Up to now, guitarist Derek Trucks has probably been better known as a member of the Allman Brothers Band than as a band leader in his own right, despite the fact that the current Derek Trucks Band CD, “Already Free,” is the group’s sixth album.
But during a recent interview, the guitarist left little doubt about how important his band is to him and, perhaps more tellingly, how much he wants the group to leave a lasting stamp on the music world.
“Already Free” stands apart, first of all, from the other Derek Trucks Band albums for having a much larger percentage of songs written or co-written by Trucks or the other band members. It turns out that this facet of the CD says a lot about how Trucks’ interests in the music-making process have expanded, as well as his larger goals for his band.
“It wasn’t really until the last three or four years that I really started appreciating the art of writing songs,” Trucks revealed. “Up to that point, most of what inspired and moved me were performances. I appreciated great songs, but what mattered to me more was Stevie Wonder singing on a great song that he wrote or Mahalia [Jackson] singing on a great gospel tune or [John] Coltrane playing.
“It was usually the performer and the tone and the sound that I got into. It was really only in the last three or four years that I was really struck by Leonard Cohen’s songwriting or [Bob] Dylan’s songwriting, not the performances, but the depth, the multilayered ideas and just the beauty of some of these lyrics and just the song structure.”
Trucks also came to a related realization as his appreciation for songwriting grew.
“I’d definitely been thinking about the fact that to make a band’s legacy or a musician’s legacy really last, I feel like there’s got to be a healthy amount of original compositions to make it hold up,” Trucks said. “There are great artists and legendary artists that didn’t write a lot of tunes, but for the most part the ones that changed things wrote a good deal of their stuff. It’s something I was thinking about.”
So Trucks — one of the most humble artists one can encounter, despite his prodigious talent as a guitarist — may have taken a major step toward making important music with “Already Free.”
With nine of the CD’s 12 songs at least co-written by Trucks or his bandmates, “Already Free” does more than any of the group’s previous albums to define the Derek Trucks Band sound.
The stylistic ingredients are similar, as “Already Free” mixes elements of soul, jazz, world beat, country, blues and rock. But the CD is edgier, and particularly on songs such as “Something to Make You Happy,” “Get What You Deserve” and “Don’t Miss Me,” the group emphasizes the rock/blues/soul side of its sound more than on earlier albums.
Meanwhile, the high quality of the material, coupled with the fast growth Trucks has made with songwriting, suggests that “Already Free” may be just the start of a fruitful phase for the band, which released its first studio album in 1996.
While the group’s first four studio albums showed considerable promise, it now appears the fifth CD, the 2006 release “Songlines,” may go down as a key album in the development of the Derek Trucks Band, which includes Trucks, bassist Todd Smallie, drummer Yonrico Scott, keyboardist Kofi Burbridge, singer Mike Mattison and percussionist Count M’Butu.
In working with producer Jay Joyce on “Songlines,” Trucks said for the first time that he was able to harness the creative possibilities of the studio.
“I always enjoyed being in the studio and doing it,” he said. “But I never felt like I was tapping into something that I couldn’t tap into live. I think with Jay, it was the first time I felt like there was this other side of my playing and personality that was starting to awaken.”
The group’s abilities to take advantage of the capabilities of the studio have only grown since, although Trucks noted that the songs on “Already Free” translate well to the stage. “The tunes that we’ve broken out so far have really turned into some of the stronger tunes we play live,” said Trucks, who has spent much of 2009 on tour with the Allman Brothers Band. “Even before people knew the record we started playing a few of them. ... There are some tunes in a night where you can feel the crowd really with you and coming around. Like the Bob Dylan tune ‘Down in the Flood’ and the tune that Kofi Burbridge wrote, ‘Days Are Almost Gone,’ that tune was another one that the first night we played it, there was just an immediate response. That’s always a good sign.”
-- Last Word Features
Concert preview
The Derek Trucks Band
8 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday. $29.50 advance, $34 day of show, $50 both shows. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404- 249-6400, www.variety-playhouse .com
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