photo: Kirsten Cohen

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Any number of people meet in high-school jazz band and decide to make music together outside of the classroom. It’s an extraordinarily selective few who are still doing it together over 35 years later, let alone those who are on a trajectory that has included 12 acclaimed studio albums and dozens of national tours while continuing to produce vital music for a vibrant global fanbase.

Todd Park Mohr (vocals, guitar), Brian Nevin (drums, percussion) and Rob Squires (bass, vocals), along with relative newcomer Jeremy Lawton (guitar, keys, vocals)—who joined in 2001—have accomplished all that as Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Along the way, the quartet has recorded a song with John Lee Hooker that became the theme for NCIS: New Orleans, performed an original tune as the first live wake-up call to the Space Shuttle Discovery and headlined Red Rocks 35 times (so far).

“When I started to get involved with music, I was smitten by blues and rhythm and blues music from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s,” Mohr reflects. “Early on, I just wanted to be like them. I remember walking outside in Fort Collins, where there was a place called Linden’s that had blues bands. I was too young to get in, but I loved watching through the window. It was one of those places where the drummer’s back is right against the front window of the joint, so you could catch a good view of whoever’s there. Then, when I met Brian in jazz band, I loved the idea of being able to do that myself. I think that’s what initially drove me to perform, and it still does. I basically want to be Muddy Waters or James Brown or Howlin’ Wolf or somebody like that. I still love how those artists make me feel, and I love the idea that I can make others feel that way.”

The band has elicited such sentiments both through its efforts in the studio and on the stage. Big Head Todd and the Monsters’ new record, Her Way Out—the group’s long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s New World Arisin’—features 10 new originals that capture BHTM’s affinity for crafting memorable riffs and winning melodies with ardor and humor. The four musicians will support the record on their second consecutive summer tour with Blues Traveler. That relationship initially flourished in 1993 when Big Head Todd and the Monsters appeared on the sophomore installment of the H.O.R.D.E. tour, which was the band’s first large-scale outing. Mohr recalls, “That was a really special time, and our first big break, playing to large, national audiences. We got to see incredible music—Neil Young, Allman Brothers, Widespread Panic. There were a lot of bands involved in that, including Blues Traveler, of course. So for us to also have a place there was a great way to start our career.”

You’ve described standing outside Linden’s before you were old enough to enter. Can you recall the first time you made it inside a venue and saw a blues artist?

It was probably Little Milton. There was also a group called Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows. I saw Lonnie Brooks early on. I saw Stevie Ray a couple times before he died, and I actually got to meet him, when I was 20 years old, at a record signing before he was big.

Since entering music, I got to play with most every blues hero that was still living, including Albert Collins. I played with B.B. King a couple of times, and I had a hit with John Lee Hooker. I’ve spent a lot of time with Ronnie Baker Brooks. I lived in Chicago for seven or eight years and did stuff with Buddy Guy. I’ve had a really rich career as far as interfacing with blues artists and getting to learn from them.

Now that I think back, I also recall that, when I was 16, I rode my bike downtown hoping to see James Brown. But it wasn’t such a great neighborhood, and they wouldn’t sell me a ticket because they were worried about my safety. [Laughs.]

“Boom Boom,” the song you recorded with John Lee Hooker, is on Beautiful World, which Jerry Harrison produced. When I asked him recently to name a record he’d worked on that didn’t get the full attention it deserved, that was the one he named. He also singled out your song “Resignation Superman.”

Wow, that’s a really nice thing for him to say. It’s very flattering.

Beautiful World came out in 1997. Thinking about your original tunes in the context of the material on Her Way Out, to what extent has your approach as a songwriter changed over the years, if at all?

I’ve always tried a scattershot method as a writer. There are times when I subject myself to a rigorous writing goal. For example, I went for six weeks where I wrote a song, performed it and posted it on YouTube every single day just as a writing exercise. So I’ll do things like that, but I also collect ideas on my way. Things happen, and suddenly there’s an idea, so I have my radar out for different ways of writing. Sometimes it’s instantaneous and sometimes it takes a couple years. I try to catalog and collect ideas as much as I can, like a photographer taking a lot of pictures, and then I’ll go through my collections and see what’s there when I’m searching for inspiration.

