Like many songwriters, Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes found himself in a prolific state during the pandemic. And the songs he was writing had a more bluesy edge than usual. So, when he and the band entered the studio, they had so much new material they decided to record two simultaneous albums, with one solely dedicated to the blues. The resulting album, Heavy Load Blues, is a departure from their improv-heavy rock that’s made them revered in the jam band world. Gov’t Mule performs Sunday at the Pepsi Amphitheater in Flagstaff. In KNAU’s newest installment of Eats and Beats, Haynes talks about the new album and his longstanding love of the blues.
Warren Haynes: I’ve been wanting to do something like this for many years now. It’s kind of always been on my list of things to do but it’s always kind of been on the backburner. And I think the whole lockdown-COVID process brought that more to the forefront.
We couldn’t tour, we couldn’t travel. It made sense, let’s just go record as much as we can and it’ll kind of bring everybody back together, keep us all from going crazy. And then looking back, it’s like well, it was also really cool timing to put a blues record out because the whole world kind of had and still has the blues at this point, and is in a very relatable position, I think, if there ever was a right time to put out something like this, now would be it.
We had all these tiny, little amplifiers, we were in a tiny, little room right on top of each other with no headphones just hearing eachother like we were in a small club. So, that has a lot to do with why it sounds like an old record because that’s the way those old records were made. So there was no way to get a modern sound even if that’s what you wanted, which is totally not what we wanted.
I thought it was really important to kind of get further back to, especially with the cover songs, to get further back to the original versions. And even for the original songs to kind of just pay more tribute to where this music comes from. At the same time, we wanted it to be fresh and original, so there’s a song-by-song line to be drawn of how far you’re going to go down either of those paths.
Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, I’ve listened to those guys so many times throughout my life that stuff comes out and I go, oh, I wonder where that came from, and then you start thinking about it and you go, oh yeah, that’s like a Muddy line or a Muddy riff or a Wolf melody or something that you don’t think about at the time. But that stuff becomes part of your DNA if you saturate yourself with it.
There is a bright side to the blues but it’s the minority. The blues is pretty dark in general, and the heavy stuff melodically and lyrically is stuff that I was always drawn to because it’s the stuff that hits you the hardest. That’s kind of the lifeblood of that music. I’ve always been drawn to that even in rock music, in folk music, in all types of music. Writers don’t tend to write when they’re happy. They tend to write when they need writing from a therapeutic standpoint to bring out the stuff that they’re harboring, and to make themselves feel better and to be able to cope. It’s kind of what the philosophy of the blues is, is you make yourself feel better by acknowledging that you have the blues.
