Does this band sound like the original Mudcrutch?

Campbell: The key here is it’s very true to the original Mudcrutch. The Mudcrutch that got signed to Shelter records and put out a few singles was a different Mudcrutch: Tom Leadon had left, Randall Marsh had left and a few other guys had come in and we’d gotten a little away from that original sound. This band is the original lineup and inspiration of what that band was all about. It sounds just like we did back in the day. When we recorded the album, we made a point of recording it live with no headphones, live vocals, live solos. It’s very, very true.

Leadon: What’s different, though, is that 30 some years later, we’ve all been playing, some of us famously, some of us not so famously. We’ve all been progressing with our music and I feel like we’re all much better players, singers and writers than we were then. When we started Mudcrutch, I wasn’t even 18 yet and by the time I was 20, I’d left the band. We had something special, it just never had a chance to fully develop. That’s something that’s so satisfying with his project. To me it feels like a chance to see what might have been.

Did you go back and listen to the original material when you were all together?

Campbell: That’s another thing that’s interesting: Even though we have the same sound and chemistry that we had back in the day, maybe 80 percent of the songs are freshly written.

Has there been any thought to revisit it or are you letting it lie?

Campbell: We like to leave that alone and move on with newer songs. We did a few covers on the record that were older, that we used to do back in the day, like "Six Days on the Road" and "Lover on the Bayou." There’s one song on the album that we brought back from the old days that we actually never recorded but used to play at our shows that Tom Leadon wrote, "Queen of the Go Go Girls."

Leadon: Now that we’re much more mature, better players—and Tom was always a good writer but now he’s a great writer—we come in and do the best song we have at the moment and it’s not going to be a song we wrote 35 years ago. Most of the others are brand-new songs and that’s because Tom is writing better now than he did then. He thought about some of the old songs, he thought, "Nah, that’s the sound of guys learning to play and write."

One of the bands that Mudcrutch gets compared to a lot is Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons. I’m curious to hear your respective takes on Parsons.

Campbell: I’ve always thought he was a genius, brilliant and very soulful singer and I always loved his records. It was actually Tom Leadon and Tom Petty who turned me on to him. I just loved his whole trip.

Leadon: Tom and I first heard him, like many people, on Sweetheart of the Rodeo and we were really into that and we actually used to cover some of the tunes he did, like "Empty Bottle, Broken Heart." We were hip to the fact that he and Chris Hillman started The Flying Brothers. Hillman was someone who my older brother Bernie had been in a band with as teenagers in San Diego before The Byrds, called Scottsville Squirrel Barkers. Chris was the main guy that inspired my brother to move to L.A. to try and make it. So we started listening to the first Flying Burrito album and we just loved it. We were doing Flying Burritos covers and nobody in Florida was doing anything like that. They didn’t understand why these longhaired rock musicians would be playing this truck-stop country music. We just loved it. Gram, for me, was the one that inspired me to sing other than just a few harmony parts I used to do. … So really, the reason Tom Petty and I got into country was my brother’s influence. We’d get these records from the West Coast and the public in general didn’t know about it and then [my brother] joined The Flying Burrito Brothers, which was our favorite band. I was just thrilled. He made a couple of records with them.

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