Ash Grunwald has got his ‘Mojo’ well and truly back with his ninth studio album released on 30th August, through Bloodlines. Grunwald has pulled together a host of guest musicians from the blues & soul world to appear with him on ‘Mojo’, with the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Kasey Chambers, Mahalia Barnes & The Teskey Brothers as well as the late Terry Evans & Eddie ‘The Chief’ Clearwater, all featuring throughout the twelve track album, which showcases some of Ash’s strongest work to date. Recorded here in Australia as well as during visits to the US, ‘Mojo’ has been the labour of love for Ash, taking five years to put together and the resulting release is quite stunning. The Rockpit caught up with Ash once again, having recently spoken to him about his first ever appearance at The Melbourne Guitar Festival but this time to discuss the outstanding ‘Mojo’ as well as what music he grew up listening too & why he feels the need to work on becoming a better guitar player…
Sean: Hey Ash, how are you doing?
Ash: Good thanks Sean, how you going?
Sean: Very well thank you. Great to talk to you again but this time to talk more in depth about your wonderful new album ‘Mojo’. It’s been a real joy to listen to.
Ash: [laughs] Oh that’s cool. Thank you.
Sean: Plenty to discuss but let’s start with the fact that all twelve tracks sound so very different. They all have a really different vibe to them.
Ash: I guess that is partly due to the way it was recorded – two different counties in two different time periods. I decided about ten years ago, on my ‘Hot Mama Vibes’ album, that I didn’t mind the idea of doing albums that way. I think contrast is not a bad thing to our ears these days. We’re more used to contrasts because we listen to a lot more playlists today in our lives. If you can get contrast on an album it really breaks thing up a bit.
Sean: And there is certainly contrast on ‘Mojo’. You’ve gathered some magnificent artists to join you on the album – it works so well. The track ‘Waiting Around to Die’ is just stunning…
Ash: Oh wow…
Sean: It’s just such an emotive song and with the addition of one of my favourite guitar players, Joe Bonamassa.
Ash: He did a very tasty version. It’s so funny because at the time I had been working really hard at my guitar playing, so the original version that I recorded in LA five years ago had the same backing & everything but I had recorded a really nice solo that was more in the vein of BB King, I would say. By the time we finally came back to the album I had been aiming to get Joe Bonamassa to play on one of the tracks so I went in and recorded the best solo I could and it was quite flashy & shredy… I was trying to imagine what Joe would do – I can’t play anywhere near as flashy as he can, but that was what I was working on… to become a flashier guitarist, so I did my best. Then Joe went in and I don’t think he listened to that at all – I think they said he didn’t want to listen to mine, he just wanted to do his own thing and not hear what was already done. He just did the tastiest, most minimal solo [laughs] but it was just beautiful playing – not flashy at all, just beautiful. So that song has had three different takes on the guitar solo on that. But I was just so appreciative of Joe doing that and the interplay between him & Ian Collard worked so well.
Sean: You also managed to get some other wonderful blues musicians & artists on the album and I know when we spoke a few months back you mentioned to me how much it meant to you to get both Terry Evans & Eddy ‘The Chief’ Clearwater to feature on a couple of tracks before they passed away last year.
Ash: I haven’t even looked into what they did in the way of recordings over their last years…
Sean: …I know one of Terry’s last recordings was documented as 2012 so you may very well be the final artist to record with him. Do you remember when it was?
Ash: I think we did those tracks back in 2014.
Sean: So this could be the very final tracks he did. It’s a remarkable piece of blues history if so.
Ash: Absolutely. I you can hear it in Terry’s voice as well as Eddy’s too. Sadly, I wasn’t there for Eddy ‘The Chief’, I was back in Australia by then but for Terry I was lucky enough to be there directing his backing vocals and talking to him over the studio mic. He would be trying different things as we were layering up these gospel harmonies – it was just one of the best days of my life, musically speaking.
