Gov’t Mule Play the Blues on New LP, ‘Heavy Load Blues’

The story of Heavy Load Blues, the new record out Friday (November 12) from the prolific rock band Gov’t Mule, begins with two separate rooms. For a number of years, the band’s co-founder, Warren Haynes, had been talking about the idea of making a blues album. Generally speaking, Gov’t Mule is a jam-rock band, founded originally as an improvisational power rock trio. But once the 2020 pandemic hit, Haynes found himself, like many other artists, writing song after song, and he’d accumulated a significant number of blues tunes that he wanted to lay down. But when the band eagerly agreed to the idea, there was one more stipulation: the group had to record two albums at once. In two separate rooms, simultaneously.