Tedeschi Trucks Band - I Am The Moon: III. The Fall - 180g Vinyl LP

TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND - I AM THE MOON III. THE FALL  by David Fricke

The Fall – the third record in the monumental four-album project by Tedeschi Trucks Band, I Am The Moon – begins with the vivid hurt and explicit challenge of "Somehow," an easy-rolling groove that soon turns into full-blown soul power. How many times will you walk away?/How many times is the price I pay too high?, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi demands, opening the next chapter in this love-and-madness story, unfolding over 24 new songs, like a hanging judge with a wounded heart. "Every time I write something," says keyboard player Gabe Dixon, who co-wrote "Somehow," "I just want her to sing it."

 

 The first studio release by Tedeschi Trucks Band in three years, I Am The Moon is a portrait of passion, despair and hard-won revelation in American-music technicolor – blues, country, jazz, R&B and gospel – set in motion in the spring of 2020 when singer Mike Mattison offered Layla and Majnun, a 12^th-century work by the Persian romantic poet Nizami Ganjavi, as a point of inspiration. I Am The Moon also reflects the the continuing evolution of TTB itself, the 12-piece powerhouse led by Tedeschi and her husband, guitarist Derek Trucks, since 2010. Of the three new members featured on I Am The Moon, Dixon, a Nashville-based songwriter and recording artist, joined in late 2018, replacing original keyboard player Kofi Burbridge (who died in February 2019). Bassist Brandon Boone, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, arrived in early 2019, and drummer Isaac Eady literally passed his audition in the first week of recording.

 I Am The Moon – which has a cinematic component, the four companion movies of I Am The Moon: The Film, directed by Alix Lambert – "is a different type of project," says Trucks. "And it's a different band. We couldn't just keep plowing forward in the same way. We talked for awhile, even before this came up: 'Whatever we do next, it has to be a hard reset.' The fact that it ended up being this – I don't think we could have imagined that."

"We didn't expect to have this much material," says Dixon, who regularly made ten-hour drives – commuting between Nashville, the Trucks family farm in Georgia and Swamp Raga Studios in Jacksonville, Florida – for the writing and recording sessions. "We had so much down time" – after TTB's usual, heavy slate of live work was put on hold by the pandemic – "that when we started this thing, we just kept going. Between us individually writing and then getting together to write at the farm, it turned into this opus."

 "We knew we had to do something to stay creative and banded together," Mattison says. "And there were all these voices in there," he adds, referring to the source material in Layla and Majnun, "with something to say and very strong points of view." On The Fall, that focus swings from Tedeschi's pathos and fight in "Somehow" to Dixon's New Orleans-R&B appraisal of love's grip and pull in "Gravity" and the heavy loss and healing memory that Mattison carries with poignant aplomb in "Emmaline." 

 Mattison says Dixon's singing has been an important addition to TTB's lyric and musical strength: "I like the way his voice mixes with Susan's. I'm good at singing with Sue when we're belting. But Gabe has this contemplative, very quiet voice, and the blend with Sue is seamless."

 Track by track, this is The Fall.

"Somehow"

 Dixon wrote this song about the strange dynamics of commitment – that urge to hold on when every other instinct tells you to let go – with Tia Sillers, a longtime collaborator in Nashville whose writing credits include Grammy®-winning country hits for The Chicks and Lee Ann Womack. "Tia and I had written that for one of my records back in 2019," Dixon explains. But as the composing went on for I Am The Moon, "I thought it might work, so I sent it in." Trucks and Tedeschi "liked it as it was." Still, you stone me/Something 'bout you knocks me down, Tedeschi sings in the chorus, a surrender underscored by the searing force of Trucks' slide-guitar solo and the hearty glow of the band. 

"None Above"

     "I had the nub of it," Mattison says of this hymn-like miniature, "and Sue helped me fill in the blanks – looking at this love-mad guy from the woman's point of view." The climbing urgency recalls the earthy searching of George Harrison's records after the Beatles, such as 1973's Living in the Material World. "I hadn't thought of that," Trucks says, "but that's a great connection. It's one of my favorite moments on the record."

"Yes We Will"

     Tedeschi wrote this determined stride to church, via Blues Alley, with a specific purpose. "Derek and I have so many blues roots," she says, "and I really wanted to show those roots, where this band is at." The result is early-Seventies B.B. King arm in arm with the Staple Singers, while the guitar breaks affirm the rise-and-shine in the lyrics and Tedeschi's vocal. Come on, wake up people, can't you see it now?/Time is right now, she declares as Mattison, Mark Rivers and Alecia Chakour bring the train-to-glory in the chorus. You can't help but believe it.

"Gravity"

     "They just said, 'Send some songs – let's see what we've got,'" Dixon says, recalling the first writing gathered for I Am The Moon. Like his demo for what became the project's title track, "Gravity" was a finished number, co-written with singer-guitarist Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers. Dixon takes the vocal and plays deep-South piano – Leon Russell by way of Dr. John. The band takes it the rest of the way to the Crescent City in second-line drumming and street-corner brass, Trucks' slide guitar illuminating the party like heat lightning.

"Emmaline"

     Mattison's waltz-time ballad began as a reflection on Burbridge's passing. "I've lost some friends lately too," the singer says. "I was kind of walking around, talking to the departed. I thought, 'That's weird.' And I started thinking about Layla and Majnun, all of the people who just don't make it through that story, and how one thinks of the departed. Whether people think it's silly or not, they're always sitting there with you."

"Take Me As I Am"

     "I had a hard time at first," Tedeschi admits of her first attempts to write for I Am The Moon,  "from that point of view" in Layla and Majnun. "But I had some songs that I started a while back that I hadn't finished, that I knew I could craft in that way. One of those was 'Take Me as I Am'" –  a slow-dance plea for respect and the sanctity of life itself, sung by Tedeschi from the edge of peril with Rivers as the hand of comfort, surrounded by Dixon's keyboards (Hammond organ, Rhodes piano, accordion and mellotron). "I had this image of women being taken from their families and killed, this real-life connection," Tedeschi explains. At the same time, in Layla's story, "I felt like it was her reaching out: 'Take me as I am, as a person – whatever that is.'"