From their early roots, circa 1988, playing house parties at Louisiana State University, Better Than Ezra have made their mark on the music world in a major way having occupied spots on Billboard’s “100 Greatest Alternative Songs of All Time” and “100 Greatest Alternative Artists of All Time.” In May, the New Orleans quartet, founded by Kevin Griffin [lead vocals, guitar, piano] and Tom Drummond [bass, backing vocals] released their tenth studio album ‘Super Magick’ which was their first full-length project in a decade.
As a songwriter, Griffin has written songs recorded by artists including Blondie, Meat Loaf, Train, Barenaked Ladies, Chase Rice, Dierks Bentley, Christina Perri, Sugarland, James Blunt and Tigirlily Gold’s recent smash ‘Shoot Tequila’ topping off this very impressive list. However, in addition to being a highly sought after co-writer, along with recording and touring with Better Than Ezra, Griffin co-founded the two-day Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival taking place in Franklin, Tennessee which this year sees NEEDTOBREATHE, Hozier, Dave Matthews Band and Noah Kahan headline this year’s event. To top it all off, Kevin Griffin will return to London for the first time in 29 years for his own show at Bush Hall on Thursday 4th July (tickets available HERE) so we spent some time with him over Zoom to talk about the new Better Than Ezra album, Pilgrimage Festival and his long awaited return to play in the British capital. “I haven’t played London in over twenty years, in the meantime I’ve toured all over, written songs for bands and a lot of country artists, most recently Tigirlily Gold with their hit ‘Shoot Tequila’. I’m on a two week vacation right now and I’m actually in Ibiza right now then will be in London so I figured why don’t I do a show at the end of it as it had been too long since I played a show in the UK.”
Whilst he hadn’t played shows on this side of the Atlantic for a long time, trips across the pond have been fairly regular for him as a holiday destination along with work trips to write with artists over here including James Blunt. Kevin then opened the door to my favourite topic of conversation when he said that his last visit to our capital was to see his beloved New Orleans Saints play the Minnesota Vikings at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium. His own story started in Atlanta and now finds himself in Franklin, Tennessee with time spent in New Orleans and also in Los Angeles, so as a big pro football fan myself I am always interested where people’s allegiance lies. “I was born in Atlanta, Georgia but in second grade I moved to Louisiana, so my formative years were all in Louisiana and that’s when I became a Saints fan. Living in New Orleans all of the way through the nineties until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I got to know the back office of the Saints. New Orleans is a very small pond, so if you’re in the music industry or high profile you’re going to know everybody so I got to know Coach (Sean) Payton and in 2010, with my band Better Than Ezra, we played the victory party for the Saints in Miami, so that’s my longwinded answer of saying yes I am a Saints fan.” After a fun discussion around the growth of not just the NFL but international expansion of sport in general, we got back on track and to the music industry by talking about how he came about to be working with two sisters from North Dakota seeing as he had already brought up writing ‘Shoot Tequila’ with Tigirlily Gold. Kevin explained how songwriters in Nashville generally have a writer’s rep if they have a publisher publisher, who writers advise their availability for the next couple of months and they give access to their calendar, then people appear in there to write with where one day Krista and Kendra appeared, then the first song that they wrote together at his studio in Franklin, Tennessee was ‘Shoot Tequila’.
“That first day I had a cigar box guitar, which is exactly what it sounds like, it is a cigar box with a crude, skinny neck and three strings tuned to an Open D chord, the strings are really high off the fret board but you don’t use a slide, you just jam on it so it’s almost kind of a novelty item but everything sounds like things that The black Keys or Jack White would do. It's a great way to start a song because the way that you play it, everything has to have a kind of stomp like ‘Shoot Tequila’ does. I started playing this kind of loop, this riff and the girls just started singing and that’s how it began, so I was like Oh my God, hit record!”
Kevin’s relationship with the Slaubaugh sisters continued beyond the writing of ‘Shoot Tequila’ and as the song broke into the Top 40, Tigirlily Gold played at the festival which he curates in Franklin, Tennessee. “Those girls are everything that you want when you work with an artist, just amazing people, driven, great manners and professional because when you work with somebody in the music business, you have great experiences and experiences that aren’t as great which often is due to lack of professionalism and all of the intangibles but they have everything that you look for in an artist and as a result you just cheer for them.” Pilgrimage Festival takes place during late September in The Park at Harlinsdale in Franklin, Tennessee and has previously seen the likes of Justin Timberlake, Chris Stapleton, The Black Keys, Maren Morris, Zach Bryan, Kacey Musgraves, Lionel Richie, Keith Urban, The Foo Fighters, The Killers, Beck and Sheryl Crow so covers quite a diverse spectrum of musical genres on a festival site that utilises a beautiful space just south of Nashville. A lot of his inspiration for the festival came from living in New Orleans for sixteen years and being a regular attendee of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival where he really connected with that event being multi genre but also celebrate the best culture, food, artisans and merchants of the Gulf Coast. “When I moved to Franklin, Tennessee in 2010, I took a run one day and found myself out at this two hundred and fifty acre Tennessee walking horse farm with buildings on the historic register, where I thought to myself wait, there’s no festival here? Someone is about to do it and it is going to be me! I just knew it, so a couple of my buddies from Louisiana decided we would do a festival where we would celebrate the best of Nashville and middle Tennessee like what Jazz Fest is to New Orleans where the music was going to be diverse and look like everybody’s playlist. We don’t just listen to one thing, everybody’s playlist is all over the place so that’s what we do and we have had a lot of success.”
