Connections made across 11 years in Nashville shaped Good to Be... (out Jan. 21 via Rounder Records/Concord Records), the new album by Grammy award-winning singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Keb' Mo'. The Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award recipient collaborated with Vince Gill, Darius Rucker and Old Crow Medicine Show in a way that's less about a blues picker upping the twang quotient and more about lovers of music shattering common assumptions about genre and geography.
"I had everything I needed in LA, but I came out to Nashville and I found a whole bunch more. It wasn't bad, I tell you," Keb' Mo' told Wide Open Country. "Now I'm rubbing shoulders with the country music community here in Nashville, musically and socially. It's a very different experience to be entrenched in the Nashville culture."
Gill co-produced three songs with Keb' Mo': "Good to Be (Home Again)," "'62 Chevy" and "Good Strong Woman."
"We just have an ongoing, really great relationship as friends and as musicians, as well," Keb' Mo' explained. "In the beginning, I never would've thought 'I'm going to be working with Vince' way back then because I was living in such a different world... or so I thought. Our working together now is really natural. It's not based on a dream. It's based on much, much musical respect."
Guitarists Keb'Mo' and Vince Gill performs onstage during the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival at Toyota Park on June 26, 2010 in Bridgeview, Illinois. (Photo by Barry Brecheisen/WireImage)
"Good Strong Woman" pairs Keb' Mo' for the first time with a newer Nashville friend (and, as it turns out, a longtime admirer) in Rucker.
"I just mentioned in passing that it'd be great to have Darius on this record and this song, not thinking that's someone that would take me serious," Keb' Mo' said. "How am I supposed to get to Darius, you know? It turns out he was kind of a fan, and he said yes and did it. I was like, 'Holy moly! What? Really?'"
A third-country collaboration, "The Medicine Man," intertwines Keb' Mo's musical roots with those of 21st-century string band Old Crow Medicine Show.
"It's so easy to play with those guys, and I fit in probably more [with them] than with any band I ever put together for myself," Keb' Mo' added.
Keb' Mo' connects with his Music City pals so smoothly for two reasons: Southern hospitality and an infrastructural difference between Hollywood and Nashville.
"In LA, moving around is the hard part of it because it's so big and the speedways are so congested all the time," he explained. "So it's kind of like harder. I have the relationships there, but it's harder to do. Sometimes you're trying to do a session, and somebody just gets caught in traffic unexpectedly. It happens all the time. I find it easier in Nashville to get things done because it's a smaller town, but it's not a small town."
Country team-ups reflect a spirit of collaboration in Keb' Mo' that doesn't weigh stylistic differences.
"Nashville loves to collaborate," Keb' Mo' said. "Country loves to collaborate with other genres. People tend to think that country musicians are 'country musicians,' but they're musicians and you can't just put them in a box. Just like you can't put any musician in a box. You can't put me in a box, you know. I find I'm in a really great community of great musicians rather than being in a town where it's all country. I had to shake that thought out of my own head. I thought it's going to just be all country all the time, but it's not. That's my impression of coming to Nashville and seeing the real Nashville up close and personal.
"You've got to be real careful in life to put somebody in a bucket, to pigeonhole somebody," he continued. "You've got to be real careful for that because 99.9 percent of the time, you're going to be wrong. People get surprised and say, 'I thought you just played the blues.' No, I don't play all music, but I play a lot of music. So that's how it is. We're all musicians. We're all artists that happen to live in Nashville."
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A cover of the late Bill Withers' "Lean on Me" underscores that much like Keb' Mo' and his Nashville collaborators, past greats defined as country, soul or blues acts never created music in a one-genre vacuum.
"Bill Withers is a West Virginia native, so he'd totally fit now in Nashville," Keb' Mo' said. "He's got that real country heart, and it comes out of the church, soul, the blues and country."
Good to Be... follows three 2021 examples of country stars giving Keb' Mo' his flowers now. The Oak Ridge Boys ("Life is Beautiful") and Toby Keith ("Old Me Better") covered the Compton native on new albums, while Trace Adkins recruited him (and Stevie Wonder) for The Way I Wanna Go selection "Memory to Memphis."
