On the morning I spoke with Kenny Wayne Shepherd last week, he was pulling into Colorado Springs, Colorado, to play the final concert of his current tour. The Shreveport, Louisiana, guitar player was looking forward to a few months off, relaxing with his family and doing some recording with his band. Spending the majority of 2022 celebrating the 25th anniversary of his hugely successful second album, Trouble Is…, Shepherd will continue his celebratory tour in 2023 and come this December, released a rerecorded version of the album that really put his name on the marquee as one of the best blues players of modern history.
Recording the original album back in 1997 wasn’t exactly what he had expected it to be. His debut album, Ledbetter Heights, had caused a major spark with songs such as “Deja Voodoo” and “Born With A Broken Heart,” and he was looking to capture that lightning he had stirred up once again on album #2. But just before they went into the studio, the lead singer was let go and a scramble ensued to find a replacement. “There was this crazy search for a singer,” producer Jerry Harrison told me in a recent interview‘. “I mean, the idea that Noah Hunt, who is so spectacularly good, was found was just really so fortuitous and remarkable cause he is so much better than Corey [Sterling] in my mind. But he was really a neophyte and really scared.” Hunt proved to be just what they were looking for and Trouble Is… rocked the music world with songs like the #1 hit “Blue On Black” and “Somehow, Somewhere, Someway.”
“I’m so proud of what we accomplished,” Shepherd proclaimed in a press release, “and also the fact I was just eighteen years old when I did it. I mean, I had an experience with this album that most musicians can only dream about. Trouble Is… sold millions of copies. There’s validation in all of that for me.” Now 45, married with five kids, Shepherd decided to go back into the studio with Harrison and his band and a lot of the same guitars and amps he had used the first time around. Trouble Is…25 will be released on December 2nd and it sounds fantastic. “In the studio, it felt like no time had passed,” stated Shepherd. “If you play well together, you play well together. It worked back then and it worked just as well this time. It was all of us living in a room. That’s just how I do it, man. I’m old-school. Human beings need to be in the same room to be able to play music together.”
Once proclaimed the prince to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s king, Shepherd has tried to grow and expand his music over the years while maintaining his roots. “I think me and Stevie had a lot of the same influences,” Shepherd told me during a 2010 Glide interview. “He probably listened to the blues all the way back to the early 1900s, just like me.” He continued talking about Vaughan’s influence during our 2014 interview: “I would probably say that the concert that changed my life was either when I met Stevie Ray when I was seven years old for the first time or even before that when I went and saw Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker when I was just a little kid. That particular show introduced me to live blues music and I’ve been a fan and loved blues music as far back as I can remember. And then seeing Stevie when I was so young was a life-altering experience for me because I’d never seen anybody play music that way. It was so much fire and passion in playing the guitar like that. From that day forward, all I wanted to do was play with that kind of intensity.”
In a brand new interview, I spoke with Shepherd about the upcoming album and tour, revisiting an old Bob Dylan tune, having other instruments in his live shows, his forever musical pursuit, and how his goals have changed – or stayed the same – since he was that seventeen-year-old gunslinger full of passion.
So you went back and redid Trouble Is… twenty-five years later. Where do you see the most prolific changes within these songs?
Well, the thing about it is, I kind of really debated for a long time as to how to approach rerecording this record. In the studio, as we played down each song, we did them in two different ways. We did one where it was really faithful to the original and then we did another version where this is how the song has kind of evolved over the years. Then I just kind of had to make a choice at some point of which version to refinish. And I realized that you know, this album has been so important to so many people and people have become very attached to the sound of it, you have to walk a fine line. If you get it a little too far away from what they’re used to then I think they may think, why did you do this to this record?
So what my goal became, we took the performances where it was very close to the original and then we made some very subtle differences in the recordings, whether it’s a slight change in some of the guitar licks I play or a slight change in the way Noah sings some lines in the song, things like that, so people feel like the moment that they listen to it, it sounds familiar to their ear. They go, I know this record, this IS that record. But as they listen, they start hearing some little different things here and there and they realize they’re having a new listening experience.
