Mamas Gun’s Andy Platts

Photo by Richard Ecclestone.

Few bands better embody the enduring appeal of west coast soul and its resurgence in recent years than UK collective Mamas Gun. Back with a new LP, Cure The Jones, frontman Andy Platts sat down to discuss the process of recording the band’s new album, why he doesn’t mind the term yacht rock, whether or not Erykah Badu is a fan of the band, and the Lewis Taylor-D’Angelo collaboration that never was.

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Andy, how's it going?

Teddy.

Pleasure to meet you.

Likewise, man.

Is this your home studio space?

Yeah, small but perfectly formed. That's where we've done the last record.

Small but effective, and I'm going to formally welcome you to The Eisenberg Review. Such a pleasure to speak with you. It's hilarious how good Cure The Jones is. I was listening to the record just walking around in Northeast Ohio last night, in the dark, walking my dog, because it's a mental space that you can just totally absorb something. It's incredible. It is just so gorgeously written and produced. I'm really excited to dig into it. Your home studio is a perfect springboard into to that first question about the recording process.

Cure The Jones is the second Mamas Gun record that you have produced and recorded as a band entirely yourselves. It's even, I think, a step above your last project, Golden Days, in terms of how fleshed out the instrumentation is. In terms of just how many more harmonies you've been able to add. I was reading that the recording process actually took place only over the course of a couple of days. Let's get into that. Let's talk about that a little bit. Sorry, got excited and jumped the gun.

No, this is cool. You're the second person really outside of our circle and our team that's given us any feedback about the record or listened to the record in great depth. We've not done many interviews yet for this record, so it's nice to get this kind of response so early on. There were various peaks and troughs with restrictions, as you know, throughout the last couple of years. As a band, whenever we got one of those moments, we seized upon it, paid whatever needed to be paid for us to be in the room together. That happened three times. So effectively, all the band instrumentation and some of the lead vocals, everything was recorded overdubs in three days. The bulk of the band recording was done in three days. Obviously, on top of that, there's bits of overdubs and background vocals and lead vocals, which I've tended to do afterwards.

That incredible. It adds, I think, to the cohesiveness. The vocals in particular are something I'd love to hone in on, because even the opening track, “When You Stole the Sun from the Sky,” you get just the heavens opening. With some of those vocal harmonies, it's like The Beach Boys, but turned up to 11. It's fantastic. There's the waterfall of vocals that happens and I think “Go Through It.” It's just ... how do you approach your vocal tracking? How do you approach harmonizing? Are the vocals primarily your domain? Are you writing a lot of those harmonies, doing a lot of those harmonies yourself?

In terms of what's written to be recorded, that's coming from me. I write the songs and all the harmonic information is me and background vocals are me as well. I'm interested in the process of background vocals being an instrument. A lot of people just use it to pad out a song, just use it as a way to get from your verse to your chorus or whatever.

But when I'm thinking about background vocals, I'm thinking about the way that Marvin Gaye used background vocals, or the softness in those really high female vocals you get on Disney films. Just really this kind of sinuous, soft edged sound. So I try to think of it in terms of textures. And obviously that ends up kind of enhancing what the song harmony is doing as well half the time. Sometimes you can put a bunch of stuffs together and it sounds like a pad rather than vocals, you know? So I'm really interested in back up vocals, being an effect as well as kind of musical part.

I would, of course be remiss if I did not ask you about your terrific project, Young Gun Silver Fox, which I can hear the influence of spilling into the approach here. Maybe that's the wrong way to put it, because certainly you are an integral part of both projects. You bring your songwriting approach, your vocal sensibility to both. I'm almost hesitant to even broach the topic of “yacht rock,” because I know that's almost a pejorative at this point.

It describes a sound in an era that's, depending upon who you ask, people either revel in or love to make fun of. But I tend to really love the production quality of that era and the excess. Not even excess, but the luxuriousness of it. What do you make of the current revival of those sounds? Do you think it's because people have always loved it and we've just come around to being able to appreciate it again? Or, I don't really know what I'm asking, but I'm asking you to comment on that more broadly.

I know what you're asking because it's something I've kind of discussed before. I mean, obviously the term “yacht rock” is the kind of retrospective term that's been coined in the name of comedy and sending up artists of that era through that web series. And, and indeed me and Shawn [Lee] have had a Zoom with the creators of that program, which was funny in itself. But I think conveniently actually, it's given everyone this touchstone, this phrase that helps kind of umbrella a lot of stuff that was brilliant, was absolutely the peak of analog recording. You had the best guys, best arrangers, best writers, best producers. It was like the crème de la crème, everything meeting at this kind of zenith of music making. I think terms like soft rock and stuff were too lazy and not all encompassing. There's something about yacht rock that kind of nails it.

Do you know what I mean? I don't mind the term yacht rock. It helps, again, it helps people know what you're about. I use the word term “west coast” just as much, to kind of help conjure up the same kind of feelings. There's something wonderful in yacht rock or west coast, where you've got the low end of the bass, the groove of the soul. But then you've got the kind of real craftsmanship of the kind of white pop rock fraternity. When that meets with this, all this kind of uplifting gospel-edged joy of soul and funk and blues, wonderful things happen. Just an incredible melting pot basically. And what's not to love? So many good tracks on albums.

You get a little bit to a question that I want to ask, which is the mindset of writing this record. I'm curious as to what the thought process was, in terms of writing and where you're at, because certainly Cure the Jones sounds like you are working to almost kick a certain feeling, revel in something bigger and better, happier. I mean, certainly love is a huge theme on the record. What emotions went into the ultimate crafting of these songs and really what is Cure the Jones getting at as a title for this body of work?

