On their fifth record, Black Stone Cherry went back to the place where they recorded their very first record and the outcome was something damn impressive. We talked with bassist Jon Lawhon about how much their hometown Kentucky inspired this new effort and how was it like to go back to their roots.
This year your self-titled debut album celebrates 10 years. A lot has happened throughout the years to Black Stone Cherry, so how do you feel about looking back to that first album?
This album [Kentucky] was done in a very similar way as the first album and it’s cool looking back because you have all these memories of experiences of recording the album in the first place, just memories of hanging out with the rest of the guys of the band and all that. It’s always cool looking back. I think the songs on the first record were pretty solid, they left an imprint on people and after that we were allowed to do a second record and so on. Definitely no complaints there. This new record was done in a similar way with the same engineer, by the same gear. We were in a different building in the first record, but that’s really the only difference other than the fact that Richard Young – our drummer John Fred Young’s dad – produced the first record and in this one he didn’t produce, we produced it by ourselves. Every record we’ve done, we’ve always been very hands on with the production and more so as the years have gone we’ve learned even more, but this time it was just us, gloves off kind of thing… If people don’t like it, we have nobody to point the finger at. [laughs]
For your fifth album, Kentucky, you wanted to do something that you’ve never done before, but that you’ve wanted to do for a while. You guys went back to David Barrick’s Barrick Recording near to your hometown where you recorded your debut album. What did lead you to go back there?
We left Roadrunner in the early part of 2015 and so when that happened we started talking amongst ourselves like “What’s next? What do we want to do? Do we release a record on our own? Do we find a new label?” We kind of kept the ideas around for a while, but the first thing that came up was “Either way it goes, we want to make a record with no A&R, we want to produce it by ourselves and we want to record it back where we recorded our first record to kind of rejuvenate our spirit a little bit.” It’s been so long since we recorded it with David and done things on our own, and more than anything, we just wanted to prove to ourselves what we’re capable of, you know? We did that and it worked out though, because we got in touch with Mascot Label Group and they were really interested in working with us, and they were interested in us doing things the way that we wanted to. Ed – the guy that owns the label – his exact words to us were “If you don’t know who you are and what you sound like by this point of your career, you don’t need to be doing this anymore.” [laughs] They were very supportive and they have been killer, because this is tthe most big promotion, press, marketing and all that that we’ve had on a record. This label is like an eighth of the size of Roadrunner, but just because they’re smaller it doesn’t mean they’re lesser because if anything they’re far better. Everybody is just passionate about the bands that they have and they don’t have 300 bands, they have like 12 acts and everybody focus so much on those bands that things actually happen for them, instead of bands tend to fall to the wayside and fall into the cracks whenever they’re with a larger label like Roadrunner or Atlantic or Capitol or whoever.
It’s awesome to know that you’re having a great experience with Mascot Label Group.
Yeah! The cool thing too is that our old A&R guy from Roadrunner is the president of Mascot in the US and it was only him and a handful of other people that we got to be really close with at Roadrunner, so it’s nice to be able to keep one of them at least.
What memories do you hold from recording your debut album that probably inspired this new album?
Any time you’re recording with somebody that you recorded with in the past, different ideas that come up will kind of be the reminiscent of things that you’ve done in the past. A lot of the sounds that are on the new record, we started developing the sound and somebody would be like “My guitar sounds a lot like what we had on ‘Hell & High Water’ in the first record” or “My bass sounds like ‘Lonely Train’.” That’s always cool, especially in a situation like that when a band on their 5th record, they’re trying to go back to square one sort of speaking, just diving in like Metallica did for example when they did St. Anger. Their sound completely changed going back, which I mean there’s a portion of the sound of our record that does sound kind of like the first album, but sonically it still sounds better than the first record because we have become so experienced with developing sounds and on the production side in the studio as well.
What were the main elements that you wanted to approach and work on this album?
One of the biggest things for us has always been but have never been easily achieved is trying to get that live sound and feeling on a record, so this time going in without having any producer in the way other than us. We went in and set up everything that everyone tends to like to use on records. John Fred played with the same kit in the studio that he plays live every night. Same thing with Chris, Ben and I. We were playing with the amplifiers that we use live and 90% of the guitars and bass was stuff that we use live. Also the other thing is that when we set the amps, we just kind of rolled in and set them in the way that we set them on stage. We let them be loud, we let the speakers kind of break up and the head drives them the way that we do live. We weren’t trying to be so analytical, precise and perfect, you know? We were just going for a passionate performance for every take, because we wanted it to feel like a live record while still being a studio record. So far the response that we had from our fans is that it feels like a live and raw Black Stone Cherry album, so I believe we achieved our goal.
“We were just going for a passionate performance for every take, because we wanted it to feel like a live record while still being a studio record…”
You named this album after your hometown’s name. Why’s that?
