What Did She Think?

 Much of my listening in recent weeks has found me trying to absorb this summer’s four-CD release by the Tedeschi Trucks Band, I Am The Moon. 

The band gets its name from the married couple that organized the band in 2010: Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, both of whom had fully realized solo careers before getting hitched. (Trucks, it should be noted, is the nephew of the late Butch Trucks, drummer for the Allman Brothers Band; one hears very loud echoes of the guitar of Duane Allman in the younger Trucks’ playing.) 

The genesis of the I Am The Moon project is fascinating, tied tightly into rock history. First of all, Derek Trucks got his name from the group Derek & The Dominoes, the group that brought Duane Allman and Eric Clapton together with a few other people to create the 1970 album Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs. Some of Clapton’s inspiration for the title song came from the twelfth century poem Layla and Majnun by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. The epic poem tells the haunting tale of Majnun’s love for Layla that leads him finally to madness. And some of the inspiration for the album – especially the title track “Layla” – came from Clapton’s love for Patti Boyd, at the time the wife of Clapton’s best friend, George Harrison of the Beatles. 

Then, in 2019, the Tedeschi Trucks Band – along with guitarist Trey Anastasio – was invited to perform the entire Layla album live at the Lockn’ festival in Arrington, Virginia. As Mike Mattison writes in the liner notes to the first of the four CD packages of I Am The Moon – subtitled 1. Crescent – when a singer learns an entire album for a single performance, he or she learns more than the words. He or she learns the story. In the case of Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, Mattison writes, “it is a nonstop confession of a love that has driven a young man insane.” 

Less than a year after the Tedeschi Trucks Band performed the Layla album live, the corona virus lockdowns began, and the band members struggled to fill their time productively. And they wondered, as Mattison writes, “What does the character of Layla have to say about all of this?” 

The four CDs of I Am The Moon, Mattison says, answer that question. I’ve listened to all four CDs, first listening to each of them in full and since then listening to separate tracks shuffled randomly. It’s going to take many more listens to absorb them all. 

“Hear My Dear,” the opening track to the first CD, 1. Crescent, is below.

– whiteray