Big Head Todd & the Monsters Rock on With or Without Albums
On Feb. 27 at 6:30 p.m. PT/9:30 p.m. ET, Yahoo Live will live stream Big Head Todd & the Monsters' concert from the House of Blues Chicago. Tune in HERE to watch!
Last year, Big Head Todd & the Monsters released their 14th album, Black Beehive. The album, named for the title track inspired by the late Amy Winehouse, received a four-star rating from the All Music Guide, the band's highest since their 1993 breakthrough album Sister Sweetly. Unfortunately for fans of Big Head Todd, it may very well be the band's final album.
"Our strategy from here on out is going to avoid making albums and just make videos," says singer/guitarist Todd Park Mohr, who adds it's no longer feasible for the band to make albums. "We've had the good fortune to have some albums on the shelf already, so our situation might be different than other groups who are trying to define themselves with an album. The last several albums have been an awful lot of work and cost an awful lot of money and as a business it's not super viable, but it's also how our culture is working now. It just doesn't seem to fit in with the way that people are utilizing music and listening to it; albeit, I am a fan of the long form."
Mohr says it wasn't necessarily frustrating that Black Beehive was overlooked by the general public. "It's not, because our fans haven't overlooked it," he says. "The music has connected in various ways with our fanbase. It's been a successful album as far as the songs that we play from it in our show and how the music connects to people who like the band."
One of those songs is "Black Beehive," which Mohr wrote following the overdose death of Winehouse in July 2011. "I do these exercises where I write a song every day about the news and current events," Mohr explains. "The day she died, I wrote the song. Her life just effortlessly converted into a song, because there was such a crossroads of symbols in her life and death, dying at 27 years old, the whole story of it is a recurring theme amongst celebrities. I didn't know her. I love her music and her voice. It wasn't so much that she inspired my life as much as it was her story, which I found so compelling."
Another one of those news-driven songs on Black Beehive is "We Won't Go Back," which was inspired by the 2010 Arab Spring movement. And just because the band plans to forgo future album releases, it doesn't mean that Mohr isn't cranking out new tunes. "I'm constantly working on new material," he says. "I wrote 22 songs between Thanksgiving and Christmas and we have some new material in our set." Clips of those songs, in Mohr's "Daily Donut" series, can be found on his YouTube channel tpmvault.
As those clips show, Mohr is moving in more of a folk-influenced direction from the blues style he and the band -- which also includes drummer Brian Nevin, bassist Rob Squires, and keyboardist/pedal steel guitarist Jeremy Lawton -- has explored in recent years on such releases as 2011's 100 Years of Robert Johnson and Black Beehive.
"I'm inspired by 100-year-old folk and blues songs," Mohr says, "and taking that and applying that in a new way." As for the transition from blues to folk, Mohr explains, "I kind of look at them as very similar forms. When Pete Seeger and Dylan got a hold of the old form of folk, they continued the tradition of social commentary, I don't know if it's political activism. It's a sense of trying to get to the root of human suffering and that's the thing I love about folk and what draws one into it -- that reality check that folk is willing to stand up for. Other music is more just entertainment and distraction, whereas folk really wants to wake you up and get you to take responsibility."
The fact that Big Head Todd no longer plan to issue albums really isn't a drastic departure from the band's original vision, since first and foremost the group has been primarily about playing live. "That's always been the case," Mohr says. "That's absolutely how we look at it."
To that end, the band is currently on tour with a couple of notable dates in particular coming up. First, on March 14, the band will play Big Caribbean Cruise III, which is already sold out. The band hasn't done the cruise gig in a decade, but Mohr is looking forward to it. "We've done two of them and they were enormously successful on a whole bunch of levels," he says. "This year it sold out in 17 minutes." This cruise is a more intimate than some of the other musical vacations, since it's a masted ship that only holds 170 people, rather than a huge cruise liner.
Also on the band's docket is a June 6 homecoming date with Lucinda Williams at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, the scene of some of the band's most memorable gigs. "It's an absolutely magical natural setting amphitheater wedged between two huge rock formations," Mohr says. "And, it's a wonderful acoustic environment. There's not a bad seat in the house and all the seats kind overlook the city lights of Denver. We've done some of the defining shows of our career there. Almost every year since 1992, we've played there. We've had a really incredibly career to play Red Rocks that many times and every time we play there it's just as special."