Well, it’s a return home and so we wanted to name the record with something that made sense for what the album is. It just made sense because the band is based in Kentucky, we all live here and we’re from here. All of our crew guys live in Kentucky – we just have one crew guy that lives just outside of where we live – but all the extra musicians that we brought in: the horn players, the background singers on “Soul Machine” and “War”, the organ player Paul… I mean, everyone who is on the record is from Kentucky and that’s that whole rejuvenate spirit of returning to your roots kind of thing and Kentucky is our roots, so it was just perfect sense for us to do it like that.
“In Our Dreams,” was co-written with Bob Marlette (Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie, Seether, Saliva)”. How was the writing process for that song?
It was awesome! Bob produced our second record [2008’s Folklore and Superstition] and we built up a great friendship with him, so writing a song with him was nothing outside of the box. On our third record [2011’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea], we have a song called “Killing Floor” that we wrote with Bob and John 5, because John 5 was actually literally right behind Bob in Los Angeles and we were there writing just a day after we wrote “In Our Dreams”. When we were writing, Bob was like “Hey, let me call John 5 to see if he wants to hang out” and we were like “Sure!” He called John 5 and he came over and he had this riff that was killer. Bob is a fantastic guy and we actually wrote that song “In Our Dreams” for our third record, but Roadrunner thought that the song was too heavy for us for some crazy reason. [laughs] When we split with the label, we told them we wanted that song back and they agreed, so it was cool to have the song back. We recorded it and the new label wanted it to be the first single. [laughs] We obviously heard the right thing in the song and it’s on the radio right now.
The album ends with the emotional and melodic “The Rambler” that was co-written with former Shinedown guitarist Jasin Todd. What was the inspiration behind this song?
That song was originally brought to us by Jasin. We found out kind of later on that Jasin actually wasn’t the writer of the song. There were two dudes in a band called The Zuni Mountain Boys. They had actually written the original version of that song and our version is quite a bit different. Their version is kind of like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers esque and got a little bit of Bob Dylan as well and our version obviously is more moody, it has strings on it and Chris performance is just incredibly emotional, but we wrote a bridge for it because the song didn’t originally have a bridge and we changed quite a few lines in it and changed every melody in it as well and kind of came up with our own thing. The song talks about this guy who for whatever reason – drugs, alcohol, fear of being tied down or whatever it is – it has been rambling around and just kind of running his whole life, not really knowing what is running from, but in doing so, he’s kind of left his daughter behind and he has always had struggles. It’s kind of a tortured soul song and lyrically when we heard it for the first time it really touched all of us. We knew we could do something with the song and it would come up very genuinely for us because we know what it is like to kind of ramble around and miss our families and all that. I have two daughters, John Fred has a daughter and Chris has a little boy… so it just made perfect sense for us to take that song over and kind of do our own thing. The Zuni Mountain Boys’s dudes were really humble by us and they are great guys.
“Everyone who is on the record is from Kentucky and that’s that whole rejuvenate spirit of returning to your roots kind of thing and Kentucky is our roots.”
How is it Kentucky music scene like nowadays?
There isn’t really much of a music scene in here. [laughs] When we first started, there were a couple of cool bands. Back in the day before we ever started playing music, there was a band called Supafuzz that was actually really influential to us as kids, a guy named David Angstrom, who’s the singer of the band, they had a record deal and had a video on MTV and all that. They were kind of part of the Grunge era. They were a fantastic band and released really great albums, and I’m still a fan of the band honestly. Other than a few local bands that had come up and not really done anything. We made buddies with them, but not just one or two dudes can have it, the whole band has to have it for them to be able to move on and do something big with it. There hasn’t been much around here. We are from a small area and it kind of comes difficult. I think that’s part of the reason why though our band is looked at as being such a unique band because we didn’t have a scene necessarily to influence us in one way or another. We always rehearsed in the practice house, which is kind of passed on to us from Richard Young of The Kentucky Headhunters because for his band always wrote in rehearsal and recorded demos. When we were teenagers and we were starting the band, he was like “Hey boys, this is where we always do it, so y’all coming here and get some work done.” And then when we went in, they got all these album covers and posters and stuff from anything from Cream to Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, you name it… Just stuff hanging up all over the walls because it’s an old farmhouse with plank walls and the wind kind of blows through the house and blows through the cracks and freezes you to death in the winter time… To keep the wind out, they kind of cover it up with all those posters and album covers they were collecting back in the 60’s and 70’s. As kids going in there, we were kind of looking around at everything. My first time in there I was only 15 and I’m looking around and staring to the faces of anybody in there, so for all of us, we were just very influenced by 60’s and 70’s rock music, blues, jazz, soul… That’s kind of where we cut out teeth and how we figured out how to be musicians. It wasn’t necessarily influences upon us by a scene as much as it was by us having this stuff right in front of our face so we were checking out all those bands and becoming educated in music history.