JJ Grey & Mofro

“That music was coming from out there in the distance,” Grey recounts. “It was this peaceful little moment, and I just started humming what turned out to be the melody for the verse. It just kept sticking with me, and it’s one of those times that I’m glad I remembered to pull out my pocket recorder – I know most people have these recorders on their phones these days, but I don’t bother with that. I wasn’t really thinking about it all that much until later when it came to me again, and I realised that’s the melody I thought I could hear when I was there in Jamaica that time. I kept humming it in the car, and one day I just decided it was time. I grabbed an acoustic guitar and started messing around with it, and it all started falling together.”

It’s a bold, exuberant song, replete with horns and backing vocals plucked straight from the legacy of artists like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding and Dobie Grey. You can’t help but get caught up in the energy (and man, what a climax), in the sense of communal celebration. It’s little wonder given the unaccustomed collaborative nature of new album Ol’ Glory. Grey ordinarily composes much of his material at home in Florida, only bringing songs to the band once he is confident in knowing exactly how each will sound. Ol’ Glory, though, panned out another way.

“This album I wanted something different,” he says. “Normally I demo a song, and they’ll learn it from the demo. This time I came to the guys with an acoustic guitar and just told them the chords. Told the keyboard player what kind of sound I’m after, told the guitar player just to try and experiment. I tried to be very vague. For the drummer I’d just hum a basic beat. A song like ‘A Night To Remember’, there was a bassline that I wrote but I took it to Todd [Smallie] and said, ‘Wherever you want to go from there, just do it. Just go.’ So that way, who these guys really are will come through their playing. In my opinion, it makes it feel a lot more laidback, rather than if they just try note-for-note what I set down and what I was feeling. That would be a waste of their talent, because they can play their instruments way better than I can!” Grey laughs. “It definitely takes on a life of its own when you let other people get involved. You just need to get out of their way and trust that they’re going to be true to the vision that I had. And they definitely have, so I’m very, very lucky.”

While the strength of JJ Grey & Mofro’s live performances has brought them an enduring reputation, something that is often overlooked in the band’s critical response is the quality of songwriting on display. The tunes are at once universal and very particular, as though penned by a happily sober Raymond Carver. Grey writes from personal experience, he concedes, but the shape of a song is dictated by forces far outside his ken. Ol’ Glory is a journal of thoughts and impressions, but Grey is at pains to emphasise that each song is its own pilot.

“I feel like these songs are a diary. I don’t mean that in any self-important way, but these songs are my stories of the places I’ve seen, the people I know still living and those that died, the blood, the sweat, the tears. All of the good times, too. I feel like most of the songs write themselves; I would never want to take the credit from them.

“I’m not a great craftsman – I feel like anyone can do what I do. The trick is to just try to remember it all, and sometimes it’s just like having a conversation with yourself. You know how you’ll be out of a night having drinks and one person will start telling a story, another will start inserting their own, that triggers something in your own mind that inspires you to somewhere else? That’s the same thing that goes on with me in my writing, except that it’s a conversation that I’m having with myself. A lot of the songs I’ll have no idea what in the hell is going on, and I’ll only realise later, ‘Oh my God, that’s the story of my grandparents’ last conversation together.’ And then I can sometimes add personal touches to really bring it in to tell that story completely, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do all these years. It’s like being on a sailboat. I just man the rudder. I let the wind and the current do the rest. Steer and drift. Steer and drift.”