Married couple and parents Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks—also the leaders of the 12-member Tedeschi Trucks Band—are rabidly partisan fans of their hometown NFL team, the Jacksonville Jaguars. They’ve even individually or together performed the “Star Spangled Banner” several times at home games over the years.

That said, the Jags did give the Houston Texans their worst drubbing of the past season with a 31-3 win at NRG Stadium.

So, the question must be posed to Derek Trucks on the other end of the phone: If he were the head coach of the Texans on that fateful day, what would he have done differently?

“Incredible you ask that! I’d say you’d have had to hit Trevor [Lawrence] a few more times. He had a good game!” Trucks laughs about Jaguars quarterback.

“No! Don’t touch Trevor!” Tedeschi yells in the background.

“Yeah, that’s right. Leave Trevor alone! He must be protected!” Trucks says. “I think you beat us eight or 10 times in a row, so there was a lot of bottled-up football frustration going into that game. We did have a really good season. But we’ve been bad for so long. So, there’s no shit talking the Texans from us!”

Many TV watchers have heard the music of Tedeschi Trucks Band recently, even if they don’t know it. Their song “Anyhow” was prominently featured in a recent commercial for Chevrolet.

The idea of any band “selling out” their music for advertising was considered verboten in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but things have changed. It’s now an effective way for current bands to get their new music into ears or can turn an “oldie” into a heavy Spotify streaming traffic jam.

“They came to us about it. And I was thinking Old School in [not wanting] to do it. But the thinking has really shifted in the past decade or so when you hear Hendrix and Bob Dylan and Nina Simone in commercials. It’s a different world,” Trucks says. “There’s only so many ways to get your music in front of new listeners. But you still have to be selective.”
“And it’s not like we went into the studio and wrote a song about Chevy trucks! This song has existed for a long time, and it drew people to the band. The amount of people who were Shazaming that song was bonkers!”

Last year, the rock/soul/roots-inflected unit embarked on their most ambitious creative undertaking since their 2010 formation—and indeed on par with any band. They produced four separate records under the umbrella title of I Am the Moon.

The discs— I. Crescent, II. Ascension, III. The Fall, and IV. Farewell were released a month apart and loosely tell an interpretive story based on Layla and Manjun, the epic poem by 7th-century Bedouin poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah about two star-crossed lovers who can never be together. They also made four accompanying full-length performance/interpretive videos.

Classic Rock fans, of course, are very familiar with both the song “Layla” and Derek and the Dominos’ 1970 double album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. “Derek” (aka guitar god Eric Clapton) wrote the song with Dominos drummer Jim Gordon—though it’s widely accepted Gordon’s girlfriend at the time, singer Rita Coolidge, was denied proper credit.

It was his tortured musical plea to his own unrequited love, Pattie Boyd, who happened to already be married to his best friend…Beatle George Harrison. A friend had passed Clapton the book, and the story and its similarities to his own life stuck with him. Boyd and Clapton were eventually married from 1979-89.

Trucks himself was also familiar with the song and the story, having at one point played the anthem in Clapton’s touring band, and then with the Tedeschi Trucks Band performing the entire album at the 2019 LOCKN' Festival with guests Doyle Bramhall II (Arc Angels) and Trey Anatasio (Phish). Oh, it’s also where his very name comes from.
With TTB off the road during the pandemic, it was vocalist Mike Mattison who proposed that the entire band read the original story as sort of a COVID Homework Assignment. It eventually led to I Am the Moon, sung mainly from the perspective of Layla (Tedeschi), flipping the script of the poem.

“When he first brought the idea to us, doing something from her point of view, the idea was immediately intriguing as a thought exercise. And then we read the book just to see if it would spark something. We felt the time and the energy of it, and we found some themes to [explore],” Trucks says.

“Everyone jumped at it. But we didn’t have in mind what it eventually turned out or that it would take on the life that it did. That was one of the silver linings of the pandemic. We had time that we’ve never had before to [consider] something like this. We also had a lot to unpack and work through with the band and family things over the past six years or so.”
The full lineup is Susan Tedeschi (guitar, vocals), Derek Trucks (guitar), Gabe Dixon (keyboards, vocals), Brandon Boone (bass), Tyler “Falcon” Greenwell and Isaac Eady (drums), Mike Mattison, Mark Rivers, and Alecia Chakour (vocals), Kebbi Williams (saxophone), Ephraim Owens (trumpet) and Elizabeth Lea (trombone).

The current tour—which comes to Sugar Land’s Smart Financial Centre on May 3— incorporates some of the material from I Am the Moon with their own original material and some choice covers. The trek has at least once also tested Trucks’ physical speed. A few days before this interview, the Tedeschi Trucks Band were playing Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium. Literally down the street at his own gig was red hot bluegrass phenom Billy Strings.

So, during his own show’s intermission, Trucks and his guitar trucked the 0.1 miles to the Bridgestone Arena, sat in with Strings on two numbers, then quickly headed back to finish his own show.

“We got the harebrained idea the night before in an unnamed Nashville bar. It was very spur of the moment,” Trucks laughs. “I think I made the entire trip in three minutes flat, thanks to some help from the police blocking off Broadway. Sometimes you get lucky!” And Billy and I actually met on stage. So that was interesting!”
Both Tedeschi and Trucks were interviewed for the recent massive biography on singer/keyboardist Leon Russell by Bill Janovitz. They also played with Russell, Coolidge, Claudia Lennear, Chris Stainton—original members of Joe Cocker’s fabled 1970 “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour—during a tribute show at the 2015 LOCKN’ Festival, seen in the documentary/concert film Learning To Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

The legend of the original troupe was cemented in history after the tour by their own live record and documentary/concert film. In fact, it was repeated viewings of the latter many years ago that spurred Tedeschi and Trucks to pursue something similar on their own, leading to the formation of their current musical troupe.

“I think it was just the feel of the whole family thing, [similar] to growing up around the Allman Brothers Band,” says Trucks—whose uncle is the late Butch Trucks, a founding member of that band. “The travelling circus and danger elements were also interesting. I thought we could do it and see it through. And everyone is there because they want to be there. That definitely sparked the idea for this band.”
I mention to Trucks that when I interviewed Tedeschi shortly after the band released its first record, her main concern at the time was…making the weekly payroll for such a large ensemble.

“It was! Especially in the beginning. Hey, it still is!” he laughs. “There’s a reason there’s not a lot of bands like us out there. We’re not smart enough to read the bottom-line financial sheets!”

Finally, during a previous interview years ago, Trucks mentioned he was looking for some records by the late Houston-based bluesman Hop Wilson. I suggested that he drop by Cactus Records while in town for a show…and he did!

“That’s a great shop, Cactus! Not many left like that!” Trucks laughs. “And we were listening to Hop Wilson just a few days ago!

The Tedeschi Trucks Band play at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, May 3, at the Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land, 18111 Lexington. For more information, call 281-207-6278 or visit SmartFinancialCentre.net. The Greyhounds open. $49.50-$119.50.

For more on the Tedeschi Trucks Band, visit TedeschiTrucksBand.com