JJ Grey & Mofro: Deeper Than Belief
photo: Everett Zuraw
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“I call it chasing the rabbit,” JJ Grey says of the creative process that yielded Olustee, the ninth album of original music from his band Mofro.
Grey, who wrote all the material on the record, as per usual, and served as producer for the first time, elaborates, “You’ve got to see the rabbit before you can chase it. Sometimes that requires you to walk around a little while and look for the rabbit to chase.”
Olustee is JJ Grey & Mofro’s follow-up to 2015’s Ol’ Glory, but Grey’s rabbit reference is not intended to account for the time span between those records. Instead, he is characterizing his relationship with the muse.
“I started this record seven years ago,” he notes, “but I haven’t been working on it for seven years. If you added it all up, I probably haven’t spent much more time on it than any of my other records. It just comes when it comes.”
“There’s never been a game plan for me; it’s just felt like something I needed to do,” Grey offers, as he expounds on the essence of his musical output.
The singer/guitarist then introduces another metaphor from the animal kingdom, which is a steady source of inspiration to him, as Grey is an avid outdoorsman and longtime advocate for the preservation of the environment around his North Florida home.
“It’s like a salmon that swims out to sea and swims back,” he observes. “If you could ask a salmon why they were doing that, they might say, ‘I don’t know. I’ve just got to go in that direction. I’ve got to go that way.’ It’s always felt like that for me with music. It’s fun, but I never thought about it being fun. It’s a great experience, but I never thought about that either. I just had to do it and here I am. That really hasn’t changed either.”
Grey reflects on the days prior to the release of Mofro’s superb, soulful 2001 debut, Blackwater, as he remarks, “The only thing that’s changed at all is that I don’t have a day job anymore. I still approach things the same way. Music is an outlet for my life instead of the other way around. When I come home, I won’t necessarily be working on music all the time. I’ll fix lawn mowers, fix the truck. I bought a new property, and I’ll probably spend way more time fixing it up as a studio than I’ll ever spend recording in it.
“But I like building things because I grew up around that. When I was a kid, sometimes to my dismay, my dad wouldn’t hire anybody to do anything—if the house needed a new roof, he knew exactly how to do it and I was the helper.”
Still, Grey explains that pursuing any of his passions—surfing, martial arts, fishing, building or spending time with his family— holds the key to his approach, which takes place almost indirectly, since “a lot of it is just getting out of your own way.”
“The process of how I write songs or do a record has not changed,” he adds. “I feel like the songs come almost like thoughts. We’re not always in control of our thoughts, but when they come, you feel connected to something much larger than yourself. The truth of it is you don’t create that connection. That connection is axiomatic.
“When people say we all need to come together, I’m like, ‘We’re already all together. What we need to do is realize that we’re all together instead of coming together because there’s no action necessary.’ We are together and it’s the belief that we’re not that has put us this way. I feel the same exact way about music—it’s already there and it’s not only there, it’s already finished. I’ve just got to tune into the right radio station. Another way of looking at it, considering how noisy life can be nowadays with gadgets and everything else, is that I don’t tune into any station. Or maybe I tune into all of them at once. The less of me in that process the better. In fact, if I’m involved in that process, it’s not going to happen. I was once talking with Colonel Bruce about the concept of improvisation and he said, ‘To seek it is to deny it.’ For me, all music is the same way.”
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Olustee has the hallmarks of Mofro’s best work. Grey’s songs range from reflective to raucous—on introspective selections such as “The Sea” and “Deeper Than Belief,” which bookend the album, as well as more exultant offerings, including “Wonderland” and “Free High.” The music is an expansive expression of 21st-century Southern swamp boogie, which Mofro has helped to define.
Grey reveals that he recorded the basic tracks for three of the songs just months after the release of Ol’ Glory. However, he acknowledges that the lyrics came to him in their own time during some periods of fits and stops. He never wanted to rush the proceedings, which can be enigmatic and elusive.
By way of example, he describes the origins of the song “Fireflies,” which originally appeared on the second Mofro Everett Zuraw album, 2004’s Lochloosa. “I don’t mind telling you that the songs that have connected and resonated with me over the years all wrote themselves. I feel almost awkward taking credit for writing ‘Fireflies.’ It made itself up in my head,” he states.
“The concept of the song is about how the firefly just kind of disappeared. I’ve heard people say it’s from over-spraying for mosquitos—that just killed ‘em out. So you could think of it as a reference to our relationship with nature. But on the other hand, maybe because I’ve become more of an adult and busier in my mind, I don’t notice the fireflies anymore. Maybe they hadn’t gone away as much as I thought. So there are two ways of looking at it.”
