PICTURE this. A group of musicians, including a Wiggle and Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, talking shop while leaning against a black Cadillac outside the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in small town Alabama.
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That was the scene almost two years ago which began The Soul Movers’ recording project across seven iconic US studios - including FAME, Royal, Muscle Shoals and Sun –that resulted in the Sydney soul-rockers’ third album Bona Fide, out March 15.
Soul Movers’ singer Lizzy Mack and guitarist Murray Cook - the original Red Wiggle - visited Muscle Shoals on that faithful day in March 2017 as tourists. They had just finished playing South By South West in Austin, Texas, and decided to indulge their inner music nerd by visiting the home of the famed session musicians, The Swampers.
“I did bump into a lovely old man out the back of the Muscle Shoals studio,” Mack explains. “He goes, “do you want to come in and meet my friend Dan [Auerbach]?’
“He goes, ‘I’ll bring him out.’ The next minute Dan Auerbach pops out looking really slick. I didn’t know who he was. Muz’s [Cook’s] eyes popped out of his head as he walked across the grass with his hand out.”
Plans were then made to use the studio and The Swampers’ David Hood (bass) Spooner Oldham (organ) on the Soul Movers’ follow-up to their 2017 album Testify.
With credits to their name like Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man and Wilson Pickett’s Mustang Sally, the naturally confident and charismatic Mack admits feeling a sense of anxiety when she presented her songs to Hood and Oldham.
“I was hoping they were good enough, because we were going to see if we could make The Swampers boogie,” she says.
“We were looking for signs while we were playing. We were looking for body language from David Hood. We don’t need to hear it in words as musicians. If he’s tapping his foot and grooving as he’s playing his bass, then that’s it, we’ve done it.”
Elsewhere at the Royal Studios, Mack used Rock’n’roll Hall of Famer Al Green’s personal No.9 microphone after impressing the studio’s owner, Lawrence Mitchel, with her voice, and at The Nutthouse studio Little Richard’s guitarist of 20 years, Kelvin Holly, made an appearance.
Then at arguably the most famous studio in America, Memphis’s Sun, Mack stood in the exact same place that Elvis Presley recorded many of his classics, as she fittingly laid down The Soul Movers’ track Elvis Made Me.
Mack says the experience crystallised for her that The Soul Movers were a bona fide soul band.
“What we found is, we’re right,” she says. “The music is true, it’s coming from the same place, the same love and we’re on the same page. It was like going to the headmaster’s to check your work and going, ‘yes you’re right’.”
The Soul Movers play the Wickham Park Hotel on February 9 and the Grand Junction Hotel on February 10.
Josh Leeson
Josh Leeson is an entertainment and features journalist, specialising in music, at the Newcastle Herald. He first joined the masthead in 2008 after stints at the Namoi Valley Independent and Port Stephens Examiner and has previously covered sport including the Asian Cup, A-League, Surfest, cricket and rugby league.
Josh Leeson is an entertainment and features journalist, specialising in music, at the Newcastle Herald. He first joined the masthead in 2008 after stints at the Namoi Valley Independent and Port Stephens Examiner and has previously covered sport including the Asian Cup, A-League, Surfest, cricket and rugby league.
