Kenny Wayne Shepherd is nearing the 30-year anniversary of his recording career, and he’s accomplished a great deal during that time.
Since “Ledbetter Heights” in 1985, when Shepherd was just 18 years old, he’s released 11 albums — including last year’s “Dirt on My Diamonds, Vol. 1” — plus two more with The Rides, his all-star group with Stephen Stills and the Electric Flag’s Barry Goldberg. He’s also been nominated for five Grammy Awards and has become a staple on the all-star Experience Hendrix tours.
It’s been a road that never ends for Shepherd, who’s now 46 and the father of six with Mel Gibson’s eldest daughter Hannah. There are always new signposts along the way, however, and Shepherd doesn’t foresee that changing in the near future…
* Shepherd started working on “Dirt on My Diamonds” at historic FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., which he says “absolutely made a contribution to what this album could be. Being in those studios, in that town…the studio is pretty unchanged. It’s got that original vibe in the walls, in the carpet, in the console and everything. When you go into a place like that it can’t be, ‘OK, we’re gonna go to Muscle Shoals and conjure up the spirit of the old records they made there.’ No. That makes it harder than letting things happen naturally. We just went in there knowing that by being there it would have some sort of influence on what we did, but then let the project happen naturally. My goal the next time we go down there is to record an album AS we’re writing. That’s the next plan if we can get that worked out with everybody’s schedule.”
* Shepherd says that a “Vol. 2” of “Dirty On My Diamonds” is “already done,” although he hasn’t scheduled a release date yet. “There was a lot of reasoning for (two parts). Vinyl has become such a thing now. There are a lot of enthusiasts out there. Our fans love that stuff. And generally back in the old days it was four songs per side, so you have an eight-song album; that also was dictated by the quality of the vinyl and the fidelity that you get by not trying to cram too much music on one side. Four on each side seems to be the magic number all the way around. Then I started looking up legendary albums that had eight songs, and there were a huge amount of them. So, I dunno, man, it seems ideal to me. Eight songs is much easier to listen to than 16 songs on an album.”
* As for his musical identity during the past three decades, Shepherd has been happy to straddle some genre lines. “Am I a blues artist that plays rock, or a rock artist that plays blues? It’s hard to say. There’s so many different labels — blues guitar player, blues-rock guitar player, contemporary blues…And “Dirt on My Diamonds,” to me this sounds like a fresh, new and young, energetic album. That’s my goal, to continue trying to put the music forward. If you looked at me as just a traditional blues artist you’d go, “He’s pushing things in different directions.” But that’s what I’ve done from day one. “Deja Voodoo” from “Ledbetter Heights, that’s not a blues song. It’s a blues-based rock song.”
* In doing that, Shepherd has learned that “you can’t make everybody happy. If I’m not roughing up some feathers that means we’re not pushing things enough. Luckily I have fan base that’s been with me 30 years now. They’ve seen me go through a lot of phases and a lot of different directions, from blues to a 100 percent rock ‘n’ roll record with (2004’s) ‘The Place You’re In’ and everything in-between. I just look at somebody like Eric Clapton; he’s done everything throughout his career, never just one particular thing. I’ve looked at him as a perfect example of a guitar player-artist who is just following the musical muse wherever it takes him at that moment.”
* The Rides has been dormant since before the pandemic, and Goldberg recently launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with expenses for treatment of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But Shepherd says the group may still ride again. “Me and Stephen recently did a few things together…and he’s like, ‘Oh, man, I miss you. We need to do this again.’ We love each other and we love playing together. It’s just a lot more challenging now ’cause I’m in Tennessee and he’s in California. It was much easier to get into the car and go to his house and write an album. But I would say the intention is there; it’s just a matter of can we realistically make it happen with my schedule and his schedule and all the logistics. It was a lot of fun to do, and it would be nice to do it one more time for sure.”
Kenny Wayne Shepherd performs at 8 p.m. Friday, May 17 at Music Hall Center, 350 Madison Ave., Detroit. 313-887-8500 or musichall.org.
