Interview: Billy Bob Thornton

Morro Bay is a cozy seaside city in California’s San Luis Obispo County. Aside from serving as the primary setting for the 2016 animated Pixar film “Finding Dory,” it was a main source of inspiration for the new Boxmasters’ album “In the Bay.”

For the band’s duo of Grammy Award-winning recording engineer J.D. Andrew and Bud Thornton (better known in his other day job as actor/director/writer Billy Bob Thornton), the inspiration for this new collection of songs can be traced to a combination of living in the Golden State and plugging into ‘60s and ‘70s influences up to, but not restricted to, the Beach Boys.

“My daughter goes to school at Cal Poly up near San Luis Obispo,” Thornton explained. “Morro Bay is where our house is that we lease while she’s in school. We’re only 12 minutes from campus there. She’s a sophomore now and I didn’t have anything to do but sit there and look at the bay while she was in school. I got inspired to write some stuff that I brought back to JD. Then we started making them into songs. Even the cover of the record is Morro Rock in the bay.”

Andrew agreed about a collection of new material that has nods to latter-day Beach Boys, specifically that group’s landmark 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” without necessarily being directly traceable to Brian Wilson and company.

“We had all the songs recorded and were playing the record for the rest of the band on the bus to show them what we were working on,” Andrew recalled. “Somebody mentioned it had a real ‘Pet Sounds’ vibe to it and the lightbulb kind of went off. When the guys said it was like ‘Pet Sounds,’ we realized they were right and we did it without thinking. We leaned into it really hard. We still draw on our other ‘60s influences like The Beatles, The Byrds and The Kinks. It’s still our tribute to what the Beach Boys did.”

Thornton added, “J.D. and I both love the record so much. We just experimented with different kinds of instrumentation and different ways to construct songs. We were using a couple of instruments that we haven’t used and didn’t even have, like a Guitorgan, which is like a guitar, but it has a 1970s computer in it. You can chord with it and it has five or six different organ settings that don’t sound like any organ you’ve ever heard. But you can put it through two amps and then you can play lead on the one amp or just chords on the other.”

The dozen songs on “In the Bay” reverberate with the kind of sunny vibe that’ll perk up the ears of anyone with a passing familiarity of British-Invasion-era pop. Rich harmonies are the through ingredient of these songs. Highlights include “Light a Candle,” which bounds along on a bed of Tijuana Brass-flavored accompaniment and wonderfully juicy Farfisa organ runs and “Accidental Dance,” a twangy shuffle that has a bit of a Mavericks vibe. Elsewhere, the title track pulls you in with a waltz-like cadence complimented by Thornton’s nuanced vocals and horn charts that give the song a very baroque vibe while Teddy Andreadis provides the kind of wind-up piano accompaniment that evokes the spirit of mid-‘60s Fab Four throughout “The Swift.”

With this kind of creative inspiration, the Boxmasters are switching to live music gear for their current 2026 Morro Rock Tour. These music mavens have hit the road off and on since 2008 and have built a catalog of 21 studio albums. So they bring to their shows a deep song catalog and the experience of sharing bills with the likes of The Who, ZZ Top, Steve Miller and George Thorogood. Plugging in and connecting with fans is a responsibility Thornton takes seriously.

“We’re a lot more punk and a little bit wilder live than we are on the records,” he said. We’re louder and generally up the tempos more for live stuff. But it’s a very interactive show, too, and we talk to the audience a lot. You’ve got to connect with the audience and not be one of those bands that come out and turn their backs to them. Those are the people that pay your way on tour. I will say having so much material to draw from is a good problem to have. There are so many songs we’ve been playing on tour for so many years and we don’t want to drop any of them. And yet, we’ve got new records and we’ve got to put some in there. Making our set list every year is probably the most difficult thing we do.”

The music bug bit both the 70-year-old Thornton and 52-year-old Andrew early. For the former, it came in the shape of receiving Elvis Presley’s “King Creole” soundtrack from his mom and seeing The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“When I saw that, it was all over. I just thought Ringo was the coolest s*** in the world and just the way he was swinging up there,” Thornton said.

For Andrew, it was The Beach Boys.

“I love all those songs about surfing,” he said. “Growing up in Kansas, I never really thought that I would someday have the opportunity to move to California. When I finally did, it was everything I dreamed my life would be like when I was four years old.”)

Thornton is the resident music nerd, who can go from waxing rhapsodic about the charms of the criminally underrated 1971 Mott the Hoople album “Wildlife” (the Boxmasters covered Mott’s “Original Mixed Up Kid” on their 2008 debut) to sharing how his early pre-Hollywood band Nothing Doing opened for Humble Pie and Black Oak Arkansas in Lake Charles, LA.

Very much still a music fan whose tastes run from the British art rock of Gentle Giant and The Strawbs to Big Star and The Allman Brothers, the Arkansas native said his creative aspirations include completing “Dinosaur,” a triple-record concept album that’s been percolating since 2009 and is about “…a guy who grew up in the heyday of rock and roll and is watching his world disappear while trying to live in current society.” These kinds of high-flying ambitions are what Thornton and Andrew feel underpin the Boxmasters’ longevity with 2028 looming as the band’s 20th anniversary.

“We have a drive for success and making stuff that is meaningful,” Andrew said. “We’ve always grown up wanting to be in bands. It’s a real gang kind of mentality. It’s more about what our music means to us and everyone else be damned.”

Thornton added, “I guess the band being together this long probably comes down to the fact that we have the same interests and are all friends. What keeps us hungry is we’re always trying to improve and get better. Nobody is ever going to be The Beatles, Beach Boys, Kinks, Animals or any of that. When the bar is set so high, it drives you so you can be our age and still feel like you’re 14. We still look at ourselves as a garage band still trying to make it.”