Blues Traveler is about the release their 14th studio album and they are sounding a good as ever. ‘Travelers Blues‘ arrives on July 30th via Round Hill Records and is filled with an assortment of blues cover songs from a robust catalog of tracks to choose from.
The album which was produced by Matt Rollings. Rollings also produced the bands last album, ‘Hurry Up & Hang Around’ in 2018. ‘Travelers Blues’ features many talented guest performers. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Warren Haynes, Rita Wilson, Crystal Bowersox, Mickey Raphael, The War & Treaty, John Scofield and Keb’ Mo’ are among the artists that appear on the new album.
I asked guitarist Chan Kinchla about the thought process behind choosing the ten tracks that are featured on this latest offering from the band. Chan tells Sound Vapors, “As most things with Blues Traveler, it was a strange, mysterious group effort. We have Josh, who runs Round Hill Records, has all of these licenses. So we had probably 200-300 songs that were kind of in our world to start. Between the five of us, our manager, Josh and our producer Matt Rollings, who is a great player and who we worked with on our last studio record. We all kind of just started making short lists and running them through the email confabulation.”
Chan continues, “Slowly but surely some front runners came up. I’ll have to give it to Matt Rollings who at the end had to pare it down from 30 to a shorter list that we came in with pretty good intentions of doing once we got into the studio. It was a group effort as the process kind of crystallized. But you know, with these things I think it’s good to let the mysterious forces come to play.” :laughs:
Chan also told me about one of the first songs they started working on – ‘Funky Bitch’, the Son Seals track. He says, “That was the first track where we knew we could do some interesting things with these songs. That was a great revelation.”
Another stand out track from the new album is a cover of the Gnarls Barkley songs – ‘Crazy’. The song features Rita Wilson and John Scofield and gives a bluesy, smooth take on Gnarls Barkley’s biggest smash hit.
You can hear my entire conversation with Chan Kinchla as we get into some of his favorite guitar players, records and even a certain cameo in the motion picture – ‘Kingpin’, by clicking on the link to your favorite place to listen to podcasts:
-Tommy Marz
You can find Tommy on Twitter
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