The Tedeschi Trucks Band has always felt like a family, and lately that family has been hit hard.
The deaths of Butch Trucks, Gregg Allman and Col. Bruce Hampton left enormous holes in the musical community from which Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi emerged. Then, on February 15th, the very day Signs was released, keyboardist and flautist Kofi Burbridge died after months of serious health problems. He was 57.
It's impossible to hear Signs without some of that loss hanging over it. Mortality, uncertainty and perseverance surface repeatedly in the lyrics, and the circumstances surrounding its release have inevitably given some of those words additional weight. Yet the record is full of life. Grief and joy occupy the same room, much as they do in the gospel, soul and blues traditions that have always fed this band. Signs feels like an elegiac celebration of life, music and family, three things that have been intertwined in Tedeschi Trucks Band from the beginning.
The first thing that strikes you is the warmth. Recorded at the band's own Swamp Raga studio in Jacksonville, the album has the atmosphere of musicians gathering in a room rather than assembling a commercial product. There is space to stretch, room for accidents and the constant feeling of people responding to one another. Fingers scrape against strings. Voices mingle. Horns, organ and percussion move in and out of the arrangements. The door feels open.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Signs is how familiar the songs seem. There are no covers here, yet much of the album has the instant familiarity of great old soul, blues and gospel records. The band wrote the material themselves, sometimes with fellow travelers including Warren Haynes and Doyle Bramhall II, and they have absorbed their influences so thoroughly that the songs feel connected to a much older repertoire without sounding like exercises in revivalism.
That begins with the people playing them. Derek Trucks remains a staggering guitarist, but virtuosity is rarely the point. His slide can scream, sing or hover around a vocal, and he seems to know instinctively when to step forward and when to disappear back into the ensemble. Susan Tedeschi sings with the grit, power and vulnerability of the great R&B vocalists, while Mike Mattison remains one of rock's most underappreciated singers. Beneath them, drummers J.J. Johnson and Tyler Greenwell function less like two percussionists competing for space than a single, unusually flexible rhythm section.
The title track, "Signs, High Times", puts much of that chemistry on display immediately. Tedeschi and Mattison trade and combine voices over dark soul, while horns, organ and the two drummers steadily increase the pressure. Trucks waits until the end to take over, his guitar providing the release the arrangement has spent the entire song building toward.
That movement from restraint to release appears throughout Signs. "When Will I Begin" is a melancholy ballad surrounded by almost otherworldly backing vocals, with Trucks' slide gradually climbing until the song reaches its emotional peak. "I'm Gonna Be There" moves at an even slower pace, its gospel foundation submerged in a smoky, swampy atmosphere as strings and percussion add drama around the vocal.
Then there is "Walk Through This Life", which starts as supple mid-tempo funk, somewhere in the vicinity of early-seventies Stevie Wonder. A pulsating bass line, horns and an uplifting melody gradually loosen the song until the band is tearing into a full-blooded soul jam. And then it fades. On record, it's almost frustrating. Onstage, it sounds like an invitation. You can already imagine them ignoring the fade-out entirely and spending another ten minutes finding out where the groove leads.
That freedom is balanced by some remarkably precise arranging. "Strengthen What Remains" begins as a short acoustic ballad built from pensive minor chords and beautiful major-key lifts. The physical sound of fingers moving against guitar strings remains audible, adding to the intimacy, before an orchestrated coda of strings and flute opens the song into something closer to chamber pop. It's a small reminder of how broad this band's vocabulary has become.
"Still Your Mind" explores the opposite extreme. A dramatic piano introduces guitar, drums and bass before the arrangement becomes increasingly dense, eventually filling almost every available space. There are echoes of "Bound for Glory" from Revelator in the verse, while the chorus is perhaps one of the album's few moments where the writing feels a little forced. Trucks' solo arrives like fresh air in the middle of all that weight, and an instrumental breakdown allows the song to end somewhere lighter than where it began.
The band can still simply rock, too. "Hard Case" rolls along on slide guitar, communal backing vocals and a neat keyboard solo, while "Shame" is built around a vicious hard-blues riff punched forward by the horns. The verses pull back to give Tedeschi room, then the chorus crashes in with the weight of early-seventies blues-rock. The song repeatedly swells and collapses, eventually breaking into psychedelic slide guitar before rebuilding itself and finally settling into a soft exhale.
"They Don't Shine" has a completely different kind of swagger, a raucous boogie with a thick riff, honky-tonk flavor and a chorus that owes something to Motown. Tedeschi gets the guitar spotlight here and makes excellent use of it. "All the World", meanwhile, returns to minor-key soul, leaving plenty of space around the instruments before gospel voices lift the chorus.
Those contrasts keep a large ensemble from becoming cumbersome. Tedeschi Trucks Band has enough musicians to overwhelm almost any song, but its best arrangements rely on knowing when not to use them all. Sometimes the horns carry the weight. Sometimes the rhythm section does. Sometimes everything falls away and a voice or guitar is allowed to sit almost naked in the room.
That restraint makes the closing "The Ending" particularly affecting. After everything that precedes it, the album finishes with a simple acoustic country ballad. The chord progression is uncomplicated, the acoustic slide is beautifully understated and Tedeschi gives one of her finest performances on the record. She moves from near-whispers into full soulful cries, and the recording catches the grain of her voice, the vibrato and tiny changes in pressure that make a vocal feel human. The song was written in response to the deaths surrounding the band, and it doesn't require a grand arrangement to carry that weight.
At just under 47 minutes, Signs is also unusually disciplined for a band capable of stretching a song far beyond its recorded dimensions. There is no filler and very little fat. Each performance feels committed, every arrangement has a reason for being there and the songs leave enough unresolved space for the band to reshape them onstage.
That may be the most remarkable thing about Tedeschi Trucks Band at this point. They are formidable individual musicians who have built a collective identity strong enough to make individuality secondary. Loss has inevitably changed that family, and Kofi Burbridge's death on the day Signs entered the world makes the album's themes painfully concrete. But the music itself captures him where he belonged, inside a group of people playing together.
Signs is an album about carrying on, made by a band that understands carrying on as a communal act. People arrive, people leave, the family changes, and the music absorbs all of it.
For a band that keeps raising its own standard, the old question remains: how do you improve on perfection?