July 25: Blacktop Mojo circling for a landing at Wally’s aka ‘rock’n’roll haven’

Anyone who knows about Wally’s in Hampton Beach knows that it’s a haven for rock’n’roll. The venue is legendary for the amount of established talent the place has had grace its stage and they’re also never afraid to give reputable up and comers the spotlight for an evening. A band that’s a close example of the latter is Blacktop Mojo, who hail from Palestine, Texas. The quintet of lead vocalist Matt James, drummer Nathan Gillis, bassist Matt Curtis and guitarists Malcolm Booher & Ryan Kiefer have a cohesive sound that incorporates elements of blues, country, heavy metal and ‘90s alternative. They’re going to be performing at Wally’s on July 25 with the show starting at 8 p.m.

Gillis and I had a talk ahead of the gig about the band’s latest album that came out a few months ago, being involved in the business side of things and looking forward to coming back to the New England region.

IF YOU GO

Wally’s

July 25/8 p.m.

144 Ashworth Ave., Hampton, NH

Rob Duguay: Back on April 5th, Blacktop Mojo released their fifth studio album “Pollen,” so what was the songwriting and recording process like for it? Did you guys work with a producer in a studio or did you do all of it yourselves?

Nathan Gillis: Almost from day one of recording music, I guess you could call it professionally but that might be a bit too polite to ourselves, but I knew one guy who had a lot of experience with studio stuff and engineering and he kind of knew what he was doing. He’s a guy that I’ve known off and on, we’ve never been best buddies but we’ve always got along and I’ve always liked the guy but we’ve always been so busy. I called up Phil Moseley, who has basically been our producer ever since and he’s kind of been like our sixth member of the band. It’s been a great journey with him, he’s grown with us and when we first got started, we didn’t have a clue. We knew a little bit but there were some simple missteps that we would have probably otherwise made that he corrected from the beginning. As the band has gone along and as we’ve added a couple of members, the knowledge of theory and a bunch of little simple things has gotten better.

Phil has become more of a traditional type of producer where he’ll see what we’re doing and he’ll make suggestions for trying something different, and then we would expound on that a bit. He’s kind of been with us the whole time and he’s produced every record that we’ve done to this point. Like I said, he’s almost like another member of the band and one of the notable things that’s just interesting, I’ve kind of joked with him about it, is that through the years we’ve become really good friends with Nathan Hunt from Shaman’s Harvest. That has created a space where “Rise” off of the album became the first collaboration we had ever done and he ended up hanging around the studio with us for almost the whole record. I told him that he should get executive producer or co-producer credits, but we were hanging out after being in the studio and they started writing the song.

It turned into what “Rise” was and when they were writing that song, it was one of Malcolm [Booher]’s riffs, Nathan started working on it and then Matt [James] walked in to start working on it as well. When they started singing together, we were like “Holy crap!” and these harmonies started happening, it was kind of crazy. Because of all of that happening, that led to our first ever studio collaboration and it was such an organic thing. It wasn’t just “Hey, let’s do a collaboration” with somebody who’s a friend of ours, they wrote that song together. We weren’t going to force anything, so I’m really proud of that song.

Not because I had anything to do with it, I was just sitting there and playing some drums on it, but we didn’t do something just to do it. We were able to attach a guy that we respect from a band that we love outside of being friends and it wasn’t a business decision. We did something that we thought was cool and we wrote this song together, which made sense to do this collaboration.

RD: It’s cool that it worked out that way. What inspired the album cover being a photo of someone sitting in a hot rod smoking a cigarette? Did you get the car from a friend or is the car owed by one of you guys?

NG: It’s funny, I actually got the full story about that car the other day. I handle various things, Matt and I work a lot together on dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on stuff for the band and we’ve done it independently. Matt’s really good at the business side of things, but most of the time he wants me to talk to people as far as handling business, managing stuff and everything else. We kind of took on these roles early on and when it comes to the creative direction and a lot of stuff like that, especially visuals, Matt is always wanting to head that kind of stuff up. He knew what he needed and he got what he needed, which is one of the reasons why I didn’t get the story on the car specifically until recently when I actually ended up talking to the guy who owned the car.

The guy who owns the car is this guy named Bill and we’ve done so much stuff with him through the years. Whether it was merchandise or whether it was radio promotion stuff, we’ve shipped thousands and thousands of things through him and his business that he’s had in town through the years. He’s become a friend of ours, but I didn’t realize that it was his car. When we were making the record, I was on the phone with Matt and where we live in East Texas pollen was just covering everything. There’s just pollen everywhere and everything is yellow, so I just told him that we should name the record “Pollen” because it’s all over the place and some people are allergic to it, so it was kind of a joke.

