Interview: Warren Haynes

If you were to look up the phrase “a rolling stone gathers not moss,” it would be fair to expect a picture of Warren Haynes looking back at you. The former Allman Brothers Band guitarist and founding member of jam-band stalwarts Gov’t Mule is the epitome of a man keeping multiple plates spinning.

Haynes and the Mule are starting the first of two separate tours that will take up the remainder of this year. First up is the Kicking in Your Stall summer headlining tour. As is the case with every Mule tour, the set list is a moving target.

“With every show being different, we’re just going to be covering a lot of ground from the beginning until now,” Haynes said in an early July interview. “We never know until a couple of days before the show what we’re going to play. Every show is different than the night before. We try to do something from each different period of Mule. We’ve been digging back and doing a lot of old stuff recently, which has been fun, and some stuff from the past couple of albums as well. You just never know.”

Once Kicking in Your Stall wraps up at the end of August, Haynes and his bandmates - Matt Abts (drums), Danny Louis (keyboards/guitar/backing vocals) and Kevin Scott (bass) -- will switch gears to co-headline the Dreaming the Same Dream tour with old friend Ziggy Marley. The 16-date jaunt launches in New York City on September 23. Haynes’ relationship with Marley dates back roughly 15 years and for the former, he’s surprised this live music jaunt hadn’t happened sooner.

“Ziggy and I have been friends for a long time,” Haynes said. “We’ve played together before and he sat in with the Allman Brothers and did a version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ out in Los Angeles and it was fantastic.”

He added, “We actually wrote a couple of songs together, one of which is ‘Dreaming the Same Dream,’ that I did on my ‘Live at the Moody Theater’ live release. There’s never been a studio version of it, but there’s been a live version of it. That seemed like an appropriate title for this tour. It’s basically co-headlining in the way that each band is doing an equal set length. I think all or most of the shows are Gov’t Mule closing, but we’re both playing the same amount of time, which will be great.”

As an additional bonus on the Dreaming the Same Dream tour, English singer-songwriter Yola is playing a DJ set. Having only recently met Yola during the Gov’t Mule annual New Year’s Eve gigs at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre, the chance to have the leather-lunged vocalist be part of Dreaming the Same Dream was a no-brainer for Haynes.

“Having Yola come out with us just got brought up and everybody thought it was a great idea,” Hayne explained. “She joined Gov’t Mule for our New Year’s shows at the Beacon. She sang ‘Black Dog’ by Led Zeppelin and ‘Me and Bobby McGee,’ the Janis Joplin version at our New Year’s Eve set. She’s fantastic. She’s kind of been on our radar and vice versa.”

As if the Asheville, NC native didn’t have enough going on, Haynes is also prepping for the release of “Dreams & Songs” in September. This 16-track collection is a collaboration he recorded with the 64-piece Asheville Symphony Orchestra and showcases material from throughout Haynes’ work as a solo artist in addition to music he’s cut with The Allman Brothers Band, Gov’t Mule, The Dead and more. The inspiration came from Haynes’ participation in a prior project that he initially had some skepticism about.

“This all started years ago when I got asked to do the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration,” Haynes recalled. “I got a call from the Jerry Garcia estate that they had this idea of doing Jerry’s music with a symphony and they wanted to know if I wanted to be the first person to be the featured artist. I said I’d love to do it and I did a couple of tours like that. It was my first time working with an orchestra.”

He added, “I’m not somebody who normally is a big fan of marrying rock music and orchestral music together. I think it’s a song-by-song issue. But I’ve kind of gotten bitten by the bug a little bit and thought it would be fun to do a retrospective of the past 30 or 35 years of my career -- some Allman Brothers songs, some Gov’t Mule songs, some songs from my solo records and some Grateful Dead songs. It’s just like a once-in-a-career retrospective, but it’s a different slant because it’s all stuff with the symphony and I wanted to choose songs that I felt worked really well with the symphony.

Recorded in 2019, the pandemic threw a monkey-wrench into this singular project

“Initially, it was going to be a studio recording, but we couldn’t accommodate the band and the entire symphony,” Haynes recalled. “Don Was, who produced the record, came up with the idea of doing it live. And I’m glad we did. Being able to do it in my hometown of Asheville at the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, which is the site of what used to be Municipal Auditorium when I was growing up, where I saw all my first concerts [was special]. And of course, having Oteil [Burbridge], John Medeski, Jeff Sipe, Greg Osby, Jasmine Muhammad and Edwin McCain be part of this was on my wish list and it all came together.”

While next year will see Haynes bringing the Dreams & Songs Symphonic Experience to Nashville for a pair of dates at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in March, he’s fully focused now on the upcoming live dates, which include another couple of concert bill pairings.

“We’re going to be playing a lot of shows with Joe Bonamassa and one show with JJ Grey & Mofro, along with a lot of shows on our own during the summer tour,” he said. “It’s going to be a busy year covering a lot of ground, but we’re excited. The band feels fantastic right now and everybody is having a great time.”