Durham, North Carolina. Part of our goal for this trip was to re-connect with Eric’s people down here and explore the possibility of a more in-depth tour in the future. A lot of those people are right here in Durham… this is where Eric went to college (Duke), where he first connected with the Bahá’ís, and where the One Human Family Gospel Choir was born. I attended a rehearsal last night, and you can definitely feel it: they’ve been doing this for a long time.

The response to the shows has been great. We’ve had people singing along with us quite a bit (even when they don’t know the songs), and when we cross into deep Moanin’ Sons territory they ask us if there’s more where that came from.

There’s so much potential in the Moanin’ Sons project it freaks us out a little. It’s almost like it just exists and we’ve stumbled upon it, like when you write a song that comes out so naturally that you can’t really say you ‘wrote’ it.

Part of it is just that there is some cultural work to be done in the States. The well of history and music in this country is so deep, you could spend your whole life delving into it and still only scratch the surface… but somehow in Eric and me connecting, it seems like we go from digging with a shovel to moving large amounts of earth with heavy equipment. And this feeling is intensified threefold whenever we’re in the South.

American roots music, especially in its 20th century African-American forms like blues and soul, was the reason I decided to take music seriously in the first place. I remember being the only kid at my school listening to Sonny Boy Williamson instead of Bon Jovi. But over the years I’ve wondered where that stuff fits into my own work, because during my time in other countries and then Los Angeles, I was immersed in Latin music, Electronica… everything but the blues. Most of all I was caught up in trying to find an expression of my own that didn’t owe too much to any one particular genre.

But with Moanin’ Sons, we both kick into another mode, sort of ethnomusicological reality show on wheels. We connect each other with certain things about music, and its relationship to race, religion and social change in America, that made us fall in love with it in the first place. People catch on to it pretty quick, because we all know there’s something under the surface here that needs to be explored… good, bad & ugly.

After spending a week in that headspace, I’m looking forward to coming back and letting the next step reveal itself. No doubt it will.

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