Interview: JJ Grey

Perhaps you remember the old Paul Masson wine advertisements built around the line “We will sell no wine before its time.” JJ Grey, quite unintentionally, followed a variation on that philosophy in making his current album “Olustee.”

Over a career that was launched with the 2001 album “Backwater,” Grey had delivered his six most recent studio albums over an eight-year span, with “Ol’ Glory” culminating that prolific run with its release in 2015. It took Grey that same amount of time to finish “Olustee.” 

Ironically, the project actually got off to a fast start, and for a time, it looked like Grey might have a quick follow-up album to “Ol’ Glory.”
 
 “After ‘Old Glory’ came out, it probably wasn’t even 18 months, a year and a half or whatever, that I was back in the studio and had recorded the basic tracks for a song called ‘Free High.’ That was recorded then. ‘Starry Night,’ that was recorded then. And there was one other one, ‘Top of the World.’ Those three songs were recorded, the music, immediately after ‘Old Glory’ coming out,” Grey said in a recent phone interview. “And I had placeholder kind of singing, sometimes with words, sometimes it just sounded like words. I was struggling, let me back up, I wasn’t struggling because if there’s a struggle, you have to actually try. This one, I was just not writing the lyrics and not singing it.”

Grey kept waiting for inspiration to strike – all the way until spring of 2023. That’s when a friend who worked in real estate showed Grey a building along the St. Marys River in north Florida. Grey immediately saw this unique structure would work as a studio/rehearsal space. 

“It was incredible. It used to be a boys home and it was a crazy three-story octagon building,” Grey said. “In March I made an offer and in April, they handed me the keys,”

Grey put his new acquisition to immediate use and tackled the lyrics and vocal melodies he needed to finish the “Olustee” album.

 “I moved a temporary control room in overlooking the downstairs and I set my gear up,” he said. “I sat down and went in there and within a week I had everything written, recorded and done. It didn’t even take a week to do it. And when I say a week, I don’t mean a week’s worth of recording. Hell, I wasn’t in there a couple of hours each day. It took me four or five days, a couple of hours each day.

“Some of the songs took completely different directions that I never dreamed they would,” Grey said. “But it all started when I got in that room upstairs in that building. I don’t know why it did and I felt like, well, this is another sign that this is the way it was supposed to be. This is how it was meant to happen.”

While that burst of writing at the octagon building brought the “Olustee” album together, the bulk of recording was done well before then at the studio where Grey has always recorded – Retrophonics in Saint Augustine, Florida.

There, Grey, who was producing the album himself, brought in his demos and turned his studio musicians loose to bring a more human and organic feel to the basic tracks of the songs.
 
“Take a song like ‘Rooster,’ the demo, I just played it, I put it on a guide track in the studio and the guys just played along with it. I just left everything on there, the drum kit from the demo and all of that stuff, and everybody played along with it and then I just shut off the demo and it sounded killer,” Grey said. “The demos sound really good, honestly, for one listen or a couple of listenings. But over time it’s kind of flat. It doesn’t dynamically move with a demo done on a keyboard. When these guys played it, it just really came to life.”

Before putting the “Olustee” project to bed, Grey went one step further and had a full orchestra add strings and other orchestration to the album’s four ballads, rather than settling for faux-strings keyboard parts or samples to try to achieve the effect.

Grey had been working with an orchestrator, Ronen Landa, to write charts for a number of his songs for use in a possible future concert with a full symphony orchestra. As he was working on “Olustee,” Grey decided to ask Landa to write charts for a ballad, “On a Breeze,” that he wanted to include on the new album. Grey was so impressed with the results, he then had Landa bring his talents to three other ballads – “Starry Night,” “Deeper Than Belief” and “The Sea.”

“He just crushed it, all the parts that he wrote and arranged for the orchestra to play,” Grey said. “That was another highlight, just to hear the orchestra playing that live over a video feed and over Audiomovers, because they (the orchestra) were in Budapest and I was at my studio up there by the (St. Marys) river and he was out in L.A. All of us were together on the Zoom thing watching it go down. I was just floored at how good it sounded.”

Grey not only invested plenty of creativity into making “Olustee,” he went the extra mile financially.

“I don’t have giant budgets or nothing. But this time I’m like OK, look, I just want to pull out all the stops and whatever it costs, I don’t really care,” Grey said. “And frankly, it didn’t end up costing crazy, crazy money. Of course, I did what I always do. I burned through all of the budget, all of the advance the record label gave me. I went right on by that and I had to spend another, I don’t know, $25,000, $30,000 out of my own pocket. But it was well worth it.”

Listeners will likely agree. “Olustee,” like Grey’s other albums, presents a varied gumbo of rock, soul, country, with horn-spiced uptempo tracks like the edgy and funky “Rooster” and the driving, rocking soul tune “Wonderland” sitting comfortably alongside the downright pretty “The Sea” and the gently swaying “Starry Night.”  

Having already done an extensive tour with an 11-piece band, Grey is back on tour, playing a wide-ranging song set.

“We’ll be playing tracks, obviously, off of every record. You’ll want the staples, so to speak, for the people. ‘Lochloosa’ (Grey’s 2004 album) will definitely get its run throughs in the set, and (core songs like) ‘Brighter Days’ and ‘The Sun Is Shining Down,’ and definitely it’s going to be new album heavy. I don’t mean we’re going to play the whole entire new album. That’s not going to happen,” Grey said. “But usually (we play) 16 to 18 songs. I’m thinking (we’ll play) maybe six songs off of the new album each night, at least six, I would say. That leaves plenty of room to play other tunes.”