You’ve been out on tour playing this album. Which of the twelve songs had you played the least up to this point and why wasn’t it on the setlist more?
That’s a good question. It’s probably certain songs, like “Nothing To Do With Love” has not been in the set in a really long time. A song called “Chase The Rainbow” and even the instrumental “Trouble Is,” we haven’t really played live in a really long time. I don’t know which one is probably the actual least played out of all of them but now that we’re playing them every single night, it’s like I know them backward and forwards (laughs). And the band is playing them really well. But what was really interesting for me was getting reacquainted with all of the songs, particularly those songs that I haven’t played in a long time; getting reacquainted with them and readjusting to them live and realizing how much fun all these songs are to play.
You have a phenomenal version of “Ballad Of A Thin Man” on the anniversary record. Jerry Harrison told me recently that you recorded it originally but you wouldn’t let him put it on the original album. Why?
Well, at the time, you have to remember I was eighteen years old and for the first several years of my career, we were just doing straight-up blues songs. Then when I started writing my own songs, that was when I started branching out a little bit from just doing traditional blues. So we had established an audience with the first record that I thought, you know, a lot of them were kind of diehard blues fans. We had “Ballad Of A Thin Man” and then we had “Everything Is Broken” and I was concerned at the time that maybe “Ballad Of A Thin Man” was a little bit TOO much of a departure from blues and the audience would go, what are these guys doing?
“Everything Is Broken” really has a very familiar type of arrangement when it comes to blues music so blues fans can feel that and identify with that. But Jerry was very adamant and we kind of locked horns over it and went back and forth and eventually, I prevailed because I never played a guitar solo on “Ballad Of A Thin Man.” I just basically refused to play a guitar solo on it and I knew if there was no guitar solo on it, they couldn’t put it on the record (laughs).
That’s sneaky
Yeah (laughs). But over the years, you know, I’ve started to go back and listen to that and it’s like wow, it’s actually a great song and we had a great performance of it. Then when we decided to do this, I thought, it would be cool to include something like that, cause there was like a handful of songs that we recorded for Trouble Is… that did not actually go on the record and this was one of them – one of the best I think. So we went in and did a real faithful reproduction of how we originally recorded that song when we decided to include it. It gives the fans something interesting, like, hey, this is something that we did back then that was supposed to go on the record but didn’t go on the record, but now it’s on this record.
Have you ever played it in concert at all over the years?
No, we never played that song live before.
Are you going to?
You know, I didn’t even think about that. Maybe we’ll do it next year, cause we’re continuing this tour into next year. So I’m glad you brought that up.
Why did you choose Jerry Harrison to be a producer in the first place?
My A&R guy at the record company, that’s his job. They help connect you with songwriters, they help connect you with producers; they kind of put the whole team together of who he thinks might best be able to help you achieve your vision for your music. And he suggested Jerry because they had used Jerry on a band called Big Head Todd & The Monsters. His first album was produced by David Z, who was the same guy that produced my first album. Then they used Jerry on their second album. They played the record for me and there was one song, they did a version of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” and they had John Lee Hooker play on it and it was a really cool version of it; it was really aggressive and raw sounding and everything and I was like, I can dig this. So after hearing that song and that performance, I was willing to go meet with Jerry. He and I had dinner one night and just hit it off right off the bat. Jerry told me his first band was a blues band and he had a deep appreciation for this kind of music but also his vision for my music was not just to be a blues band and I agreed with that. So I felt like we had a similar idea of where my music should go.
With the guitars, did you try to use the same ones you used the first time around?
Yeah, when we went back and rerecorded everything, I dug out all the original equipment. I brought all the same guitars, all the same amplifiers, all the same effects pedals, and everything that I used on the original record. A couple of these amplifiers, I don’t think I had used very much since we did that record so they’d kind of been sitting in storage and hadn’t even been turned on in a very long time. But yeah, I brought all the exact same stuff into the studio that I used when I recorded this.
