God laughing—‘you’re making plans’.” (laughter) Out comes The Reflection —the furthest thing from the blues ever.
I’m just gonna have fun. I think my next record, it’s only fitting to just…I want to go so far in the gutter that people can’t stand it. (laughter) I’m going to go waaaaaaay down. I might even drink some liquor and cut some stuff drunk or somethin’. (laughter) Which I never do; I don’t even drink. I just want to go way down where you put on the record and you have to clean it off before you put it in. (laughter)