I do feel like I’m a better writer these days, though. I think that may be just by a very small margin, but I feel like I’ve gotten some skills. I really like where my verse writing is. Some of the verses that I have on this album, I don’t know that I’ve done better. I really love them.

You compare the process to that of a photographer. What was the idea or image that led you to write “Don’t Kill Me Tonight” about Annie Oakley and Frank Butler?

A lot of times, I’ll start with something concrete. I prefer that, whether it’s a person’s life, a real story or something that happened to a person I know. I like having a real thing that starts it. It’s a huge, analog, grainy picture. Then I can pare things down into a song from that, and it has a feeling of flesh and blood. That’s the goal anyway.

I’ll go online looking for people or historical events that lead to this or that, like a tree. I found Annie Oakley and got into the story of how she beat the best shot in the world, who was Frank Butler. Then he married her, even though she was 15, and they were together forever. He died two weeks after she died, and they lived this incredible life. There’s just a lot there. So, as a songwriter, I was like, “Wow, this is it.”

I find the subject matter charming, and I love the last line, which is about English verse. There’s a book I had from 1904. I got it at a garage sale, and it was all about the virtues of Victorian English diction. There’s a sentence in it that goes like this: “If you see a sentence that’s particularly excellent, be sure to strike it out.” It’s this very controlled, precise, concise idea.

The last verse kind of makes me think of that, which is “Poor Frank Butler, he died fast/ Two weeks later, he smoked his last.” That’s the kind of verse I really like about the song. It sort of caters to that because it’s historical, about a person who lived in the 1800s.

“Thunderbird” is set within the film American Graffiti. What put that in your head?

During COVID, I would watch a lot of movies, like we all did. I just thought, “I’m going to start watching movies and taking notes and seeking out movies that are rich with one-liners.” So I picked this movie and wrote a song out of it as a writing project.

It was the first song that I wrote that led to the album. It’s kind of cinematic. It’s sort of pop rock. The band really likes it. It’s fun to play. Audiences like it. So I decided to roll with the opportunity to keep writing.

COVID also had something to do with it because it gave me so much time off. I could seriously sit down and write a lot of songs and a lot of verses and really refine things. Having worked so long and written a lot of songs, you gain a lot of experience and wisdom. Then I had a lot of time off when I could apply all of that.

What prompted “My New Number One?”

As a guitar player, I have a fondness for collecting guitars. That’s also a vice, and I often get laughed at by the band because I’ll come to a rehearsal with a new guitar and I’ll say something like, “Hey, this is my new number one.”

I said that once and I immediately realized that was a song. So as a relationship song, it became the idea that you’re my new number one, relationship-wise. It sort of gave me a nice format to write a really lighthearted song about romantic mishaps with a lot of comedy.

How about “Rainbow Girl?” Your opening line, “My girl can make peace pancakes at the bottom of the sea,” is rather memorable.

“Rainbow Girl” is inspired by my daughter. I have a 7-year[1]old girl and I became really interested in the fact that guys and girls have different things that they gravitate towards when they’re toddlers. Boys often gravitate towards superheroes and stuff like that. Whereas, for Margo and girls in general, it’s often unicorns and rainbows and stuff like that. So thinking about that on a deeper level, I began to think that the girls had it better. They’d chosen more powerful things. If you think of a unicorn as a life force—this unusual animal that can heal—it’s pretty cool.

There was also a comic called Rainbow Girl in the ‘60s. Rainbow Girl’s skills were being able to manipulate emotions, which is really an interesting superpower.

Again, it’s a lighthearted song about my daughter, but also the last verse is about her as an adult. So it’s sort of an innocence-to-reality song, but it’s fun.

You’ve been making albums for a while now. What’s your key for successfully translating a composition into that setting?

For me, I think a lot of it has just been about having great collaborations. I’m fortunate enough that my band members are all musically smart. They all have incredible opinions that diverge from mine. I’ve come to the conclusion that if all four of us like something, if we all feel passionately about something, then there’s something there worth pursuing. I think starting with the band and having a lot of time to make things so that everybody’s happy with the recording is really important.

I look back on the albums that I’ve made where we rushed and I felt unsettled. I feel like with the best albums I’ve made over my career, I’ve had a lot of time to chill and write a great record, then a ton of time to record it with the band in different situations.

This one’s no different. With this album, I had been able to play all these tracks live. So that was really important too, as far as developing our visions for the songs and what we wanted the songs to be.

