When he’s working on his albums, Keb’ Mo’ likes to give them personal working titles so that he can keep himself on target and true to the message he wants to make. The working title for his newest, Good To Be?

“What The Fuck!?”

“That’s the reaction I wanted from the record,” said the five-time Grammy winner, whose name is Kevin Moore. “I want to get people’s attention in a different way and to move some energy.”

The Compton born and raised artist, who’s lived in the Nashville area for more than a decade, is best known for being a blues guitarist, yet he’s worked within other genres for decades. Good To Be connects his L.A. blues roots with soul, country and Americana, spaces he’s comfortably worked in since the 1970s.

It includes performances by some talented friends in Kristin Chenoweth, Old Crow Medicine Show, Darius Rucker, Marcus Miller, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Ernest “Rip” Patton, a Nashville Freedom Rider who was once a neighbor to Moore in Compton (and passed away before the album’s release). It was produced by Vince Gill and Tom Hambridge (B.B. King, Buddy Guy).

While the album is largely a hopeful, glass-half-full affair, the 70-year-old Keb’ Mo’ wanted to “move energy” by addressing older generations’ failure at addressing big issues like climate change, and of course the craziness of the pandemic and the tumultuous summer of 2020.

He wrote most of the songs between his Nashville home and his family home in Compton, which he had bought from his mother before she passed in 2018 and has been renovating with his wife. “Quiet Moments” (with Chenoweth), however, he wrote in the 1970s. There’s also a cover of his friend Bill Withers’ classic “Lean on Me.”

A 2021 recipient of the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Performance Award, Keb’ Mo’ took some time away from working on music for the Chuck Lorre TV show “B Positive” (he also wrote the show’s theme) for a video call from his home in Franklin, Tenn. to speak about Good To Be (which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Blues chart and No. 5 on the Americana/Folk chart) and his positive outlook, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable discord.

RIFF: How difficult was it to write in such a hopeful manner during such a trying time? Were you optimistic at the time, or were you counting on the songs to put you in a better mood and make you more hopeful?

Keb’ Mo’: I’m always very hopeful because I know that the news is always cherrypicking the stuff that’s going to get people riled up or get people interested in watching the news, watching what’s going on. And I know that those things need to be aired, and we need to see that stuff. God, there’s gotta be a whole plethora of things great that are happening all the time. I know every cop is not trying to kill a Black man, you know? I just know that there’s mostly good going on, just based on what’s going around me and my neighborhood and my life. There’s some dark spots, but most of it is pretty damn good, and the bad actors tend to get all the attention.

You had quite a few guests on your album. Were they friends of yours beforehand? How did you get them involved? For example, Kristen Chenowith; I wouldn’t anticipate her being on one of your records.

Keb’ Mo’: I met her a few years prior at a party in L.A., and we got along famously. She’s a very social animal. She’s very kind. She’s just a beautiful spirit, and she connected with me. Last year, she called and invited me to sing with her on her Christmas album out of the blue, and I’m like, “OK, yeah!”

So, in turn, I happened to have that song that I thought she would be perfect on, and she did it, so it just kind of happened organically. The only person I had never met before was Darius [Rucker]. The way that came about was that I mentioned to someone that it would be cool if he was on that song, and someone who happened to be in that room took it upon themselves to go out and find him. A couple days later, I hear, like he was hearing the song, and he was down for it. So, I was like, “Of course! Yes.” That’s how that happened.

Marcus Miller is a friend of mine, Vince Gill is a friend of mine, Tom Hambridge is a friend of mine. Christone “Kingfish” is a friend of mine.

Kingfish is such a hot artist in blues right now. Why do you think his music is making such strong connections with other people right now? 

Keb’ Mo’: Because he’s great.

How did you first discover Kingfish?

Keb’ Mo’: I discovered him on YouTube. He was like 16. I caught him and said, “Who is this guy?” Somebody told me, “He’s the Kingfish!” I went on YouTube and, finally, I was like, “Wow,” so I got a chance to meet him, probably about a year before he made his first record, maybe even earlier, in Memphis at BB King’s [funeral] march down Beale Street. BB King’s last walk, you know, they walked his body down Beale Street. I met Kingfish there. I was really excited to meet him. He’s such a cool, such a sweet guy. He’s the real deal, man.

How did you end up in Nashville?

Keb’ Mo’: I hope it’s not the end, but I’m here now. [Reporter stammers]. I’m messing with you. Finally, I found my wife, and was excited to move out of L.A., and so we came to Nashville. It was probably the only logical place to go, and so it worked out really good.

I had heard that you wanted not a slower life, but a more normal life.

