Friends Like These

Having taken their first break from the band in 16 years of pretty constant gigging and recording, the members of Gov't Mule reconvened in a Connecticut studio early in 2013 to shake out the cobwebs and “reignite their collective flame”, as their official bio puts it. What actually happened was that they ended up coming up with enough new material for a new album, Shout!, cut pretty much live over a couple of days.

“One of the things I really enjoyed about making Shout!,” singer, songwriter and guitarist Warren Haynes explains, “was each song we brought to the table seemed to be a missing piece to the puzzle. None of the songs sounded too similar to each other, they all had different arrays of influences and they all seemed to go together as some sort of complete statement. It's almost like a culmination of everything we've worked on previously.

“Sometimes when you're working on a record, you go in with a lot of different songs and some of them wind up being too similar to each other or too far apart, so it takes away some of the cohesiveness of the record. But with Shout!, it just all fell in line. We originally thought we were making a bunch of demos but it started coming together so quickly that it turned into making a record.”

It's certainly their most diverse album to date and draws on more of their own influences, whether the hard blues power of Free that inspired Bring On The Music or Sly & The Family Stone, which spawned How Could You Stoop So Low. In fact, as the band got down to recording the album, an intriguing idea crossed the collective mind.

“Starting with Elvis Costello, Dr John and Toots Hibbert of Toots & The Maytels,” Haynes recalls. “One by one, we started thinking of these three singers and how nice it would be to hear them maybe make a guest appearance. But the thought process was, 'What a shame to have people of this calibre singing a small part of the song; why not let them sing the entire song and create an alternate version?' So we did that and then we thought, 'Why don't we do that for every song?' And we knew we were onto something different.”

The result is a second disc with a track each of the Gov't Mule version of the Shout! album featuring a different guest singer, with Ben Harper, Glenn Hughes, Myles Kennedy, Dave Matthews, Ty Taylor, Grace Potter, Jim James and Steve Winwood joining Costello, Hibbert and the good Doctor on the guest list. “I basically sat up till three o'clock in the morning and made a list of each song and what singer other than myself I would love to hear sing it and started making phone calls. The response was so wonderful.”