Speaking of playing live, we were talking about “Boom Boom” earlier, which is a song you continue to perform. Is there another cover that feels so natural to you that it’s almost as if you’d written it yourself?

I feel that way about Bob Dylan’s whole catalog. I’ve performed probably six Dylan songs and we’re about to do another. We’re doing a show with The Wallflowers at Red Rocks. They’re with us, and we have another show with them just before. That’s as close as I’m ever going to get to Bob Dylan, so we’re playing “Lay Lady Lay.”

I don’t know if you’ve heard Duran Duran’s version of it, but they have a really good version of that song that’s more uptempo and pop. So ours is sort of like that, more like a rock version of the song.

But I love all of the Bob Dylan songs we’ve performed. I think “Brandy” also feels like us. Even though I never wanted to cover that song at first, it’s been a really popular song. It’s in our Top 10 Spotify songs and it’s worked out really well.

Right now, we’re also playing Tom Petty’s “You Wreck Me” and I love playing that song. It feels so easy, which is why it’s terrific and a lot of fun.

You grew up in Colorado and the band remained there as you developed. A number of East Coast artists have long viewed Colorado as an important destination when establishing themselves as touring acts. Was there a place that you really wanted to get to once you started touring?

The first thing about that for us when we started, was that Colorado was not a music hotbed. It wasn’t where the industry was. It wasn’t where bands were breaking. It was kind of a musical ghost town in the middle of nowhere, although there has always been incredible support for live music. Having Red Rocks in your backyard really drives a lot of it because it’s so special to be able to see shows there.

But your question is different because you’re saying that bands feel like they’ve made it when they get to Colorado, which is totally the opposite of how we felt. At that time, we felt stuck in Colorado and we wanted to make it in LA or New York or a place where people would notice us.

When you were starting out in the late ‘80s, bands in New York could pick up six gigs a week without leaving the city. Was that possible for you, if not in Boulder proper, but nearby, with minimal travel?

That was much more difficult. We were sort of stuck in the middle of nowhere. There were other places we could get to like Fort Collins or Cheyenne, but we had to leave town. We bought a van so we could go to Chicago or San Francisco or Austin. That’s how we started. We’d go, “We’re back in the van!”

Can you recall the first out of town show that felt really big to you?

Well, the first places we went to were Chicago, Austin and San Francisco because those were within about a 1,000-mile radius, which made it a little easier for us to get there than the East Coast. We started to do well in Chicago. There was a place called the Cabaret Metro. It’s a smaller place, but it’s a big place reputationally and in terms of what it means to the music scene in that town. Getting that gig was one of the first bigger gigs in my memory of like, “Wow, this is pretty amazing! We’re playing the Cabaret Metro!”

Do you remember the first performance where you experienced that connection with the audience you had envisioned when you were younger?

There’s a place in Des Moines, Iowa. I don’t remember the name, but it was at a university venue. It was outdoors and the stage was really high, so it was like there was a giant bathtub full of people.

We had a hit song called “Bittersweet.” It’s not a real raucous song—it’s sort of a mid-tempo, ballad-ish pop song. But when we played it, I’d never seen a crowd react like that. They were beyond excited, but also agitated, like body surfing and everyone was flying around.

Big Head Todd and the Monsters have performed so many times at Red Rocks. The first show you attended there as a fan was the legendary U2 performance from 1983 later released on video as Under a Blood Red Sky. What are your memories of that show and how did it help inform the way that you envisioned the live setting as an artist on the other side of the stage?

I was an early U2 fan. I had Boy and October, and then another album came out [War]. I was 16, we bought tickets and we got to the show early, but it was a brutal day. It was really rainy for a lot of the day, and it was foggy and cold up there, like 45 degrees. But as a kid it was totally worth it. We were having the time of our lives.

We didn’t know if the show was going to go on, and they kept saying different things, like they’re going to reschedule it or that there would be a backup show in Denver at the stadium.

Ultimately, they did decide to have it, but by that time the audience was probably a third of what the park holds. It was pretty empty, but because there was so much fog, the day they picked was just perfect for what they were doing.

It was incredible. I didn’t realize that it would become the tape or video that would help break the band, but it was a really special day. I’ll never forget it.

It gave me something to shoot for, that’s for sure. It definitely was a marker for what’s possible as a performing artist. I was lucky to see it.