“When you get the spark, you got to ride that energy,” says G. Love, and that spark certainly ignites on his 10th studio full-length Love Saves The Day. He calls the new release “the fullest realization of the hip-hop blues” that he first pioneered with Special Sauce in the early ‘90s. The album, due out October 30 on Brushfire Records, not only features G. Love’s long-term Special Sauce rhythm section – upright bassist James “Jimi Jazz” Prescott, and drummer Jeffrey “The Houseman” Clemens – but also prominent guest performers including Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo, Lucinda Williams, Citizen Cope, Ozomatli, DJ Logic, Money Mark, Zach Gill and Adam Topol.
To create their down and dirty “trashcan blues” sound, G. Love and Special Sauce returned to Brushfire Records’ Solar Powered Plastic Plant in Los Angeles. The band was excited to reteam with Sugar engineer and producer Robert Carranza (Jack Johnson, Beastie Boys, Mars Volta). They recorded live with few edits to capture the immediacy of the music: G. Love making his guitar snarl and his harmonica moan, bassist Prescott bringing nimble funk to the bottom end and Clemens’ drum work crackling with power. “The music,” G. Love enthuses, “jumped off the tape.”
The new album completes the trilogy for G. Love that started with 2011’s Fixin To Die. That disc stripped his music down to its roots and saw him record with The Avett Brothers, while Sugar, in G. Love’s words, “reconnected the blues with the electric side” and reunited the original trio to create the band’s signature style of blending John Lee Hooker blues with “Golden Era” hip-hop beats. On Love Saves The Day the group dives even deeper, making the grooves heavier, the music rawer and the performances more authentic.
Love Saves The Day marks G. Love’s sixth with Brushfire Records and he’s thrilled with their relationship. He lauds label chief Emmett Malloy as someone driven by creativity first and whose aesthetic tastes he trusts. G. Love views today’s music world as the Wild West, with “all the lines washed away;” however, his genre-blurring music now is more relevant than when he started. “It’s a good time to be doing what we are doing,” he asserts, noting Gary Clark Jr., Jack White, Robert Randolph and Galactic as some fellow keepers of the blues flame who “maintain the roots but push music forward.”
G. Love proudly describes himself as a road dog who “will be touring until I fall off the earth” and plans to keep on pushing with Special Sauce from stage to stage. Whether Love Saves The Day makes one dollar or a million isn’t a big concern to him. It stands as a huge success because he made the gritty, honest album that he intended by “keeping it raw, keeping it immediate, keeping it real.” It’s an approach that he has honed over the years: “be original and be true to what you do.”
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