Put an ear to the door of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, back in late 2019 and you’d have heard it. The first stirrings of a new studio album from the man who pulled American roots into the 21st century. Melodies forming, riffs taking shape, grooves building, stories of loss and redemption spun by a crack team of sympatico songwriters. The road from that first writing session to the finished copy of Dirt On My Diamonds you hold in your hands, smiles Kenny Wayne Shepherd, has been quite a ride. “Every record I make is a moment in time. And this is a really special moment.”
Since the release of his debut album, 1995’s Ledbetter Heights, this Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum bandleader still sounds like the future of the blues. Approach Dirt On My Diamonds expecting autopilot twelve-bars and you’ll instead be thrown a volley of curveballs, from the modern urban edge of Sweet & Low and Best Of Times’ socio-political observations to the speaker-tearing production from Shepherd and his partner-in-sound of recent years, Marshall Altman. “Working with Marshall, it’s like any productive relationship,” considers the guitarist. “We put our strengths together and push each other.”
Throughout, as the album title suggests, the grit and emotional honesty of these new songs is prized above guitar pyrotechnics (even for one of the modern scene’s most valuable players). Of the Dirt On My Diamonds’ guiding philosophy, “Life has imperfections, and I actually prefer it that way. The imperfections are what make it interesting.”
Since his birth in North Louisiana, in 1977, Shepherd’s own life has never followed the script. Steeped in classic blues and rock ‘n’ roll from an early age by his dad – a respected Louisiana radio personality and promoter – the kid soon reached for his first Fender Stratocaster and found he didn’t require lessons to make it cry and wail. Long before Warner Brothers subsidiary Giant Records offered a deal, Shepherd had clocked up countless miles on a merciless touring schedule of clubs he was still too young to drink in. “For the first five years,” he says, “I was on the road non-stop.”
But that old-school apprenticeship sharpened both his chops and songcraft to a razor’s edge. Following up the aforementioned Ledbetter Heights, Shepherd changed his world forever with 1997’s Trouble Is…, the breakthrough second album that saw him write songs of such eye-opening maturity as Blue On Black, and sell over one million copies in an era when post-grunge supposedly held sway. “It was vindication,” he nods.
Shepherd’s studio releases kept gathering pace, from 1999’s Live On to 2004’s The Place You’re In, before 2007’s two time Grammy-nominated album/documentary Ten Days Out: Blues From The Backroads saw him stand up and be counted alongside such giants as B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin and Pinetop Perkins. “I always felt like I owed it to those people to mention their names and the impact they had on me,” he says, “because otherwise you’re doing them a disservice.”
In 2013 and 2016, he even found the bandwidth for two albums with blues-rock supergroup The Rides, also featuring Stephen Stills and Barry Goldberg. But to understand the direction of travel on Dirt On My Diamonds, it pays to revisit 2017’s Lay It On Down, on which Shepherd’s enduring partnership with producer Marshall Altman began. “After Lay It On Down and The Traveler, this is my third consecutive album working with Marshall, and the evolution almost feels like chapters in a book. To me, this album sounds incredibly fresh, modern and current.”
It all started with the aforementioned session at FAME, where Shepherd and his favorite co-writers threw out the rulebook. “Nothing was off-limits,” says the bandleader of penning the songs whose vocal parts would be split down the line between himself and co-vocalist Noah Hunt. “We just wrote non-stop for three days, throwing out songs and letting the good stuff rise to the top. Sometimes with these writing sessions, especially in towns like Nashville, people will set up an appointment, like, ‘OK, we’ll get together from one til three’. But this time, we weren’t under the gun, it was just a bunch of guys having fun writing music. And of course, you feel the history down there in Muscle Shoals. You feel it in the air at a studio like FAME.”
When it came to tracking, the bulk of the sessions went down at the Band House Studios in Los Angeles, with the lineup completed by Chris Layton (drums), Kevin McCormick (bass) and Jimmy McGorman (keys). “It was a really cool, intimate, old-school studio with analogue everything, but it’s since been torn down to make way for a high-rise condo,” sighs Shepherd.
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