Keb’ Mo’: I had a normal life in L.A. My wife is from a small town in Wisconsin, and she’ll pick up and move out of town in a heartbeat. She’s got a little bit of a nomad in her.

So it’s logical to follow your wife.

Keb’ Mo’: Happy wife. If she wants to go somewhere, and I agreed and went along with it. I admit I was a little skeptical whether it would be a good idea, but it was a better idea than I could ever imagine.

You’ve delved deeply into numerous genres, including country, despite many people seeing you as a blues musician. Was there anything you wanted to say to people by making an album that was so heavily dependent on country and folk, acoustic, Americana persuasions?

Keb’ Mo’: I never think like that. I just think in terms of what’s going on in my life, where I am, what’s going on around. I live in Nashville. You hang around people in Nashville, a little country is going to get on you. I wrote country songs in the ‘70s. I’m just really being myself.

I genuinely feel all the things that I do in terms of the genre-bending, if people call it that. People kind of like to know where to find you and like to put the blues moniker on you. I love having the blues moniker on me; it’s fine. I give myself the freedom to do musically what I’d like to do, and people can have the freedom to call me whatever they want to call me, but it’s OK because I’m going to do what I’m gonna. People are gonna think what they think about it. It’s a collaboration of opinions about who I am: mine and the outside world, or individuals, which I welcome and I celebrate.

There’s a touching cover of “Lean on Me” on the record. You were pretty close to Bill Withers, right?

Keb’ Mo’: I knew him pretty good. I knew him before he passed, probably about five years. Before he passed, I had hung out with him from time to time, spoken with him on the phone several times.

A couple times, he just called me out the blue, “Keb’ Mo’, whatcha doing?” It was an honor to rub elbows with a master such as he is of his craft. I’m very proud of that, and so I was messing around with the song. I think I messed around with it before he passed.

I was just sitting at the guitar playing it in B flat because the key of C is a little too high for me. I can hit it, but it sounds like an animal being slaughtered by a pack of lions. [laughs]. I did it in B flat and just found another way. The song speaks for itself. That song holds up in any key. That song ended up on the record by me just messing around.

Songs like “Marvelous to Me” and “Louder” aren’t all happy-go-lucky, everything-is-great-in-the-world sort of thing. How did you work those songs in? Or were those some of the first songs you started with? 

Keb’ Mo’: “Louder” was one of the first ones I started with. I wanted to make an attempt not to be admired by a younger generation—not to get a young audience—because young people don’t usually want to listen to some old guy. They want to be around their peers. But I wanted to make a connection with a younger audience and a connection with an older audience or generation to address the issue of climate change and all those things that are going on in the world we didn’t fix, and the generation before us didn’t fix it. These problems keep being handed down and aren’t solved.

Someone wanted to use it about an entirely different thing. I was like, “Oh, I didn’t really say anything [overt] about climate change, but that’s what I meant.” It turned out that applies to other things that run amiss in society as well, which is OK. But it was meant to make that connection.

Then “Marvelous to Me” came about later on in the process. That was a collaboration by my longtime writing partner John Lewis Parker. He sent me this piano piece … and it was all basically just like you hear it on the record, all the parts. It was the middle of that summer of riots and Black Lives Matter and George Floyd being murdered in front of our very eyes. Things were pretty dark. The whole world was just going crazy. COVID was running rampant, and so when I heard this music, I just thought to myself.

I started writing, “It was a cloudy day.” It literally came out like very linear. I didn’t have a hook, first. I just wrote each line, “It’s a cloudy day/ No sunshine, it’s cold, gloomy and gray/ Oh, I have felt much better/ And I’ve had my ups and downs along the way/ But when I look back, I just laugh/ And all my troubles just melt into the sea/ And my vision is clear in the aftermath/ Hindsight being 2020/ The future looks marvelous to me.” Things are going to get better, so it’s mentioning the obvious, but not holding us, the best that we were going to be from here on out.

I kind of lose it every time when I sing it … because when it gets to that part of the bridge, and I gotta come back after Kingfish’s solo. Kingfish’s character in the song is the future. He’s young, he’s talented, he’s a messenger, he’s somebody we look up to, you know. I played the first part of the solo on my dobro, and I relinquish the second part to him to just rip it, and then drop it back into the song and talk about, “It’s a cloudy day, no sunshine and gray,” then the gospel thing: “I’ve been up and down.” And then when you get to the last part, “If Martin Luther was here today/ Tell me what would he have to say?”

Going back into the legacy of a great man, with a vision: “I have a dream,” you know? In a sense, he was looking at some really dark things and had a dream that one day, someday, “What would he say now?” He’d say, “I still have a dream, and the future looks marvelous to me.” In a sense, I dug up his spirit and put him in the song, When I sung it, I tried to channel him saying it.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.