Booker T. Jones Delivering First Solo Set in 28 Years

Booker T. Jones, famed performer, producer and songwriter and the man behind Booker T. & the MGs, has returned to the studio to record his first solo album since the early-80's. Potato Hole is due April 21 from Anti-Records.

Jones has brought in the Drive-By Truckers for his backing band along with Neil Young, who plays guitar on nine of the album's ten tracks, to produce an album which "re-introduces the neglected all-instrumental format to a noisy, crowded marketplace crying out for precisely the type of soul satisfying pleasure which Jones excels at."

Booker plays organ, acoustic and electric guitar on the album and wrote seven of the ten tracks, with the other three being covers of Outkast's Hey Ya, Tom Waits' Get Behind the Mule and the Drive-By Truckers' Space City. The album was recorded in a one week period last year in Georgia and California and is produced by Jones and Rob Schnapf.

On his website, Jones wrote "I really feel like I've been opened up again, I've got the creative muse working for me. It's like I have discovered a new method, a little road I can take to open it up, and I'm excited about playing this music."

He also told Billboard "It was a matter of finding people to help me interpret these ideas. In the public's mind, it's gonna be a new sound for me. In my mind it's not. I've loved rock for a long time. In the '60s I wrote a few songs for Otis Redding and Eddie Floyd that were rock songs, but it was too soon for us to be doing that kind of music."

The track listing for Potato Hole

• Pound It Out
• She Breaks
• Hey Ya
• Native New Yorker
• Nan
• Warped Sister
• Get Behind The Mule
• Reunion Time
• Potato Hole
• Space City