Boz Scaggs’ Southern Inspiration: Inside His Eclectic ‘A Fool to Care’

In 2013, Boz Scaggs ventured into Tennessee to make a new record, his first in five years. The appropriately titled Memphis drew inspiration from the city’s rich history of soul and R&B, and when it was time to make a follow-up, he decided to reunite the same group of players across the state in Nashville. The result, A Fool to Care, is one of the most eclectic albums of his long career. Reinvigorating smoky blues numbers, sultry jazz tracks, uptempo Latin rhythms and down-home country barn-burners, Scaggs has put together a wide-ranging document of the history of roots music in America.

Just after its release, the singer called Rolling Stone to talk about the LP’s Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams duets, searching YouTube for inspiration and studio memories of old collaborator Duane Allman. 

What was it about the Memphis team that made you want to bring them back for another record?
I have worked with these guys off and on for a number of years, and the chemistry of this section is just magic, really. It’s phenomenal to the point that I feel that we can do just about any material that we put in front of the section. The style of it is unique and very much suits my approach. The musicians have no idea until they come to the studio that day, but they don’t have to know. We have a lot of years and a lot of music in each of our pasts, and it all comes together in a unique way.

It seems like you used that musical flexibility to its fullest here. Was there a common thread or theme you were looking for when you selected this material?
Not really. The only common thread that runs through the whole process was the rhythm section; the engineer who we used from the previous album in Memphis, Nico Bolas; and the search for interesting material. We considered hundreds of songs in this process, but we found that each of these selections to be extremely interesting. They’re vehicles to take us where we want to go. They’re vehicles for my voice. They should be of some interest to music people. They come from interesting places and each is unique. That’s the only criteria.

The song “Whispering Pines” is a classic by the Band, but what made you envision it as a duet with Lucinda Williams?
I had been searching for the heart of that song for some time. You get into the Band’s original recording of it and there’s some disparate chords being played, and I think those guys were sort of feeling their way around harmonically. It led me to try and find my own definitive version of those chord changes, and I searched around the web to see if other people had done it and how they had heard it. I didn’t hear any version of it that seemed definitive to me, but I did run across a tribute to Levon Helm after he died and Lucinda gave it a reading that was deeper and richer than anybody else had given it. She shares the same fascination for Richard Manuel and the eerie quality and the mysterious quality of that song.