Derek Trucks might be the luckiest dude in rock. The guitarist is a few months shy of his 30th birthday and already he's been playing with the Allman Brothers for a generation. His uncle, Butch Trucks, is the band's founding drummer, but the group is a family enterprise built on talent rather than nepotism. The guitar wunderkind — it's almost too tempting to call him Duane Allman reincarnated — jammed with Buddy Guy before his 13th birthday, has been nominated for Grammys, befriended Eric Clapton and married singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. On "Already Free," his sixth studio album as the driving force behind the Derek Trucks Band, Trucks' prodigiousness shows signs of mellowing. Recorded in his new home studio, Trucks' playing on the solid blues-rock disc is tasteful, truncated and reliably deep in the pocket. Rolling Stone's Brian Braiker recently called up Trucks, who was in Atlanta rehearsing with the Allmans, to discuss the new album, married life and a couple of jazz giants. Tell me about the new album.
I'm excited about it. This one feels different than the others. I think part of it is that when you build a studio yourself from the ground up with your own hands, with family, you feel like you birthed the whole thing. It's in our backyard, it just feels organic. It was nice to be able to wake up in the morning and drive the kids to school and hit the studio and write. The album definitely sounds different — the songs are more concise, there are fewer expansive solos, it's more mature sounding.
A lot had gone on between records, a lot of maturing as a human being, being around great musicians. Playing with Willie Weeks, Clapton and Santana and even being around the Allman Brothers makes you step away from your own work when you're recording it and judge it harder — the chord changes, the content, everything. It was also nice to not focus on a guitar record. I think this one was much more song- and feel-oriented. I've always been pushed in the other direction of doing more guitar records because that's supposedly what people want to hear. When I see someone live I want it to be expansive but with a studio ideally I want to hear the birth of ideas and the sound and not necessarily extended soloing. Your wife sings on this record. Do you guys work well together or do you get on each others' nerves?
It's a nice situation. We're both bandleaders in our own right and both pretty stubborn people but we work pretty well together. We haven't done a record completely together yet so I don't know how that'll work. [Laughs] We write pretty well together. The studio is a new thing for us so I'm excited to expand on that and see what can happen. I think we can do a really great record together. It would be really nice to spend four, five, six months and keep writing till we have some great tunes. I am hoping we can do it by 2010, 2011.