Gov't Mule guitarist Warren Haynes seems to be everywhere these days. He took time out of his busy schedule to talk to Jambands.com about the new Gov't Mule album, his philosophy on improvisation and playing with Phil Lesh, among other things.

JW: You have a new studio album, Life Before Insanity. What were you trying to achieve when you went into the studio?

WH: Well, with the first CD, we were really trying to capture the band in the live setting. We just wanted that to be like a snapshot of a power trio. Then, by the time that we got to Dose, we wanted to experiment a little more and overdub a little more and utilize a little more production, but not much. It was our design all along for the third album to have a lot more production and maybe change directions more and just be more versatile than anything we had done in the past. I felt like by the time we got to the third record, it was OK for it to be a bonafide studio release so to speak. We were trying to include all the different colors that maybe we haven't painted in, in the past. You know, we were just trying to include all of the different things that make up Gov't Mule. We're growing all the time and at the same time, we want to be true to ourselves and to our roots, but we have so many different influences that we're just trying to utilize all of them. I think the new record is the most varied record that we've made so far. I like the fact that there are more guests on it and that there's more instrumentation and that sort of thing.

JW: Speaking of guests, you've played with so many different musicians. The new album features appearances by Johnny Neel and Ben Harper. How did you decide which guests you wanted to have on the album? Did you have them in mind when you wrote the songs?

WH: Well, on some of the songs, I just knew that we wanted keyboards on them. Some of them, when they were written kind of cried out to have keyboards and Johnny (Neel) seemed to be the obvious choice. You know, we know so many great keyboard players. We've worked with Bernie Worrell, with Danny Lewis, with Mo Denim, with Chuck Leavell, Dan Matrozo and all these great keyboard players. Johnny is someone that we had not worked with since I guess '91, when Johnny left the Allman Brothers. In the back in all of our minds, we knew we wanted to work with Johnny again and he's such a great harmony singer as well as a lead vocalist, but it was kind of an obvious choice to bring Johnny in to play keyboards and sing some harmony. It just kind of brought us back together. It was a nice feeling.

In the case of Ben Harper, I knew when I wrote "Lay Your Burden Down" that I wanted it to have three-part harmony, which is something we had never had on any Gov't Mule record previously. On the H.O.R.D.E. Tour, we all became friends with Ben and all the guys in his band and we jammed together a few times and kind of just knew that in the back of our minds we wanted to do something together. We didn't know what. While we were in the studio doing "Lay Your Burden Down," I thought that Ben Harper would be great on it, so I called him and asked him and he was like "yeah, I'll be there." So, that kind of was a decision made after the fact, although I knew that I wanted multiple voices and multiple instrumentation to be added to that song. Hook Herrera, who played harmonica on our first record, on the song "Left Toast Groovies," played harmonica on two songs on the new record, which was a nice addition as well.

JW: Are there plans to invite any of these musicians to play with you on the upcoming tour?

WH: Yeah, they're all invited, all the time. Actually, Ben is going to come out for a few days and join us and we're hoping that's going to be right towards the beginning of the tour. I think he's probably going to do the Irving Plaza shows and maybe two or three more. Johnny Neel is going to come out for a week or two and join us. Hopefully Hook will be able to make it as well. You know, we're trying to bring as many of our musical friends into the fold as possible, but meanwhile we want to keep the trio thing alive. We play such long shows that we can do 90-minute shows as a trio and an hour with a special guest and still, that satisfies all the different tastes, you know? We love the trio format and we love the space that the trio utilizes and the freedom that it presents you, but we also love bringing our friends into the fold and jamming with as many of our friends who are great musicians as possible. So it's kind of like the best of both worlds. These days, especially since we released Live With a Little Help From Our Friends, and it has all the guests on it, it's kind of part of our motif. From this point forward, although we don't want to permanently expand to become a quartet or a quintet or anything, we do want to continue to augment the trio where we see fit. It's a lot of fun for us to do both.

JW: Is that going to be a surprise to fans going to the shows, or will you announce the guests ahead of time?

WH: In some cases, we'll announce it ahead of time and in some cases we'll just leak the word out. It will be a word-of-mouth kind of thing. With Ben Harper, we're not sure yet whether we're going to be able to advertise that Ben's going to be there, but we're definitely going to be able to spread the word. In the case of Johnny Neel, he'll come out for a week or two at a time and so we'll put up on our website how many dates Johnny's going to do with us and where it's possible. We'll even try to sneak him into the adds. There are so many guests at this point that we're trying to work with and it's a lot of coordination. There's definitely a lot of coordination involved, but we really enjoy doing that and so it's worth the effort.