I used a black-faced 1964 Fender Vibroverb. That was the primary sound of most of the record. Then I had two other amps, I had a black-faced Fender Twin and then I had a Fender Vibro-King, which was an amp made in the Fender Custom Shop at the time. Those three amps were like the core sound on the whole record. Most of the songs I played on my 1961 Strat because I had just gotten that guitar a year or so before that so that had become like my number one guitar. Then I also had a couple of other ones, a couple of custom shop Strats, and I brought those in. Effects pedals were pretty basic. I never really tried to get too crazy with effects pedals. I had an original Ibanez TS08 Tube Screamer and then I had this pedal called a Klon and I had an original Univibe pedal and my Roger Mayer Octavia pedal and a Vox wah pedal. And that’s it.
Is there a guitar in your collection that you never take on the road but like to use in the studio?
Well, the 1961 Strat, to some degree, has become that. I still take it on the road but I have a couple of guitars I will only take with me if I can carry them out the door with me. If I’m getting on an airplane, those guitars stay at home. If the bus is picking me up at the house and I can carry them onto the bus and then also carry them back off the bus when the tour is over, then I’ll bring them. That’s my 1961 Strat and my 1960 Les Paul. Those things just don’t leave my sight. To me, they are completely irreplaceable instruments. I mean, each and every one of them is kind of irreplaceable cause they are all unique but those are the two.
When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
I don’t really know other than just trying to wrap my mind around the instrument, cause I wasn’t really learning theory and I wasn’t learning music. At a certain point, you know, you just learn how to play other people’s music and then the big transition is trying to figure out how to go from playing what somebody else played to what YOU want to play and how to make it your own; how to take what you’ve learned and kind of change it up a bit and mold it into something that is unique to YOUR sound. And that’s just a process. But at some point between the age of, I don’t know, right around the age of thirteen, I just remember that something started to click and I was able to start improvising and exploring the instrument and looking for things and ways to make things my own. And that was kind of the beginning of that process. And that’s still evolving today. I think that’s a never-ending process for a musician.
You showcase on your website some of your guitars and you have this beautiful black Les Paul that belonged to your grandfather. Tell us more about him and his musical background.
What’s interesting about him is, I don’t know if when he was younger he played that much. I’m trying to remember how long ago he got it but I just remember him pulling it out one day I never saw him play guitar or anything. I don’t know how far he had progressed on it. I just remember he bought the guitar and it was kind of like sitting in a closet for a long time and at a certain point he decided that I should have it and I started playing it out on the road and stuff like that. When I did my Signature Series, I gave him one of those, but I never actually saw him play guitar. I think it was something he kind of briefly decided to pursue and then just kind of stuck it in a closet and never really picked it up again. A lot of people buy an instrument and mess around with it for a little while and it’s just not for everybody, you know.
Jack Casady once told me he is forever chasing tone. What is your forever chase?
So tone, that is like a never-ending search and it’s like, I’ve kind of gotten, between the guitars that I have and the amplifiers that have been built for me over the years, the pedals that I’ve kind of found that work for me, I mean, I’m always looking for a different sound, right, cause if you find a different sound it can inspire a new song. That’s fun. But I’ve felt pretty satisfied with where I’m at with my tone so really what I’m chasing now is the feeling, the emotion in the music. I’m chasing that moment when we play where it’s like, you can reach this moment in your performance where it’s almost like an out-of-body experience. When you really cross into that other realm of musical existence, you can almost sit back and observe yourself playing and it’s incredible. The feeling that you get when you do that and the emotion that you’re conveying to the audience through your instrument, it’s just like otherworldly. That’s really what I’m after. Every time I walk up on that stage, it’s like I want to tap into that as much as possible. The goal is every night, and it’s not really possible I don’t think to do it EVERY night, but that’s my goal, that’s what I’m chasing every night, because when I hit that point, I know that I’m at the peak of my abilities and that’s what I want to give to people when they come to see us play.
Why have you always wanted keyboards and piano in your band?
