MUSIC INTERVIEW: G. LOVE

Garrett Dutton Relishes A Second Chance To Make His First Record

By: Team Buzzine

February 25, 2011

In January 1993, Garrett Dutton was playing a show at The Tam O’Shanter in Boston when he met a drummer by the name of Jeffrey Clements. Along with a bassist, Jim Prescott, the trio wrote and recorded a self-titled debut which blended blues riffs with hip hop beats and contained a little ditty called "Cold Beverage." That massive hit triggered both a name-change for Garrett and 15 years of musical momentum for G. Love & Special Sauce. But here in 2011, a new kind of G. Love album has been released. Recorded with the Avett Brothers in the mountains of North Carolina, Fixin’ To Die is a raw, emotional album of original songs and cover versions which brings the blues to the forefront but almost entirely drops the hip hop elements from what we have come to know and love as G. Love music. Buzzine just had to know more about what caused this artistic shift, so we headed down to the all-new Fingerprints record store in Long Beach, California to talk to Mr. Dutton on the very day that Fixin’ To Die was released…

Stefan Goldby: You are releasing your 11th studio album today, and in some ways it seems like a radical musical change, but at the same time, you’re just fully embracing an element that’s been there from the beginning. How did what this record became begin to start forming in your head?

G. Love: When we knew we were going to get ready to go make a record - I’m always ready to make a record - at first we were thinking we were going to continue on with the hip hop blues, but we knew we had to make a real strong record. We did about a year of songwriting sessions, which I had never done before, with different writers and producers coast-to-coast, and I was feeling pretty good about the material, but the label and the management didn’t feel like it was enough of a departure from the last three records that we put out with Brushfire. So we scrapped everything and they said, “Why don’t you make a blues record?” I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this? I’ve been trying to make a blues record for the last 20 years.”

I remember the day very clearly because we had this conference call, and Josh and Emmett at the label, and Jason my manager, said, “Okay, we’re gonna scrap all these tunes. You should do a blues record,” so I said, “All right. [Laughs] Fuck you guys. [Laughs] Why did you just waste the whole year? I could have already had it done.” So I basically cancelled soundcheck that day and just demoed out like 30 tunes that I’ve just had in my repertoire from age 17 to age 38 - which is how old I am right now - what I thought was the best, mixed in with some older blues covers…and then it was like, “Okay, it’s on. We know we’ve got a record in here.”

It’s kind of a second chance to make another first record, because this new record, Fixin’ To Die, is the record that I would have made if I would have gotten discovered before I came up with the hip hop blues, which became G. Love and what that project stood for. This record, in a sense, is Garrett Dutton, and that’s me and it’s the music that I was making on my way up, and that music is Delta blues and also kind of folk-blues inspired by people like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed.

SG: For the uninitiated, what exactly is your description of ‘Delta blues’?

GL: I think the definition of Delta blues…and I’m using it as a broader term, maybe I should say country blues… Delta blues, specifically—there's the 'one man performing with his acoustic guitar' blues of a certain region, the Mississippi delta in the deep south, that was first recorded in the early ‘30s up to the ‘50s and then shifted up to the Chicago blues.  But the start of it was Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and so many other people. Of course, there’s also a lot of musicians not from the delta but from Texas and New Orleans and the Carolinas and Georgia, and everywhere else around there that are southern country blues. But to me, all those artists, whether it’s Robert Johnson or Lightnin’ Hopkins or Robert Pete Williams, to me, they’re so much different from one another, it’s hard to even say that they play in the same genre sometimes, because I find—especially once you really get into their records—you see that each one of these artists is so unique, and they all laid the foundation for rock and roll, whether it was Elvis or Chuck Berry or The Rolling Stones or The Beatles—all those bands started out as blues cover bands before they had big original hits. 

SG: You mentioned that this is stuff you wrote over a 20-year period. That’s very different from a regular record, where you’re in a cycle and you write music and then you record music and on it goes. Where did that put you personally? I mean, you’re back in the mindset of being a high school kid at times: That had to be a trip…

GL: It was cool. When you’re in that regular recording cycle of putting records out and touring, you’re in a two-year cycle: you make a record and then, by the time it comes out, you’ve got new songs you’ve written and you start working on your live set, and that leads you into the studio after you’ve finished touring on the previous record. So you have your whole life to make your first record, but then 18 months to make your second record. So this record was unique in the way that I, once again, got to draw from my huge wealth of material that had been written over a 20-year period. That gave me a lot of powerful, meaningful songs.

A lot of times, when you’re writing a song…obviously every song has to start with some kind of spark or inspiration, but some inspiration, for certain songs, is a lot heavier or just more meaningful than it is for other songs, and that’s just the way it is. And I always think that a song that’s been around for 20 years…you know that’s got to be a good song because there’s a reason you keep wanting to play it, there’s a reason you remember the lyrics and the musical form, so I think that any song that has a long shelflife like that, that gives it a lot of merit, and basically, the new record, Fixin’ To Die, is full of songs like that.

