On August 6th, G. Love & Special Sauce will bring its hip hop, Delta Blues-y style to Kalamazoo when it plays atBell’s Eccentric Café. The “G. Love” part of the band is frontman Garrett Dutton, who we reached earlier this week from inside a trailer in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Dutton has been touring nearly nonstop for two decades, but he says we caught him and the band in a unique spot. For the last few years, Dutton was experimenting by himself with more folky, acoustic music. But with the band's latest album Sugar, he brought back the "Special Sauce" and went back to the funk that G. Love is known for.
"And now, you have a really re-invigorated, strong foundation for what creates that electric blues, when you go back to what makes the Delta blues. And re-explore that," Dutton explains. "And we brought out Sugar which explored that. It's an electric blues record that, again, came back to some of the stuff that G. Love & Special Sauce is known for, blending hip hop and the blues. And we recorded that in a way that was very reminiscent in our old records. A very raw, immediate style of recording."
Dutton says the band will go one step forward on their new album, called Loves Saves the Day, out October 23rd. "This one gets taken to the blues. The blues gets heavier," Duttons says. "It's our heaviest record yet. It's folky, it's got hip hop but it's really rock and roll. It's rooted, though, still in that Delta blues."
Dutton continues: "With myself and the band, I mean, we try to, we do try to write from the heart and perform from the heart and show it all from our sleeve," he says. "And in that way, no matter what style we're approaching, it's us. And I do feel like that! Because over the years, if you listen back to twenty years, you'll hear along the way, you'll hear every kind of rhythmic style of music within our records. Whether it was hip hop, reggae, country. Salsa. New Orleans. Chicago. Delta blues."
G. Love & Special Sauce started out in the early 1990s, when they were just a three-piece band trying to get a little attention. But Dutton remembers one night, in particular: a show in Pontiac, Michigan. It was a big night for the band, but Dutton thinks it was also important because of the influence it had on now-famous artists like Jack White and the Black Keys.
"Tthe first time we played Pontiac Michigan on our first record release show in 1994, both Jack White and Kid Rock told me that they were both there," he says. "They're both huge...There's footage of Dan Auerbach on YouTube coming up, playing covers of G. Love & Special Sauce! With his old band, before he had the Black Keys. I'm not going to be shy about it, we've influenced a lot of people. What we did is nothing completely new, we just did something old in a new way! And luckily it got to reach the kids who were just a little bit younger than me."
Dutton's proud that G. Love and Special helped to bring out those new artists. But he's not jealous.
"To me, it's just a victory when raw, good music happens," he says. "There are always people who say, 'Oh man, that should have happened with so-and-so.' But at the end of the day, no one invented music, except for like the first time when a caveman smashed two rocks together. So you have to be humble. If you get to play music every day and make a living off of it, you're doing good."
You can catch G. Love & Special Sauce at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo on August 6th at 9 p.m.
