LP - 180g Black Vinyl.
I Am The Moon, the fifth studio release by Tedeschi Trucks Band, is the most ambitious and, at the same time, intimate recording that America's best rock 'n' roll big band has ever made: a genuinely epic undertaking in four albums and 24 original songs inspired by classical literature but emotionally driven by the immediate drama, isolation and mourning of the pandemic era. There is the recurring fight for hope too, the reaching across damaged connections – all of that trial and urgency unfolding over a robust tapestry of blues, funk, country, jazz and gospel in collaborative writing, luminous singing and the instant fire of improvisation.
At more than two hours of music, the four albums that comprise I Am The Moon – Crescent, Ascension, The Fall and Farewell – are like a full evening of all-new composition and performance with Tedeschi Trucks Band, the 12-piece touring phenomenon founded in 2010 by its married leaders, guitarist Derek Trucks and singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. In its heart and scale, I Am The Moon is also a living, evolving map of the soul: the enduring tale of star-crossed devotion in Layla and Majnun by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, brought forward to present day, through universal experience and faith. As Tedeschi sings at the start of Crescent, in the gently swinging R&B of "Hear My Dear" – As we watch the world go by/There's so much we search to find/Holding on to memories/Knowing there's so much more to say – it's immediately evident that I Am The Moon is a record as big as its stories – and the life and love inside.
"It's amazing," Trucks says during the band's first interview about the project, "because we wrote most of this music in a pretty short timespan" – and recorded it with the same speed, sometimes in basic tracks caught live on the floor in first takes. "There are even chord changes that mirror other tunes – themes and variations, lyrical allusions, that pop back up."
"It took a while to wrap our heads around all of the music we were making," Tedeschi admits. "It's hard to write exactly from somebody else's perspective," referring to the lovers in Layla and Majnun. "At the same time, you want to write about human emotions. A lot of the things we were going through are things they would have gone through too."
"I've never been part of a project like this," Trucks claims, a remarkable declaration for a guitarist who played his first paying gig at nine years old; started his own group at 15; spent a quarter-century in the Allman Brothers Band; and has worked with Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh and the late jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, among many others. "Everything was conceived in the same time and headspace. It was just music we kept writing. We didn't think about how much it was.
"You always want to do something bigger and thematic," he says. "This is the first time it happened naturally."
Tracklist:
A1. Playing With My Emotions [4:12]
A2. Ain't That Something [5:25]
A3. All The Love [9:01]
B1. So Long Savior [2:40]
B2. Rainy Day [4:49]
B3. La Di Da [4:09]
B4. Hold That Line [6:04]