The Tedeschi Trucks Band, one of the few big bands in the history of rock, always liked it big. With their last project, a live homage to the legendary album "Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs" by Derek And The Dominos, the group around guitarist couple Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks already laid it on very thick. With the new mammoth work "I Am The Moon" - a cycle of no less than four separately released albums - the large formation now goes a clear step further.
A poem almost nine hundred years old
So far, all Tedeschi Trucks Band records sounded like live albums, whether they were recorded in front of an audience or in the studio. With full power, the band colossus staged its instrumental strengths. But at some point it was time to take the next step. Thematically, the cycle "I Am The Moon" follows on from "Layla Revisited". The impetus for this was given by singer Mike Mattison, who had thought about that poem of the Persian Sufi poet Nizami from the 12th century, which tells the love story of Leila and Madschnun, on which the song "Layla" is based.
"He made the suggestion to us to treat this a little more broadly," recaps Derek Trucks. "The original text raises so many issues that correspond with the present. It's about isolation and longing, things that were around all of us when we were locked up in our homes. There were so many strange parallels to the world a thousand years ago. We had such a close connection to the Layla theme without really knowing what it was ultimately about. I had known about the existence of this text, but had never really immersed myself in it. For the core of the band, this was a welcome opportunity to work separately on a joint project. When we actually got together in the studio for three weeks, the band exploded with creativity ..."