Sean: When you get to work with this old school bluesmen do they make it so much easier for you because they get where you’re coming from or do they still have to work at it?
Ash: I think they just do what they do. I’d ask Terry to give me a 5th above a note and would he do another harmony and he’d just do something completely different [laughs] but it was just epic.
Sean: Too many tracks to talk about in depth all in one go and I have to mention some of my highlights; ‘Trouble’s Door’ & ‘The Boogie’ are wonderful but the album closer ‘Goin’ Out West’ is just such a cool track.
Ash: Yeah with Kim Wilson – that’s another great song. But you mentioned ‘The Boogie’, well that was recorded during another session as a two piece and was produced by the drummer who was George Carpenter, who lives in Melbourne. That was all to analogue tape too, so we were going for a greasy kind of feel for that one.
Sean: Last time we chatted you put me on to The Teskey Brothers and their new album is just incredible stuff. It reiterates what we were saying about the strength of Australian music right now. The blues genre has given us some wonderful albums so far this year and ‘Mojo’ is another one that adds to that list.
Ash: I’m so glad to hear that, thank you. Because it was recorded over a long period of time it feels like a lot of albums compressed into one.
Sean: When I saw you at the Forum last year opening for Kenny Wayne Shepherd I vividly remember you playing the album opener ‘Hammer’ because you got the audience to sing the chorus with you and it worked so well live.
Ash: ‘Hammer’ was the main song that I wrote for those LA sessions. There are some tracks that didn’t make the album but that was the main one that I was really happy with that we wrote and I think Terry Evan’s vocals on that are just absolutely incredible. When I wrote that and went over to LA to do the sessions I came back in December and got down to doing some festivals and put that song in straight away to my set so I’ve actually been playing that for nearly five years now [laughs]. I’m only just releasing the original version of it now.
Sean: The first single from the album was ‘Whispering Voice’ with the wonderful Kasey Chambers and you’ve now just released the second single, which is ‘Ain’t My Problem’ with The Teskey Brothers. How were they to work with?
Ash: That was really cool to work with them all. It got some really great production values from it and some old school ideas about the way we recorded it. It’s just so really cool what they do.
Sean: Yeah, I love their work. Tour dates aplenty in support of ‘Mojo’ kicking off in Adelaide on the 4th October and all the dates can be found on your site ashgrunwald.com but true to your closing track ‘Goin’ Out West’ you are indeed coming to visit us in WA during October & beyond with a show at The Rosemount on the 11th Oct.
Ash: We are also heading down to Blues at Bridgetown too in November which is always great.
Sean: I’m hoping to come down to that as I’ve not been to Bridgetown yet. You also have the Western Australian Guitar Festival in Margaret River on the 12th October so plenty for WA fans to sink their teeth into.
Ash: Yeah that should be a good one too. I’ve also got something happening in the New Year with Daryl Braithwaite as well.
Sean: I’ll keep an eye out for that. I know your embracing social media a bit more now and I watched you broadcast a little solo jam session on Facebook Live the other week that was really cool…
Ash: I feel with social media now, I have finally got to the level with it… I did it from the start. Because I’ve been playing music for so long and these things have come along, I’ve never really had a personal Facebook page or anything like that. It’s always been a bit of work for me and wondering if it’s a young person’s thing. But over the last year or so I’ve been getting into the content side of social media more – I’m doing my own podcasts and stuff. Once you start using it for something that’s full of meaning then you start to engage in to it in a deeper, real way. Now, I love social media for that – When you’re talking about something our interview right now, that’s when I start to really get into social media and that’s what I’m using it for. I think it’s so great when you use it for something that isn’t just superficiality.
Sean: Since we last spoke you also had your signature guitar released at The Melbourne Guitar Show back in August. How has that been going?
Ash: That was the first prototype that one and I love that prototype. But I think the actual signature guitar is going to be even better. I don’t know if it’s going to better in terms of sound. I think it will sound similar but it will be just a little bit more ornate & bluesy looking. It was already pretty cool – I love it.