I didn’t hate the idea and Matt was like “Yeah, we should do that.” He went the bee route and the other instances, uses and signs of pollen in general. He had an idea for the cover, the artwork and everything else, which he tied altogether in his brain with some of the lyrical content in some of the songs. A friend of ours named Kelsey Anderson who does photography, she got together with him, they just put it together and they made it happen. The car was interesting because I found out the other day that it sat for five years, it’s been auctioned off and the guy selling it through the auction service or whatever wasn’t even positive what motor was in the car. I think it’s a ‘69 Oldsmobile 442, it was in immaculate condition and Bill got it for half of what it was worth.

It was a cool little side note for me and I didn’t even know that it was Bill’s car. I know him very well and I had no idea that we used his car for the cover art on the new album.

RD: I like the photo a lot, I think it looks cool. The music video for the single “As The Light Fades” off of the album pretty much depicts a giant backwoods party with some off-road driving, playing songs by the campfire and other things. How did the making of the video come about?

NG: We are blessed that most of us are close with our families individually. Our families have supported us really well through the years and our families have even gotten kind of close. They’ve been around each other a lot and it really is kind of one big family, especially my family and Matt’s family. We’re all in East Texas and not everybody’s families are as close as mine and Matt’s, we all call Matt’s grandparents grandma and grandpa. They’re amazing, they’ve been so sweet to us and they’ve helped us out so much.

Matt had an uncle pass away in 2019 or 2020 and I just remember that we were on tour out on the West Coast and when we first started playing shows in Houston, we would stay with his aunt and uncle. He died unexpectedly, it was kind of out of the blue and I started thinking about that song. According to my best recollection of talking to Matt specifically about the lyrics is that the song is talking about going through a life when you’re a kid. You’re riding your bike around on the street and when the street lights come on then it’s time to go home. Into your adolescence and into your teenage years and high school years, you’re sneaking out, you’re dating and you get that first infatuation.

The bridge talks about being on your deathbed after so much life being lived and up until a couple years ago, nobody in the band had kids. Then in 2022, three of us had kids, so we were looking at it like we had all these stages of life happening right in front of us with our families, with our parents, with our grandparents and with everything that we’ve gone through. I thought it would be really cool to almost do a time capsule with our families, with our kids and with all the people who have been close to us and supported us. I figured the best way would be to get all of us in a video together doing what we would do on a weekend if we had the time and the ability. Let’s make it a party that we can enjoy while getting together and hanging out.

I kept thinking that I wished Matt’s uncle was still around because he was a blast and I wished that he’d been there for it. I really thought it was cool to have that snapshot of our families in the event that in a few years we lose somebody unexpectedly again. We’d always have that to look back on as a time capsule and with that thought process, that was why we dedicated it to Matt’s uncle at the end of the video there. I thought it was a really cool way of remembering him a little bit and it was the first video we ever made where I said “I don’t care if anybody likes this, this is for us”, so that’s the story about the video.

RD: It’s great that you were able to pay tribute to him with the video and have it be a sentimental thing. You mentioned earlier about how you help handle the business aspect of the band, which is through Cuhmon Entertainment, which is also Blacktop Mojo’s record label. Do you find yourself scheduling things out a lot and doing a lot of work on the road so you don’t overwhelm yourself?

NG: If you got the answer for that, please let me know. It’s a lot of stress, a lot of phone calls and a lot of juggling. Even with being a fairly new parent still, my daughter just turned two and she’s my first child. It’s funny with all the phases and stages you go through in life with the different challenges and the great stuff that happens and everything else. One way or another, there’s always a point man in the band.

I have nothing bad to say about the management we had in the past and we’ve had two really good managers through the years, but there was a real direction issue. There was a lot of burnout that was happening and there were some philosophical differences between the label and the band when it came to how we were going to reach our goals. There was a lot of wasted effort and we were in danger of burning ourselves out, so a lot of people had told me, including our previous managers, that I was cut out to be a manager. I have a lot of respect for our last manager, but ultimately he wasn’t the right fit for us at the helm anymore and all the guys asked if I wanted to give it a shot to see how it goes. It’s actually gone pretty well and it can always be better, but it has been better in most ways.

RD: That’s fantastic. What are your thoughts on coming up to Wally’s? With Blacktop Mojo being from Texas, do you guys play New England that often?

NG: We love Wally’s. This will probably be our third or fourth time headlining there and the first time we went there we opened for Black Stone Cherry and we just had a blast. We love the venue and we love the beef tips up there that they serve. They’re always really kind to us, they always take good care of us and they have good production with a good sound system. It’s a good stage, they give us a chance and that’s really all we want as a band. There’s enough room for us to move around a little bit while making it a jovial experience for people and we make sure to circle Wally’s when we’re anywhere near that area.

We got some really good friends up there that we’ve made through the years and when we stop in we’ll stay at their house for a day and just chill. We love it out there and we’re really starting to enjoy the trips out to New England. We’ve made a lot of friends and we love playing spots like Wally’s.