Sometimes Mondays need a little extra energy...

​A belated happy birthday to photographer Douglas Opbroek. Here he is on stage with us in Shreveport, LA giving Fred some help with the drums.

Fred: What we try to do with the show is to let people know that it’s OK to lose your mind. It’s OK to be just as silly as you want to be. There aren’t many places in the world these days that allow you to do that. 

​Running through sound check at The Funky Biscuit in Boca Raton, Florida. Can't wait for tonight! Are you with me?!

Fred: It is important to me to put out a positive vibe during our shows. That's something I do for me as much as for everybody else. Ultimately it is up to each person in the audience if they want to run with that idea. It's not up to me. It's up to them. I'm not looking to save the world. But if I am going to do this, I want to put out a constructive vibe. 

John Thomas: I will never forget my mom and dad coming to our soundcheck at "Memphis in May," which is a big concert series down in the lower part of the river. My mom was sitting in a lawn chair outside our trailer. I came off the stage after soundcheck and saw my mom talking to this gentlemen. After a bit he went back to his own trailer. I said, "Mom, do you know who that was?" 

She said, "No." 

"That was Little Richard." 

"Okay." 

I said, "Well, what was he saying to you?" 

"Oh, he was the nicest man. He was so sweet. He asked where I was from…" 

Just this casual conversation. She had no clue at all.

Matt: Sometimes during recording sessions Fred will come into the room, hear what I am playing, and be like "Nope. Don't like it… Wait. Do it again. Do it a third time. All right, I like it. Let's try it."

Fred: I have always envisioned myself as a weird cross between a blues singer and a Broadway singer. I figured, why not follow those two disparate ends and see where it leads? I tend to lean a little more towards bluesier Broadway stuff, as opposed to traditional rock singing, simply because it's more natural to me. It's what I feel. 

I just run with it and see where it goes. It has led to some interesting stuff the last few years, songs like “Oh, Toulouse” and “Too Many Jennys.” With the “GO!” album, there were the songs “Dare” and “How Would You Feel?"

I love singing that way. It's very natural to me. And when you sing that way for a while, you feel pretty good afterwards. 

Fred: I was diving back into some of my blues roots. Those really took hold for me for a number of years and I really liked where a lot of the stuff was going. I did an EP with this guy, Tony Pasko. He did the music for “Duck Dynasty,” “Shark Week,” all those types of TV shows. It turned out he and I were living in the same small town at the same time. By chance we hooked up and we hit it off really well. We did a whole EP together. We had a song called “Lord Watch Over Me.” It is going to be used as the theme song for a TV show called “Being Martelli.” The song is really swampy and I got to explore a little more of my blues side. I really enjoy that. Being from Louisiana and the South, that stuff is kind of in your DNA.

“For the song ’Blues At Bay,’ how did you get that guitar sound that is in the beginning of the recorded version? It is a little different from the guitars on any other Cowboy Mouth songs.”

Fred: I was messing around with tunings on my Danelectro guitar. I recorded that around the same time that I did that cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” I was really into those sounds.