JW: In addition to playing with all of the guests that join you and Gov't Mule on stage, you are someone who sits in with so a lot different bands. Some well-known musicians don't come out and show their face as much, but you seem to show up everywhere to jam with other players.

WH: Well, it's something that I really enjoy, playing in all different musical contexts. It's a good learning experience. It's a way to get yourself out of any rut that you might be in. It's definitely a way to express yourself in a context outside of the norm or outside of your own vehicle. I've always been enamored with that whole concept, going back to the first H.O.R.D.E. Tour that we did together, in I guess '94, even '93. The Allman Brothers did a few H.O.R.D.E. shows in '93 and then we headlined the H.O.R.D.E. in '94 and at one time or another, I would find myself on stage with every band out there. To me, it's just so much fun, you know? When I get on stage with a group of musicians who know what they're doing, even if I don't know what I'm doing, I can just kind of float along on top of what they're doing and it still sounds cool. It still sounds somewhat rehearsed, provided that everyone else is in tune with the arrangement and all that kind of stuff. It's the same with Gov't Mule. If we bring someone like Bernie Worrell, Chuck Leavell, Derek Trucks, Marc Ford, Jimmy Herring or any of these numerous guests from time to time, sometimes they might not even know the song. But as long as the three of us know the song, than they can just sort of follow along and lay out when they don't know what's happening. The spontaneity is part of the beauty. A lot of beautiful accidents happen in those situations and things happen that you couldn't rehearse and that's really the part that we get off on.

JW: Can you talk a little bit about your experience playing with Phil Lesh? I read that you had said there was a big difference between rehearsing with him and rehearsing with the Allman Brothers.

WH: Playing with Phil was a mind-opening experience in a few different ways. I thought I was really open-minded about what music is and can be, until I played with him and realized that in Phil's mind, there's nothing you can play that's wrong. We're all up there improvising and wherever it goes, is where it goes. There's no pressure for it to it to be good or bad or right or wrong. We're all just playing music for the right reasons. That's pure. You know, that's the real deal. I really love that and although all of us share that attitude and that approach to playing music, he definitely maintains that approach to about the highest degree I've ever seen. That's a beautiful thing, you know, cause you get caught up in thinking about wrong notes and right notes and right chords and when you should come in and when you should lay out and all that kind of stuff. When you strip it down, it's just music. Music is a way of conveying your emotions and that's the way you feel at the time and it shouldn't really have all of the pressures of modern society. It should be stripped down to what it was in its initial form, which is communication.

I also love the way Phil's brain works, musically. His brain works differently than any musician, especially any bass player that I've ever worked with. He'll modulate in the middle of someone else's solo and if you're using your ear, you can go with him and it's a beautiful thing. If you're not paying attention and you don't go with him, it can still be a beautiful thing in the way that there's two worlds coexisting. So I learned a lot from that situation, not to mention just having a great time. It was really just loads of fun to get up there every night and do that. A lot of times we would learn a song that afternoon and play it at sound check and then play it that night. Some of those songs are pretty complex, much more so than maybe you would think from the surface. In a lot of situations, you would be apprehensive about doing that, but in that situation, not so at all. For one, that's the beauty of the gig. That's what the music is all about. For two, that audience is so open-minded. They're ready for anything. They're waiting for the magic and they'll wait as long as it takes to get the magic and when it happens, it's worth it. I just think that's a beautiful thing, you know?

The Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers were a lot alike, but the Allman Brothers were a much more aggressive musical entity. Where the Grateful Dead would meander and wait for the spark to happen, the Allman Brothers would always try to make it happen. Not that one is good or bad. They're two different approaches, but that's one of the differences between the two bands that we always saw. It was interesting when Derek Trucks and I were both out there together because it brought elements of the Allman Brothers and elements of the Grateful Dead together. Not that that's the first time, because both of those bands I think influenced each other in a strange way.

JW: So where would Gov't Mule fall in that spectrum, as far as making things happen and waiting for things to happen, improvisationally?

WH: I think we're more coming from the Allman Brothers school of thought, which is "make it happen." Especially when you're a trio, you kind of need to employ that philosophy a little bit more, but the longer we stay together, the more brave and adventurous we become and the more we're willing to just see where it goes and see whatever happens. One of the things that's an interesting dichotomy about Gov't Mule or with the Allman Brothers for that matter and maybe even with the Grateful Dead, I don't know not having been in that situation, you get a lot of different fans. You get some fans that are there for the songs and they're not as enamored with the long jams. You get some fans that are there totally for the magic and the improv., much more than the songs themselves. So you have to try and appease both camps as well as do what's in your heart and both of those things are in my heart. I'm a huge lover of songs, but I'm also a huge lover of open-ended improvisation. So we try to capture the right balance. We're constantly trying to find the right balance between songs and improv. I'm not one of those people that thinks you can get a group of great musicians together and expect there to be magic. I think there has to be chemistry and you never know what makes that chemistry. It either happens or it doesn't. I'm also not one of those people that think you can just play total improv. music for three hours with no theme and no song and maintain any sort of staying power. I think there has to be the right balance of the two in order for you to exist and maintain into the future.