Sean: Did you come back with any spare change from the guitar show [laughs]?
Ash: [laughs] I wanted to play a lot of different things but there was so much shred going on there… bedroom players who had just been waiting all year to turn up and shred. It was hard to concentrate. I played a really interesting guitar which I put up on social media. It was an eight string bass harp connected to an acoustic guitar – you plug one bass string then play a whole lot of guitar over it. It was really nice.
Sean: I know you said you had never appeared at a guitar show before so did it live up to any expectations that you didn’t have [laughs]?
Ash: [laughs] Well, yes it did. I never normally look at line-ups before I get somewhere but when I did the blues jam there was a lot of old faces like Nick Charles & Phil Manning, who I’ve known for twenty years who are both just amazing players. Then there was a couple of the younger ones like Minnie Marks & a few others who are also just so amazing and it was a really good jam – it was quite heartfelt, especially if you add in Chris Wilson passing away earlier this year so it was great to reconnect and it was all so meaningful in the end which is not how I imagined a guitar show to be.
Sean: I just wanted to talk you back to when it all started for you. I read somewhere that your started playing guitar around the age of ten through your grandad, but what were the musical influences you grew up hearing in the family home?
Ash: My parent listened to country music quite a bit. My dad gave me a mixed tape when I was twelve and it was also just the music of the late eighties and early nineties really – it was that soundtrack that everybody was listening to. It’s funny because I was talking to Diesel once and I remembered that his solos would have had an effect on me when I was a kid because he was playing with Barnesy on that live album ‘Barnestorming’, where they were playing some bluesy kind of stuff. My era is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Rage Against The Machine in terms of mainstream music and I do think that music did have an effect on me but just in the back ground. I was really listening to blues music mainly though.
Sean: I know you’ve mentioned a few times in other interviews lately the fact that you have been practicing so hard to becoming a ‘better guitar player’ but why is that? Is that a personal challenge or to improve you as a song writer?
Ash: I think it’s really important to self-produce yourself and to be able to see yourself in the third person and I think every artist does this. That way you can see what your contribution is to the music scene, see where you can fit and see where you can have success I guess. Previous to now I always thought that wasn’t to do with being a good guitarist or shredding, I always thought it was more to do with song writing and I still do think it’s that but I just started to look at what’s possible a bit differently and so I decided that with daily practice it is possible to get a lot better and if you start to think it’s possible then you start to think that surely it won’t hurt my career to get better at what I do. So it was sort of following from logic really. Whereas if you think in the back of your mind that it is not possible or you think it’s a waste of time to improve your dexterity and flashy play then you’re not going to work on it, you’ll never be better… it just becomes a bit boring. It’s just so exciting if you think that next year you’re going to be better than you are now. If I just worked on song writing every time I picked up the guitar to get better at shredding I’d have a better career [laughs] but for some reason I just can’t bring myself to write songs constantly. I just want to improve the musician that I am for a while right now… you can only be obsessed with one thing at a time so I will go back to song writing eventually.
Sean: You also have your book which is being launched, ‘Surf by Day, Jam by Night’. It’s a busy time for you. I look forward to buying a copy and having a read.
Ash: Yeah, for me really it was a… I say something like “Dedicated to people who follow their passions but in particular for people stuck in a rut and it’s my hope that it’s the philosophical spatula that gets them unstuck.” That’s how it works for me anyway.
Sean: That’s pretty cool. I shall hunt a copy down. We wish you all the best for ‘Mojo’ and really hope people enjoy it as much as I have.
Ash: Thanks mate.
Sean: It’s been great chatting to you again and we wish you safe travels on the tour as well Ash. Hope to catch you in Bridgetown in November.
Ash: That would be cool. All the best Sean.
For a list of tour dates head to www.ashgrunwald.com
