OFFICIAL WEBSITE ARTIST PAGE Twenty years after the release of their self-titled debut and eight years since their last live performance together, the original lineup of G. Love & Special Sauce return with their first album in nearly a decade. Built on the trio’s signature hip-hop blues sound, Sugar finds vocalist/guitarist/harmonica player G. Love (aka Garrett Dutton), upright bassist James “Jimi Jazz” Prescott, and drummer Jeffrey “The Houseman” Clemens breathing new life into their groove-heavy, Chicago-blues-infused brand of stripped-down rock & roll. “The goal for the album was to make it really raw and immediate, with live takes and live vocals and everybody playing so that it all comes together in that intangible way,” says G. Love. “That’s what our music is all about.”
Recorded mainly at Brushfire Records’ “Solar Powered Plastic Plant” studio in Los Angeles, Sugar captures the unstoppable energy of a band who got their start in Boston bars in the early ‘90s and still play up to 150 shows a year. “We wanted to take it back to the old-school vibe of the first record, those rich, warm sounds from when we were rocking small clubs and going on that acoustic feeling,” says Prescott. To deepen that dynamic and push their sound into new directions, G. Love & Special Sauce called in guest musicians like Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo (who appears on three of the album’s tracks), soul/R&B singer/songwriter Marc Broussard, and the legendary vocalist Merry Clayton (best known for her duet with Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”). “Recording at Brushfire was one of those super-magical sessions—it just felt right and really true to the style of this band,” notes G. Love, who also recorded several of Sugar’s tracks in Seattle with Clemens and bassist Timo Shanko.
While most of the first songs G. Love penned for Sugar were written in response to a recent breakup, the album ended up morphing into a gritty but joyful look at the thrill and grind of getting by as a musician. At the album’s heart is the swaggering title track, which fuses Elmore James-inspired slide licks with big and bouncy hip-hop beats. That mood is matched on tracks like “Good Life” (a Bo Diddley-style jam powered by the fiery guitar work of David Hidalgo), “Saturday Night” (a steamy serenade to New York City, laced with sultry vocals by Alabama-bred folk/soul singer/songwriter Kristy Lee), and “Weekend Dance” (an all-out party anthem fueled by sweet and smoldering horns, co-written by Eric Krasno and featuring rapper Shamarr Allen). Meanwhile, “Too Much Month” serves as a brilliantly bittersweet ode to being broke (“I got too much month for the end of my money/And not enough money for the end of the month”), and “Nite Life” slyly warns of the dangers of rock & roll living in its groove-laden take on John Lee Hooker’s “Whiskey and Wimmin.”