The Allman Brothers were always very good at that, as were the Grateful Dead. Both bands had really good songs and there was a good balance between the jams and the song performances. That's what keeps me interested when I go see a show. I like to see a balance between those two things. Although, I'm a huge fan of song writing, in general, so there doesn't have to be any improvisation or any guitar solo or anything for me to enjoy a song. For my own musical taste, especially in the music that I'm creating, that's what I'm trying to achieve.

JW: I was noticing on the latest album, a song like "No Need to Suffer," it really opens up. There's a pretty nice guitar solo in there. At eight minutes, it's one of the longer songs on the album, but in a live setting that might not necessarily be considered long. What kind of a philosophy do you take going into the studio to record a song with an improvisational section like that? How do you scale in down? Is there a time limit that you try to keep in mind?

WH: We don't put a time limit on a song like that. Some of the songs are more structured, but in the case of "No Need to suffer," that was the first take that we played and we only played two takes. We ended up using the ending from the second take and splicing it on to the first take because I broke one of my strings during the first take, at the end of the solo and the guitar went all out of tune and we couldn't use the ending. Actually, I didn't break a string. It just stretched out, like two and a half steps, which is what you hear in the solo. We kept the solo and if you listen you can actually hear the part where the string stretches itself out and goes to a completely other note. The reason we kept it was because there was something magical about it. When we got done with the take, I asked our producer, Michael Barbiero, I said "can we keep that?" and he said "How can we not keep it?" Because there was something totally unique about it that you couldn't replicate in a million years. So, the weird effect at the end of the guitar solo is actually one of my strings de-tuning itself to a whole different pitch, which is very bizarre. I've never had that happen during a recording session in my entire life. The take itself was very good and we really had no idea how it was going to be.

"Suffer" doesn't really vary in the live setting in the way that it's never more than ten or eleven minutes and it's probably never less than seven and a half or eight, but there's no set structure to it. Some of the songs on Life Before Insanity are much more structured and that was another conscious effort on our part to follow on the heels of our live record and our 4-CD box set. They are so jammed-packed with not only guitar solos, but also keyboard solos, sax solos and total improvisation. We wanted to kind of do the opposite for the studio record a little bit more. We wanted to make it more of a song record, which just seemed appropriate to us. It's out fifth release, counting both of the live releases, and it just kind of made sense to go with a totally different approach to recording. We consciously made an effort to make some of the songs shorter and more structured, but it was a very healthy decision for us.

JW: How is it different in your approach psychologically, playing with the Allman Brothers Band in front of 20,000 people versus playing in a club or in front of 600 people? Is it refreshing to play in the smaller venues again after playing sheds with the Allmans?

WH: Well, my favorite sized venue is that 1,000 to 1,500 seat kind of small theater. I love those small theaters because of the way they sound. That's really my main concern, how does it sound, on stage and out front. If the place is too small, sometimes it can be a little over-powering for a loud rock band like us. Some of the places we play, you couldn't put the Allman Brothers in there because it would be so overbearingly loud, that no one could take it. There's a beautiful thing that happens when you play to a small crowd. You get this intimate connection with the audience almost on an individual basis, which is the total opposite of say, playing outdoors. When we played Woodstock, there were 350,000 people and the mass of energy that was coming back to the band from the audience was incredible, but there was no intimate connection. It was just a mass of energy coming back at us that is a great feeling, but it's a different sort of great feeling than playing to 600 people in a club. I would hate to have to choose to only do one or the other, because they are both really cool things. They both have their own pluses and minuses, you know? That's why I like the small theater thing, because it sounds good, it looks good and you can still maintain that one-on-one kind of feeling with your audience. You don't feel so detached from them.

Making the switch when I left the Allman Brothers wasn't that big a deal because I've been playing music all my life. I've played for nobody and I've played for hundreds of thousands of people and it's all kind of the same. Even though it's different, you make those adjustments pretty easily and pretty quickly.

JW: You play a lot of slide guitar. I was curious how you decide during a given song when to use the slide and when to stick with conventional playing.