Grey then pauses and connects this with another experience that occurs to him. “I once went on a vacation to see the redwood trees in northern California, near Arcata. My wife almost teared up for joy just looking at this tree because she’d never seen nothing like it. Then this other family member almost teared up because all he could see was a giant stack of wood and wished that he could feel the same way. So two people were taken aback by that. Again, I have nothing to do with the songwriting itself. It’s not a skill, it’s not a talent. It’s no more than the tree inspiring them in two different ways.”
However, Grey does take responsibility for the production decisions on the new record, even if he asserts that, initially, this task was the product of happenstance.
“I didn’t intend to produce it myself. COVID sort of made that happen because I didn’t feel comfortable asking Dan [Prothero], who’s done a bunch of the records with me to get on a plane. So I began working on the music, and before I knew it, I had demoed almost the entire album here at my house with sample libraries and by playing drums and bass on the keyboard. I had the music together but only a little bit of the lyrics at that point. Then I had to wait a while because COVID was kind of nerve-racking for some people, so I decided to keep going with what I was doing. At some point, even though I had not originally intended to self-produce my record, I was like, ‘It sounds pretty good so far. If I’m ever going to produce a record—I’m 50-something years old—I better do it now. So let’s just see what happens.’”
Beyond the 17 musicians who would eventually contribute to the album, Grey’s load was lightened by Jim Devito and Ronen Landa. Devito, who owns Retrophonics—the St. Augustine, Fla., studio where Olustee was eventually recorded—served as engineer on the project. Landa handled the orchestral arrangements for the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, which appears on four tracks.
“I had strings on [2007’s] Country Ghetto and [2008’s] Orange Blossoms,” Grey notes. “Many years ago, I also did a couple shows with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. So I spoke with Ronen, who’s a good friend of my managers and now a good friend of mine—I love the dude. He does a lot of scoring for film and I asked him about writing some arrangements, maybe for a string quartet. He was the one who suggested the Budapest Symphony Orchestra because he’s used them on a lot of his stuff. They’re a world-class orchestra and I had thought there was no way I could afford to do that. They were phenomenal and one of my greatest experiences ever was sitting there on a Zoom call, watching the video feed and listening to the Audiomovers audio of the Budapest Symphony Orchestra playing on these songs from the new record. My eyes watered up.”
The 11 selections on Olustee encompass multiple moods and tones. Grey indicates that in sequencing the record, he crafted a narrative arc that parallels Mofro’s performance mindset.
“I’m always thinking about how things feel live,” he states. “I want there to be an overall narrative story, just like the live show. I want it to start out one of two ways. I want it to start out like a whisper and move to roar, then break it down and move it to a roar and so on. Or I want to start out in a roar and then suck the air out of everything by pulling it to a whisper, then bring it up and then break it down. Here, the album starts off with ‘The Sea,’ which is really subdued, quiet and light. I want the dynamics of the record to tell a story.
“The other question I ask myself is ‘Where am I flipping the record over? Where’s my reset button?’” he continues. “On the vinyl, it’s right after ‘Seminole Wind,’ which has got kind of a climactic ending. I don’t think about CDs or streaming. I think about the album flip. That can be to a record label’s chagrin because they like to front-load records but I’m not interested in doing that. None of my favorite records do it, and frankly, none of the biggest records on earth leave all the deeper-reaching songs to side B.”
JJ Grey & Mofro have been performing “Seminole Wind,” the title track of John Anderson’s 1992 comeback album, for about seven years, although Grey initially learned to play it at age 18. “I’m not a big modern country fan,” he comments, “although someone would probably say, ‘Well, John Anderson ain’t modern country,’ and they’d be right. I grew up with my dad’s record collection, which was mostly 8-tracks, and it was a lot of Grand Ole Opry. So to me, country stars were Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Patsy Cline. Then, to my dad, George Jones and Willie Nelson were like new kids on the block. Anyhow, I love the song and someone mentioned it to me on tour a couple years ago, so I said, ‘Hey, let’s learn this tune.’ It’s only the second cover song I’ve put on a record but I thought the guys were just killing it.”
Thinking back on teenage years, Grey remembers, “When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to get away from the farm. I couldn’t wait to get away from anything agrarian in a lot of ways. But some part of me was always like, ‘That’s just you bumping your gums. You ain’t never going to leave the woods and the farm-type life,’ which was the truth. I’ll also say that the last way I wanted to be thought of as a kid was as a Southern-rock guy influenced by Southern blues and soul music—which I guess is the way I’m thought of now. I would have much rather been Adam Ant.”
As Grey considers his intransigent youth in the context of his current music, he also acknowledges that there was a time earlier in his life when it wasn’t so easy for him to go with the flow. “That continued for some time,” he admits. “There were plenty of occasions when I was like Chevy Chase in Family Vacation forcing everybody to see the largest ball of twine.”
