The Maness Brothers | Interview | “God Bless The Maness Brothers”

The Maness Brothers is a heavy blues rock duo from St Louis, Missouri, consisting of brothers David and Jake.

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Their music is packed with unpretentious tunes that resonate with the local environment. The duo is currently working on the new material and I can’t wait to hear more from them.

How did you get first interested in music and what was the first instrument you picked?

Jake Maness: I remember watching The Blues Brothers with David a lot and dancing around the house as kids. Grandma was always playing Ray Charles while she cleaned, we spent a lot of time there. Grandpa saw one of the great Buddy Rich vs Gene Krupa Drum Battles back in the day. Our Aunt Laura had the Randy Rhoads Tribute album she’d play for us. Mom has a story about seeing Foghat play in a barn somewhere in Missouri and my Dad carried around a photo of Jimi Hendrix in his wallet for as long as a decade. We definitely got heavy into rock n roll. I remember making mixtapes with AC/DC and Steppenwolf on them in Elementary School. David picked up the guitar and I landed on drums both pretty naturally. I didn’t want to deal with all those strings so close together and thought the drums seemed pretty straight forward. Neither of us really started singing until we started The Maness Brothers and decided we’d both have to split the work on vocals.

Did you play in any other bands or did you decide that it’s best for two brothers to start their own band?

I was playing in a doom metal band called Iron Hills and David was in a southern rock band called Whiskey War Mountain Rebellion. We both wanted to take music to some kind of next level and figured we’d be able to do our best together. We both had the drive to keep going and neither of us had any other career motives. We started as a side project at the time and it quickly became our main bag as our other bands split up.

Your very first recording is dating back to 2012. What can you say about ‘Grief Factory’ and how your sound eventually evolved?

‘Grief Factory’ is like a trial run for The Maness Brothers sound. Looking back on particular songs such as ‘The Catfish & the Fisherman’, it’s definitely not our best work. We’ve just become much better musicians after a decade of practicing and touring. The people that we’ve connected with along the way have helped us out immensely. Producer and engineer Carl Nappa helped us dial in our sound starting with ‘God Bless The Maness Brothers’. ‘Grief Factory’ came before we had ever played outside of town. I think what our sound has become today has a lot to do with our experiences on tour and a lot of reflection on the kind of music that we play.

‘God Bless The Maness Brothers’ is such a fantastic release. What’s the story behind it?

Thank you. It was our first time working with Carl Nappa at his studio The Hill House. He helped us work through some of the loose ideas we had, and allowed us to use his space to tighten things up before tracking. We took ten days spending six to eight hours a day running over the new songs, then logged over a hundred hours in the studio to record. We had a lot of fun and didn’t feel limited by time.

 

We were able to freely make the record that we wanted to release. Carl is definitely responsible for allowing that record to be made in that way.

Are you currently working on something new? I saw several singles posted on your Bandcamp. Are they part of the upcoming album?

We have been working on a new album, our second with Carl Nappa at The Hill House. We are calling the record ‘The Hill House Sessions’. It started as one song written and recorded each month. That lasted until October before things just got too busy with tour dates, among other things life can throw at you. So we finished what we had, took a short pause, and are going back in to wrap up the last couple of songs. You can currently listen to and purchase the first seven tracks on our bandcamp page.

When creating new music is there a lot of jamming or how do you approach it?

Our song ‘End of Me’ started with the line “what’s gonna be the end of me?” and us figuring out the coolest way to express that. Of course David came up with a cool riff and we went from there. If one of us comes in with finished lyrics then that person generally takes over as sort of lead on the song. A lot of times it’s a mashup of a line I’ve come up with and a riff he’s been working on. Sometimes it’ll be easy and the song is done in minutes. Others not so much.

“With ‘God Bless The Maness Brothers’ we spent loads of time preparing before we hit record”

Is there a lot of preparation and work that goes into a recording session?

It really depends. Like I mentioned with ‘God Bless The Maness Brothers’ we spent loads of time preparing before we hit record. But sometimes especially with ‘The Hill House Sessions’, writing and recording a track each month is a totally different story. We worked those sessions into our regular day to day so we are getting off from day jobs in carpentry and painting. ‘The Hill House Sessions’ has been a completely different experience from ‘God Bless The Maness Brothers’ and that has a lot to do with finding ways to stay productive during this pandemic.

What are some of the most important musicians that influenced your own style and what in particular did they employ in their playing that you liked?

We saw the Black Keys in 2006. I was 14 years old, and it was at a really tiny venue in St. Louis called Mississippi Nights. One rock concert years before we would even start The Maness Brothers had an amazing amount of influence on us. Two really loud guys on stage playing rock n roll. A lot of people “try and do that Black Keys thing”. We’ve been described as “if the Black Keys had balls”. Of course I think we have our own sound. Being a two piece band after The White Stripes and The Black Keys, there’s no avoiding the comparison. From there we got heavily into all the bands on Alive Natural Sound Records, Fat Possum, and anything labeled Hill Country Blues. That whole scene really drew us in.

Was there a certain story you were trying to tell?

We would book tours in certain cities specifically to try and get on people’s radar. Like the time we toured around Mississippi, we hit Oxford and before our gig we hung around outside of the Fat Possum Records offices until somebody came out. That was awesome, they let us in and gave us a tour of their warehouses. I actually handed Mathew Johnson, one of the founders, our ‘Grief’ Factory seven inch. A couple of the people working the office came to our show that night at a place called Rooster’s Blues House. That was an incredible day for us even if nothing came of it, it felt like the movie Airheads when they break into the radio station to play their cassette on air.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favorite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Lately I’ve been really into the 1972 album ‘Hellbound Train’ by Savoy Brown. Thanks for taking the time to interview us.

Klemen Breznikar

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