WH: Part of the beauty of playing slide guitar is that you take away the frets. As soon as you put the bottle on your finger, the guitar has no frets because you're not touching the frets anymore.

JW: So it's like playing a fret-less guitar.

WH: Yeah, the guitar becomes fret-less as if it were a violin or something. So, now you have all these notes in between the notes and even though on a regular guitar you can utilize that to an extent by bending strings, it's nowhere near to the extent that you can do it on slide guitar. Slide guitar is really all about emulating the human voice and you can do that on the slide guitar more so than you can on a regular guitar. All my favorite guitar players, and definitely all my favorite slide guitar players, have that human voice-like quality about their playing. There are down sides though. When you first start playing slide guitar, it can be painful how it sounds, because when you're practicing a fret-less instrument, all the sudden the tuning is really bad and the intonation can drive you and everyone around you nuts. It's much easier to just mash down on the frets and know that the notes are going to come out somewhat in tune, than it is to put a bottle on your finger and try to make them come out in tune. It's a dying art in a way and I'm glad to see more and more people taking interest in it.

I love both regular guitar and slide guitar immensely. I think I'm a guitar player first and a slide guitar player second, but in the last fifteen years or so, I've become more and more serious about slide guitar. When I look around and see how few people are doing it and how especially how few people are doing it well, it kind of inspires me to want to get better at it and it's definitely inspired me to want to do it more and more often. When I started playing with Dickey Betts in the mid to late 80s, that gave me a solid reason for wanting to concentrate more and more on slide, which I had been doing for quite some time. That was one of the reasons that Dickey asked me to join his band in the first place. I joined the Dickey Betts band somewhere around '86 or something and instantly inherited all the slide guitar duties because Dickey doesn't really like playing electric slide guitar. He enjoys playing acoustic slide guitar and is quite good at it, but definitely was happy for me to take over all the electric slide duties. So that kind of threw me into the fire even more and I had to hone up on my slide chops. Then of course when I joined the Allman Brothers, it just kind of multiplied that whole scenario. So many of their songs are based around slide guitar. As far as what songs I choose to play slide on and play regular guitar on, usually the song cries out for slide if that's what's needed. There are songs that can go either way and for those songs, it all depends on how I feel. If I feel like I haven't been playing enough slide, than I'll try to play slide in some songs that maybe I usually don't and vice versa. Slides are always nice too, if your fingers are hurting…(laughs) You can pick up the slide and kind of give your fingers a rest.

JW: You played on a blues album with Little Milton that's nominated for a Grammy. What was that experience like?

WH: Little Milton is one of the great all time bluesmen and he still sounds amazing to this day. It was an honor for us even to be asked to be part of it. We were fortunate enough to be the only band that had two tracks on the record. We have the first track and the last track, which is awesome. I couldn't ask for anything more than that. Our experience with Milton was genuinely beautiful and we just really hit it off, right off the bat. Not knowing what to expect, it was just really a good thing. He was very open-minded about taking the music into some different directions and I don't think he expected us to be on up on the blues and as into the blues as we were. You know, we sat until four in the morning and told stories about Howlin' Wolf and Albert King and Freddie King. It was awesome. He's such a great singer as well as a great guitar player. I remember meeting Greg Allman, one of the first times that I was around Greg, I don't remember exactly when it was. I've known Greg for twenty years. Somewhere along the line, I think he asked me who was my favorite singer and I said Otis Redding and then said, "who's yours?" and he said Little Milton. Although I had grown up listening to Little Milton to an extent, at that point I thought, "you know, I gotta go and dig out Little Milton and listen some more." Greg's one of my favorite singers and for him to say that is pretty impressive.

JW: What was it like performing with the Allman Brothers at the service of Joe Dan Petty after not playing with them for a couple of years?

WH: Well, it was good to kind of bring some closure to that whole situation because I had not played with the guys since March of '97. Although I see some of the guys occasionally and Greg always comes and sits in with us when we're in San Francisco, there're doing their thing and we're doing our thing and our paths haven't crossed very often. So, it was nice. Somehow, something good can become of something that tragic sometimes. It took the death of someone like Joe Dan, who we all just loved dearly, to bring some people back together, and I'm not just speaking of myself. There were people at Joe Dan's funeral that had not spoken to each other in twenty years. There were examples like Chuck Leavell, who hadn't played with the Allman Brothers in fifteen years and he was there on stage and it was for all the right reasons. We were all there for Joe Dan and for there to be any weirdness between anyone in that situation, would have been the wrong thing. It made us all realize how some things can be in the great scheme of things.

JW: The latest Phil & Friends dates have just been announced. Will you be joining the line up at all?