He shares an account of a surf trip to Costa Rica in the early ‘90s. “I planned it all out like Clark Griswold,” he recollects. “I had overscheduled everything, and after a while, people were like, ‘I don’t really want to go to that other break. I just want to go grab lunch.’ And I was like, ‘Well, if we do that, we’re not going to get in as much surfing as we could.’ I was almost freaking out and it took somebody to say, ‘Calm down, dude. This is a vacation. I’ve got enough structure in my life.’ That represented one little hit with the pickaxe against the concrete wall of the way I thought the world should be.”
He then relates a musical experience that helped to change his perspective. “I went to a Buddy Guy show after he put out Sweet Tea [in 2001] and the majority of the material was from that album. I’d never seen Buddy Guy before; I might have been there to see the opening act. He came out and talked about growing up in Mississippi—he spent a lot of time in Chicago later on in his life—and I just connected with him. I ran my mouth forever to all my friends about how great Buddy Guy was live.
“Then a year or two later, he came back through Jacksonville to a different venue and he only played one song off Sweet Tea. I wasn’t angry, but at one point, I felt like I had to apologize to my friends because he wasn’t playing the songs I had talked about. So I turned to them and they were just mesmerized by Buddy Guy, and rightfully so. That’s when I realized I wasn’t there, I was at the last show from a year earlier and that this show was just as good. It’s kind of like trying to decide which sunset is the best—I realized I needed to stop placing rules and regulations on these things. That was another chip taken out of the wall, so to speak.”
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When JJ Grey & Mofro hit the road in March to support Olustee, this will be the group’s largest touring roster to date.
“I’m adding four more people onstage,” Grey discloses. “While the makeup of the band has changed over the years, for the last decade, it’s been more or less a seven[1]piece—myself, a drummer, bass player, guitar player, keyboard player and two horn players. Now, I’m adding a sax player to the horn group, two ladies who will be singing background vocals and then a buddy of mine playing percussion. Every time we play here at home in St. Augustine, I’ve brought the band up to that size. It’s so much fun and so thick-sounding. Man, I’d have a 100-piece band if I could afford it. I’ve been working on arrangements for a 100-120 piece orchestra so that eventually I can do a whole orchestra tour.”
With rehearsals for his new collective looming, Grey then considers the inevitable evolution of the songs on Olustee.
“This will be the closest they are ever going to be to the record. At first, everyone’s got to get on the same page to play the music, but once it’s in your body, it will change without you knowing it. It’s not for the worse and sometimes it’s not even for the better—it just changes. A lot of that depends on the shows and the response to the evening because everybody, including the audience, will make micro or nano adjustments to every part of their being. It’s when those nights happen that things are phenomenal.
“Sometimes you sort of mentally do it. Our drummer hears the bass player play a certain figure, and he’s done it three nights in a row, so the drummer hits the kick drum differently around that bass figure and makes it even cooler. Those kinds of mental adjustments happen, but there are also adjustments that happen faster than the mind because they happen simultaneously. It’s like when you get up out of the chair to answer the phone right before it starts ringing. In martial arts, they call it sen sen no sen—it’s moving right before something happens. You learn to cultivate that feeling, which I have no idea how to do, but I know it’s happened in the music.”
Grey then factors another element into the equation.
“I think the audience can do that too. The best nights are when the audience plays the whole show. From the minute you walk on that stage, they electrify you. I don’t mean because they are hollering and screaming so you feel like a rock star. I mean, you feel the energy because they want to share an honest moment with you and it makes you fall into that honest moment. It’s like ‘the zone’ in basketball where every shot falls. Everybody just sort of agrees to share an honest moment and that’s what a show is to me. Music is part of that, but the real thing that’s happening is being so deeply now and nowhere else that you’re in this honest moment.”
As Grey ponders this, he shares some thoughts on the origins of his material.
“I feel like these songs wrote themselves through me to remind me of what’s important,” he says with reverence. “They’re like little markers in a diary or Post-it notes on the refrigerator of my life, telling me: ‘Pay attention, this is important.’ Then they become mantras that I sing every night. Just by singing them, they remind me of what’s important.
“But I have never—and I will never— write a song as a message to other people. It’s a message for me because I was busy forgetting things that are important in my life and my connection to the land. It’s never a message for the audience because I have no greater intelligence than anybody else. The messaging is for me, and then if that helps other people, it’s the greatest reward of this.”
JJ Grey pauses, chuckles and then adds, “Well, here I am trying to be self-congratulatory about something that I can’t take credit for. It would be like talking to you about how wonderfully I’m making my pancreas do whatever my pancreas is doing right now. Or if I said, ‘I’ve decided while we’re talking to drop my heart down to 68 beats a minute, and then occasionally, I’ll move it up 72.’ That all does itself. I don’t possess the kind of knowledge to do it. I feel the same way about music.”