SG: The other new thing is new musical collaborators. I would imagine that it’s one of the better concerts of your life—that you go to a Avett Brothers show in Boston, you go onto a bus afterwards and have a chat, and from a conversation comes a record: When you were sitting on that tour-bus in Boston, what was it in that conversation that was the spark of, “I think we could work together. I think there’s something here”?

GL: It was just one of those weird nights. We were out and a buddy of mine, Jay Sweet, who is a writer for Paste Magazine, called me up and said, “Yo, you’ve got to come down and see the Avett Brothers at the House of Blues.” So I said, “All right, let’s go check it out,” and my fiancé, Sarah, was really into them, I didn’t really know too much about them at the time, and I was really blown away by the performance and really minimalistic approach. Scott and Seth are both multi-instrumentalists so they’re kind of jumping around…the singing was beautiful, it was passionate, and [they had] really great interaction with the crowd, and I was like, “Wow, these guys are really something special.”

So we hung out afterwards, and you couldn’t meet a nicer group of fellas, and there was just a lot of mutual respect there, I felt, from that very first meeting. I was a new fan of theirs, and Scott had seen our show in Charlotte when he was probably just starting to think about making music a big part of his life. So we were both really enthralled by one another’s performances, and it was cool. That was the spark, and so we met a couple months later at the Summer Camp Festival in Wisconsin, and I hit him up and said, “Yo, I’m here. You want to jam out?” And he said, “Sure, come on.”

We worked up a song on the bus and then we did it onstage, and that was cool, and we came and watched their show and they came and watched our show, so there was definitely a nice friendship blooming. And then right about then, we knew we wanted to have an artist produce the record, so it all signs pointed to working with Scott and Seth Avett, and you couldn’t have picked a better producer in those two fellas.

SG: And you picked a pretty spectacular place to go record in as well…

GL: Once we decided that we were gonna make a record together and that they’re gonna produce, the next step was just finding a time, and we were able to nail down a week and a half to record, and then they said, “Why don’t we do it at this place, Echo Mountain in Ashville?” And my whole thing was just, “I’m gonna come up with my songs, and I’ll be ready to deliver 110% and I’m gonna trust you guys and you guys take me on your trip.” And the first part of that was going down to Asheville, which is just a beautiful, small city nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina…lots of street musicians, lots of music in the cafes at night, and really great musical vibes everywhere in the town. It was a really creative atmosphere.  And it was nice for me: I was away from any distractions with a fresh group of musicians and everyone was just there to help me make a great record, so it really was something special. And the place itself was this beautiful, converted church, so there’s stained glass…the sunlight is kind of filtering through the stained glass and the air is really cool and airy, like when you walk in a church or cathedral and it has that real airy feeling. And you just walked in and you knew something special was gonna happen, and the minute we started recording, it was on.

SG: It seems to be a very personal album for you. Not to say that your other records weren’t, but it’s raw and very naked emotionally. Was that deliberate? What made you decide to put it out there a little bit more with this record?

GL: It was a real emotional recording for me. For one thing, the tunes had been written at turning points in my life. I’ve written songs about my grandmother passing and the influence she had on me, and writing songs as a teenager about that yearning for whatever is out there past your parents’ house and out of the city. I lived in Philadelphia and I was always writing songs about leaving the city, so there’s a song called “Get Goin’” and a song called “Walk On” which are like that teenage wanting to get out. I think they’re really great songs. And there are a couple of tunes I wrote for my fiancé over the summer, so obviously these are real love songs I’ve written for the girl that I’ve chosen to be the one…or she chose me, or we chose each other, but… So there are some real love songs and fresh songs on that side.

And then a lot of the older blues tunes, like “Fixin’ To Die” and “You’ve Got to Die” are just really poignant songs. “Fixin’ To Die,” the title track, is about, “You don’t mind dyin’, but you hate to leave your children cryin’…” So it’s thinking about the people you leave behind. And I’m a young guy; I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, but one thing is that emotion of leaving your child. As a father, that’s always been a tough thing, and when I go on tour, ever since my son has been born, I’ve had to leave him for a couple weeks or a month at a time. And I think, when you’re performing a song or recording a song, you always want to find some kind of emotion which fits in with the emotion of the song and you can really tap into it. For me, on this record, all the songs really had that heartfelt emotion because I can really connect with all the songs easily.

Also, because this record is not hip hop at all - which a lot of my records have a lot more hip hop in them - hip hop is a very ego-driven kind of music. And even someone like me, who is not like a battle MC or something like that, you still can’t help but fall into that hip hop thing of bragging about different things or making it bad-ass, and this record is more blues music and folk music, and that kind of music doesn’t have as much pretense. It’s like you’re putting yourself out there without ego, and often that’s much more powerful.

SG: You haven’t really done a lot of cover versions over the years, and apparently your manager Jason has been trying to get you to do a particular song for a very long time. Why did you resist for so long, and why did you finally give in on “50 Ways…”?