I think like many people creating in this period, certainly I'm one to just get away and revel in the solitude, which gives you time to process and ruminate on stuff. I think more than any other piece of music as a long player that I've been involved in this, this is kind of directly reflecting my feelings and others about what's happening in the world at the time. I think plenty of people have, "Hey, this is my pandemic album."

I wouldn't be as explicit at that, but I think there's lots of things that happen on that record because of the pandemic. Track one, “When You Stole the Sun From the Sky,” that's directly talking to the pandemic. It was here and then life was like this and there's quite a few things on the record that speak to that enduring and kind of knuckling down, go through it. The flip side of that is the yearning on the other side, the yearning to get out of it, the kind of hoping, knowing that there will be some kind of light at the end.

The last track of the album, there's a duality in that song there, that's the setup and it's this kind of very hopeful outro, and it's a completely different kind of song almost. Cure the Jones itself, as you know, to “jones” for something is to kind of to crave, to need something to be fixed, to be addressed. And I think everyone, everyone was jonesing for something, still are. Whatever it is, whether it's just to hug your grandmother or to sit at your favorite restaurant or just to be outside or whatever. We're imbuing a bit of positivity and hope there that cures the jones, to some extent through the listening experience.

I want to use this conversation to pivot a little bit to the name of the project, Erykah Badu’s Mama's Gun. That's a seminal record for me. I was a little too young for Baduizm, but somehow I caught Mama's Gun because I had someone play me “Green Eyes,” that amazing epic closing track. How did you come to that record? And how did you come to it as the name for this project?

First and foremost, THE Erykah Badu album for me is Baduizm Live. That live record with that band is just absolutely killer. Yeah. I mean just the rhythm on that record alone is just so deeply in the pocket. You're never coming back from.

I don't know, it kind of happened at the time by accident. We were chatting about how bands got their names. We stumbled upon like Radiohead, which is a Talking Head song. And like Deacon Blue is obviously a Steely Dan reference with “Deacon Blues.” So we kind of just riffed on that basically. Someone said, "Oh, Mama’s Gun, that's a good band, good album title, but it's a much better band name." So we kind of jokingly just hopped on that, used it for a couple of shows and then it kind of stuck. And we just removed the apostrophe to annoy people.

Well, also it helps, I'm sure, for when people are looking for the band, because then you're not just getting the album.

I'll be honest, I mean, over the years I've had mixed feelings about it, but kind of, we went so far down the road with it. It's like, oh, well, people kind of know us as this now. And there is a precedent for people using bands as the name of their projects and their outfit. So yeah, I always wonder whether people think we're hanging on her coattails somewhat by using this name, but it's a tribute, because it is a great record of hers. That said I'm not like a total diehard Erykah Badu fan. It was just one of those things we arrived at.

We're actually playing a festival in the UK this year called Love Supreme and she's on the bill and we're on the bill as well. So we'll finally find out whether she digs it or whether she slams us for it. But I wonder if she's heard any of our music. I wonder. I'd hope that she'd like it.

I don't see how there's any reason how she wouldn't. I can't remember when I encountered your music first. I think it was maybe Jamison [Harvey]'s blog Flea Market Funk. I think he wrote about Golden Days. I had never heard you, but I saw the title of the project and I'm like, oh, okay. I'm expecting this to be something soulful oriented, because a) it's on Jamison's blog and b) it's titled after my favorite Erykah Badu record. I think it's, at least in my experience, provided a window in to where it really peaked to my interest. Just that whole era of experimentation was so magical. I mean, Voodoo is probably a desert island record for me.

That record is 2000, isn't it? It was out?

Yep.

There's another record that year, which probably is my desert island. It's Lewis Taylor's and actually, no Voodoo is 2000. That was partly… Lewis Taylor's original record from '96.

And I don't know this record very well.

Oh, I'm loving this moment then. I'm loving giving you this. Okay. Now, that album is an album that's up there for me, that is with whatever the Voodoos or the What's Going Ons of this era. And that's a British soul musician who is kind of somewhere between Marvin Gaye and Jimmy Hendrix. He's a burning guitar player, absolutely burning guitar player, amazing singer. Really dark kind of dark twisting compositions. Just check it out, live with it, man. It's a really, really good record.

D'Angelo actually called him to work with him, I think around 2000, because apparently after D'Angelo dropped Brown Sugar or between Brown Sugar and Voodoo, that was on the tour bus on rotation. So he got him over, flew him over to New York, and, for whatever reason, Lewis Taylor took off back home. D'Angelo was like a no-show at the studio and it never happened. It could have been a beautiful thing. There are many stories, kind of testifying to Lewis Taylor's state of mind being less-than-stable.

He played the Roseland Ballroom and I think it was just after he'd played it. He was going to go and do a meet-and-greet and he just dropped his guitar and said to the guy side of the stage, "I have nothing in common with these people" and just took a taxi to the airport and retired from that moment. So he's quite an enigmatic figure.

Sounds like it.

Definitely worth checking out. Yeah. That 1996 record, self-titled on island. That's the one.

I am going to go do that right now. Andy, it has been such a pleasure getting to know you over the course of this morning. Just keep making quality music. It is a boon to my spirit and I know a lot of my listeners as well. The new record is just terrific. Cure the Jones is out April 1st.

And one last thing that we'll be over, hopefully in September, October, I think time to play some shows in the states finally.

Oh, fantastic.

I think initially we want to hit both coasts and then come back and do something a bit more substantial after that.

Well, keep us posted. Where can people find more about the band, about the project, about the music?

Mama's gun.co.uk. That's the one. Yeah, we'll be updating that with a brand new website in the coming days, but everything should be there in terms of releases and music and stuff.

Fantastic. Andy, it has been such a pleasure. Great to get to know you.

Likewise.