We haven’t always had them; well, I guess we’ve had them on the record but certain songs, like even on the Trouble Is… record, there are certain songs where there are no keyboards on there. I think “King’s Highway” has no keyboards and maybe “True Lies,” I can’t remember, but there have not always been keyboards on every song and there have not always been keyboards in my band. There were a few years there where we just did a power trio thing where it was guitar-bass drums and vocals. So what I kind of like to do is switch it up. I mean, we’ve had keyboards, we’ve had no keyboards, we’ve had horns and keyboards, and then we’ve had no horns and just keyboards.
Recently we had the horns out and now we’re finishing up this tour without the horns and it changes my playing because it changes my responsibilities musically. So I’ve actually found, every time you add another player you have to make room for them in the song and when they’re gone then somebody has to make up for that one way or the other; so it’s more responsibility. I’ve actually enjoyed having more room in the songs without the horns there at this point in the tour. We did the first half with them and now we’re finishing the second half without them. So it’s made me have to step up my playing in different ways, which I actually enjoy cause it’s then more challenging. It’s making me work a little harder. But yeah, we’ve kind of mixed it up over the years because I feel that it changes the way I approach the music. It’s like a continued learning situation.
Is there any chance of you making any new music with Stephen Stills in the near future?
You know, I just saw him actually last week. We were just kind of hanging out and talking and stuff. I mean, we both are very fond of the band [The Rides] that we had and the music that we’ve made and I think, obviously, a door is open for that. I guess it just depends on what is going on in his life and what’s going on in mine. Right now we’re full-steam ahead with what’s going on with my band and we have a whole new studio record that we’re planning on releasing next year as well. We have a lot of stuff on the horizon. We were talking about doing it right before covid happened and then all of that stuff happened and it just put the brakes on everything. But we’re both open to it. We both have very positive feelings about that so it’s just a matter of scheduling.
You said the tour is going into 2023?
I know it’s going to at least take up the first half of the year. We’re taking it over to Europe as well. The reception here has been so good. Everybody has been really fired up about it and most of the shows have been sold out and if they’re not sold out they’re very close to being sold out. So the response has been pretty tremendous. We haven’t been to Europe now in a couple of years because of the whole pandemic thing and we’ve had to reschedule tours multiple times. But this has just been going so well and I know there are a lot of fans over there that have been listening to this record for a long time so we decided that when we do go back we should bring this show to them. So we plan on doing that.
You said you were recording a new album with the band. Do you think that will get finished in the time you have on your break?
Yeah, well I already have an album completely finished. We finished a record right before the pandemic happened and I’ve just been holding onto it this whole time cause I didn’t think it made any sense to release a new album amidst all that. So I have almost two albums worth of stuff that is already finished. But we’re still going to go in the studio in our time off in October and start recording, then I’m going to start writing songs for something else. You know, I just want to continue being productive and there’s no harm in stacking up stuff, you know (laughs).
When you began your professional career, what were your most important goals then and how have they altered into today’s goals?
You know, at the very beginning I didn’t have any major goals. It was like, I just wanted to play guitar (laughs). Then all of a sudden there’s this opportunity to make records and then people are buying tickets to see me play, so my primary goal was just to give people the best show that I could give them every night. I mean, I was just thrilled to be as young as I was and have the opportunity I had. As I’ve gotten older, the responsibility has come into focus and the full magnitude of the opportunity I’ve been given has really kind of been revealed. So I think the goal of giving people the best performance hasn’t changed.
As I’ve become a family man and have my own kids, I always knew I was setting an example for somebody, whether it was young people who were coming to my shows or now I have my own young people with my children that are really kind of paying attention, I just want to show them hard work pays off and you can set goals and accomplish them and things like that. All the things that a parent really wants to do for their kids. And then, you know, just continue to make the best music that we can and put on the best shows that we can so the people can feel satisfied and want to keep coming to see us. You know, I get to do what I love to do and I don’t know how you can really get tired of that, to be honest with you.
Live photos by Leslie Michele Derrough