GL: Once we started doing some cover songs on the record, we decided, “Well, if you’re gonna do a cover of a couple of blues tunes, why don’t you do a cover of a hit song as well?  Just so you know there’s going to be at least one hit on the record.” [Laughs] Because I’ve always been like the king of B-sides, and my songwriting just always seems to be a little quirky sometimes. Anyway, so Jay, my manager, was always trying to get me to do that Paul Simon song, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and I always liked that song but I never thought about how it would fit into our live set. And when we came to do this record, it was like, “Let me work that song up again,” and then I really started connecting with the music of it, and I figured out a great way to flip it and put in a real bluegrass, hoedown jam at the end of it, and flipping the beat from the original Steve Gadd beat into more of a…I don’t know…it’s kind of a more primitive clap-beat. It’s definitely one of the more funky songs on the record. But it has both—it has a little funky side, or at least groovy, and then it really goes back into the Americana vibe at the end, so I feel like we did something pretty unique with it.

SG: This whole process has been a stark difference from the way that you’ve done things to this point.  What do you think it’s changed about you as a musician?

GL: When we first started making records, we were signed with Sony Records and we’d have a huge budget, and we could afford to sit around the studio and smoke weed and try to come up with stuff on the spot, or not be very well rehearsed and just try to hopefully grab some kind of magic out of the air, and now it’s a lot different. There is no budget to make a record, so you’ve got to make sure you have it together, you know just what you’re gonna do, what songs you’re gonna record, how you’re gonna do it, and bang it out, and still capture that magic and that emotion. And I’m finding out now that, man I really threw away a lot of money back in the day! Because if we’d just do something like this, we probably would have gotten a better result, instead of blowing all that time and money. 

But anyway, this record definitely changed me - it changed me musically and it gave me a lot more confidence in the original type of music that I was first passionate about, which was the delta blues and folk music, and about my abilities to do that successfully at this level that I’m at. And I really feel like Fixin’ To Die has opened a new chapter for me in my career, which…I can already tell in my writing that I’m already just really writing a lot more songs like the type that are on my new record as opposed to more the hip hop writing I’ve been doing for so many years, and I’m feeling good about that.  I’m feeling like it’s a breath of fresh air and a new path to start off on for the next 10 or 15 years, or wherever it will take me. 

SG: You started off as a street performer. You’re very comfortable with just you and a guitar. Has this record changed the way you can play live now?

GL: This is great because this record is a record of the type of music I play when I’m not onstage, so this is the kind of stuff you’d find me playing on my front porch when I’m off the road and off the stage. So for me to be able to come up and do what I do, how I do it is really easy. It feels good, it feels natural … You’ve always got to go out and prove it to you and prove it to the crowd every night, and bring it on, and that’s what I do, but this is very natural. I think blues is something that you have to earn your stripes on, and I’ve been out doing it and getting seasoned and marinated in the music for so long. And I’m not a kid anymore.

When I first started, I was the young kid on the scene, and I still feel like that in my mind and in my heart, but I have people who have come up to me like, “Yo, I’ve been listening to your record since high school,” or, “I’m in high school and I just got your record, and it’s a big influence,” [laughs] and you see how, wow, I’ve been at this thing for a while. When your fans come up, and you have some fans that are 16 and are learning to play the guitar, and you have some fans that are 35 and bringing their kids down and say, “I met my wife at your show back in Long Beach in 2001…” [Laughs]

SG: You did take a couple steps toward this area in 1998, when you ‘went country’.  That was a very limited release. How is the man sitting here today a different musician from the guy who recorded that album 14 years ago?

GL: When we started making records, I quickly felt like the record labels couldn’t keep up with the amount of songs I was writing and the amount of recordings I wanted to do.  So I made a bunch of bootlegs in the late ‘90s, and one of them was called G. Love Has Gone Country, and it had some pedal steel on it, and it was really old school country music, like honky tonk, Johnny Cash stuff. So we made a country record and it was really cool.  It was just a bootleg, and I guess now the difference is I actually now am with a record label that’s ready to embrace that side of me, and actually has been waiting to embrace that side of me, and pushing me in that direction for a while, and it just took me a second to get out of that major label headset where, “I need to deliver a hit for the moment…”

I always wanted to deliver a timeless hit, but I needed to deliver a hit in my contemporary hip hop blues, as opposed to saying, “No man, you’ve got a really unique approach to the blues and that’s what we feel like you should put out,” even though maybe on the outside maybe I don’t seem too commercially viable, but you don’t know how stuff is gonna work out. It’s like when you turn your back on chasing success or whatever it is you’re chasing, and stay true to the music and really dig deep into your roots, and dig deep into yourself and pull something out—that’s more important than everything else. So I feel like, this time around, we really did that. We just said, “Let’s just be us.” 

G. Love’s ‘Fixin’ To Die’ is out now on Brushfire Records.