Tedeschi Trucks Band Review

Grammy Award winner Tedeschi Trucks has produced renowned albums throughout the years. Applying a mix of blues and rock music, they take their music to a higher level, aiming to create a lasting experience with their listeners. Following the pandemic, the 12-piece band featuring Derek Trucks and wife Susan Tedeschi have announced the release of an album and film series they plan to release throughout 2022.

The band’s four-part album and film series, I Am the Moon, is an ambitious feat for the band while also creating an intimate energy for listeners, as it follows The Story of Layla and Majnun, a Persian poem written by Nizami Ganjavi in the 12th century. The poem was originally the subject of Eric Clapton’s double-EP with Derek and the Dominos back in 1970, and inspired “Layla,” widely considered one of the great rock songs of all time. It was Tedeschi Trucks vocalist Mike Mattison who came up with the idea of revisiting the poem and discussing it from Layla’s point of view, wanting to know “what Layla feels about it.”

Trucks sat down to discuss the release of their new album series and how the band used the source material as a “writing exercise” during COVID lockdown to come up with ideas. “It just became this really interesting puzzle to put together of how to make the music flow and the story flow in, kind of, a general arc of the individual records and the whole project. In some ways, it was kind of a happy accident,” said Trucks.

The album and film series emphasize changes band members faced during isolation. The process of creating this series, he said, allowed a unique universal perspective that the listeners can gather from the various songs: “There’s something honest and weirdly revealing about the whole thing.”

Tedeschi and Trucks, who live in Jacksonville (Trucks is a native), will be releasing the albums one by one with a coinciding film for each. The emotionally-driven first album titled Episode I and corresponding film, Crescent, were released earlier this month with an exciting fan response. As a fellow Jacksonville local, I look forward to the journey the band takes me on with this series.