In addition to this years headliners, there are plenty of names from the world of country and Americana that UK audiences are very familiar with including Alison Russell, Lukas Nelson, Willi Carlisle, Charlie Worsham and The Cadillac Three but the real beauty of any festival is that people may be attending because they are a Noah Kahan fan (which right now I think is anyone on the planet that listens to music from the Western world right now) but his set is not until later in the day so there is the opportunity to discover an array of artists that are completely new to them like in the instance of this year’s Pilgrimage Festival could be someone like Grace Bowers, who is the name on the lips of everyone I know in Music City as being the most exciting emerging talent in Nashville for a long time. “I think the thing that threads it all together, well there’s a few things. One of them is that regardless of whether they are pop, rock, country, southern gospel, alternative or Americana, there has to be authenticity. Wherever they are in the genre, they have to just be good and they have got to bring it. The next thing is that you build a trust and rapport, when you put on a festival, ideally after the first couple of years, the people who come to your festival know that even if they don’t know a name like Myles Smith, who is a British artist that is playing or if people don’t know The Cadillac Three, you know that the bands that they book for this are always good. Even if I don’t know the name, I know they are going to be good so I’m going to check them out. I think authenticity is the big thing but also knowing that it is always curated well and this year won’t be an exception.”
The way Kevin talked about the ambience and the aesthetic of the festival along with the line-up formation and the overall values, Black Deer Festival which takes place each June down in Royal Tunbridge Wells would be our most similar festival but the one difference between Pilgrimage and events that we are familiar with in the United Kingdom and other large events in the United States is that the music finishes slightly earlier than many others. This is similar to Jazz Fest in New Orleans where the programme finishes at half past seven, whilst Pilgrimage ceases at half past eight on the Sunday but recent incarnations have seen the Saturday night conclude at ten o’clock which was a decision taken to allow time for more artists to play but with these earlier finishes, it allows another objective of the festival to be achieved. “We also wanted to showcase Franklin, Tennessee as one of the headliners. After you are done at the festival, shower up and head into the town to the restaurants and the great live music venues in Franklin.” One of the perks to running a festival when you make music yourself is that you may as well take advantage of the fact that you put the work in so if the people want you to play it would be rude not to and Better Than Ezra have now become a fixture in the events annual line-up. “In year one, we didn’t play because I wasn’t going to give anybody ammunition to be like hey, remember that band from the nineties, well the singer started a festival and guess who’s playing ha ha. I just didn’t want it because it wasn’t about that but after year one, everybody was like why are you not playing your own festival? Are you crazy? People want to see Better Than Ezra, you need to be playing your own festival! So, finally I thought you know what, you’re right and every year when I ask my partners if they think we need to take a break, they say shut up, you’re always playing this festival! One thing I do is, I’m very amenable so if an artist comes on the bill last minute and they need to be on Sunday in your time slot, it’s sure move us to Saturday.”
Whilst Better Than Ezra are playing the festival every year, this year’s event will be slightly different as last month the band released ‘Super Magick’ which is their first full length project in ten years so presents their first opportunity to perform new music on the festival stage. “It’s really cool, each year we try to top ourselves with some special guests and this year we have got something up our sleeves where we are going to have somebody join us and play those new songs. I do so many things in music, whether it is a festival or a published artist or write with other artists, produce other artists that suddenly ten years went by and my own band hadn’t put a record out so now that we are playing new music, I’m never letting that happen again. It has to be about the music which it always was, it’s about enjoying the process of making music, recording it and seeing your fans faces light up when they hear new music so I think that was in play in the gumbo of reasons why it took so long but at any rate here it is.”
A number of these new Better Than Ezra songs are intended to be performed at his solo show at Bush Hall along with songs that he has written for other people so will be as he describes “a hodge podge of Better Than Ezra songs, I’ll probably play ‘Shoot Tequila’ and I’ll do ‘Stuck Like Glue’ which Sugarland recorded too.” ‘Stuck Like Glue’ is the other song in his writing catalogue that is most prominent to contemporary country music fans, where Shy Carter was the other co-writer (along with the duo’s Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush) leaving his very distinct style in the song. “It’s definitely got Shy all over it, that was me playing those guitar chords and you listen to the beginning of that song where it is the human beatbox mish mash that is like Bobby McFerrin with overalls on and we built that together. I got Shy on the microphone and he would spit out some stuff that was so amazing then we went on the harmonies and the melodies but that was definitely a song that neither of us could have written by ourselves, that was a great collaboration.”
After a nice relaxing break on the White Isle, Kevin Griffin (who assured me he was on the north side of the island, where it is super chilled and quiet, opposed to the bright lights of the electronic music capital of the world in San Antonio) plays his first London show in 29 years on Thursday 4th July 2024 at Bush Hall and last remaining tickets are available HERE.
The new album ‘Super Magick’ from Better Than Ezra is out now via Round Hill Records and is available HERE whilst you can find details of the bands upcoming US tour dates on their WEBSITE or keep up to date with them socially on INSTAGRAMTWITTER & FACEBOOK. The tenth anniversary of the Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival takes place across September 28th and 29th in Franklin, Tennessee which you can find the full line-up and ticket information on their WEBSITE and on INSTAGRAMTWITTERFACEBOOK.