Photograph by Khris Poage
John Jeffers says he’s looking forward to rocking out when Whiskey Myers plays Riverbend on August 26 as part of the band’s “Live in 25 Tour” with Tedeschi Trucks Band. But what he’s looking forward even more is a good sleep. “My wife wouldn’t be too happy with me saying that,” the country rock guitarist says during a recent interview, laughing at his admission. “I’m on the road and getting sleep fine, and she’s not.”
Jeffers and his wife, Hope, welcomed baby Ozzy Jak Jeffers to the fold in June, and the early months just happened to correlate to when Whiskey Myers would be out on the road this summer. “As soon as I go home I’ll get me some feedback,” he says. “I promise you.”
While the personal lives of members of Whiskey Myers continue to change and evolve with each passing year, so too does the East Texas band’s career and music. “It’s not on purpose,” says Jeffers of the creative growth fans will soon hear on their highly-anticipated seventh studio album, Whomp Whack Thunder. “It just happens. I mean, we aren’t talking about drinking beer or being in college any more.”
Rather, new songs such as “Time Bomb” and “Tailspin” reveal the continuing evolution of the country rock sound that materialized back in 2007, and Jeffers says he and his bandmates (including front man Cody Cannon, guitarist Cody Tate, bassist Jamey Gleaves, drummer Jeff Hogg and percussionist Tony Kent) continue to push the envelope creatively. For example, after self-producing their past two albums, they joined forces with producer extraordinaire Jay Joyce on Whomp Whack Thunder.
“He’s just really badass,” Jeffers says of Joyce. “We’ve almost worked with him before, and this one just happened almost by chance. The stars really just aligned. He’s got his own little quirky way of how he does it, and we had never done it in some of those ways before. The end product is so worth it if you trust his process in it. He’s one of a kind, that’s for sure.”
The process of creating Whomp Whack Thunder was one of a kind too, as the band found a way to produce perhaps the best album of their career over a span of just three weeks. “We didn’t really work into the wee hours of the night either,” says Jeffers of the work that went into the album, which is set for release on September 26. “We didn’t even start until around noon every day.”
But when they did get going, Jeffers says that Joyce found a way to pull something out of the band that even they’d never heard before. “Jay wanted to work with a band, and he hadn’t gotten the opportunity to do actual bands with big group thought processes in a while,” he recalls. “So I think we worked really well together and everybody was excited about the light hand he used.”
Joyce also used a rather interesting technique to allow time for the boisterous band to truly listen to the music they were putting out. “You wear these headphones in studios and we’re constantly like, Turn it up because we can’t hear,” Jeffers recalls. “But one of Jay’s little quirks is that he purposely keeps the volume low and won’t turn it up for you. If you trust that, it makes you play as a group and you really get locked in a hell of a lot better. And once we learned what was going on, we realized there was a method to the badness.”
Jeffers says it felt good to shake things up. “We never want to get too complacent,” he says. “If you get stagnant in one area, you’ll end up making the same record again.”
Not that it would be all bad for Whiskey Myers fans to experience again the magic that flowed from earlier albums Tornillo and Mud. But these fans aren’t like the rest. “I don’t know everybody else’s fans in the world, but I do know they want to be challenged,” says Jeffers. “They’re used to us coming up with crazy stuff. They know there is no telling what we’re going to sound like next.”
He lets out a laugh. “It could be country or it could be rock and roll or it could be something completely different,” he says. “There are going to be some wild cards in the new album, and I think that’s part of the reason a lot of our people still stick with us. Whatever kind of music we want to play, we play.”
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