“It’ll be our first Canadian show! Our first time crossing the border; we’re really looking forward to it,” says Blacktop Mojo frontman Matt James, speaking exclusively to BraveWords scribe Aaron Small about his band’s show in Toronto, Ontario at The Rockpile on May 5th.

So much more than just the next up-and-coming band, Lone Star stalwarts Blacktop Mojo are poised to resurrect rock ‘n roll. Matt formed the band in 2012 with drummer Nathan Gillis. For starters, he explains where the name came from. “We live in a really small town in East Texas. Sometimes we’ll get a couple friends together, get in somebody’s truck, get a bottle of whiskey or something, and go on a back-road that nobody drives down. Just slow-poke it down the back-road listening to music; have a couple of drinks. I’m not advocating drinking and driving, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Anyway, we were doing that and… it’s all kind of fuzzy really, but I needed something to stir my drink up with. My buddy’s a duck hunter and he had a Mojo duck decoy – that was the brand of it. He handed me the little wing that you wind it up with. It was like, ‘Here use this, it’s a Mojo key.’ Like I said, it gets kind of fuzzy after that, but somehow we came back with the name Blacktop Mojo.”

Beyond impressive in the vocal department, Matt reveals how he found his voice. “I just started singing in high school; toward the end of my senior year I started teaching myself how to play guitar. I used to sing to my girlfriend over the phone – which is super corny! I’d sing to her, and one day she put me on speaker phone and surprised me; I didn’t know anybody else was listening. After I found out other people were listening, it was a cool little rush to sing to people. I went off to college and started singing at parties, and stuff like that; just continued on from there.” No formal training or vocal lessons? “I’ve never had any formal vocal lessons; I’ve looked up YouTube videos of how to warm up and things like that, but never any formal training. I’d love to have some, someday.”

Unafraid to get their hands dirty, Blacktop Mojo really built this band themselves, starting with the self-titled five song demo in 2013. That was followed by the I Am album in 2014 – a real DIY affair. And most recently Burn The Ships from 2017, released via their own label Cuhmon Records. “We kind of considered getting signed and looked into it,” admits Matt. “We found for the last record, that wasn’t for us. We’re still building, we wanted to see if we could do it ourselves and start our own label – stick it to the man, so to speak. But it’s still not outside of the realm of possibilities that we might sign with somebody in the future; it just depends on the project at the time.”

The song “Sweat” from the Burn The Ships album is definitely southern rock, and a completely original Blacktop Mojo tune. Yet it echoes the same blue-collar sentiments that “Working Man”, by Canadian rock icons Rush, did back in 1974. “Absolutely, yeah,” agrees Matt. “My Grandad sells farm equipment, so my summer job growing up was helping him work on chicken litter spreaders, which spread chicken shit. A lot of my summer was washing off chicken shit spreaders and fertilizer spreaders. But when you hop into a fertilizer spreader in the middle of a Texas summer, it’s 110 degrees outside, and they’re made out of stainless steel; you feel kind of like a piece of bacon in a frying pan. So, I did a lot of sweating, is basically what I’m getting at. A lot of the other lyrics are inspired by – in the area where we’re from, a lot of people work in the oil patch. They go out and work on these drilling rigs for a couple weeks at a time; they bust their asses for their families back home. And they miss a lot of stuff; we can definitely relate to that, being on the road a lot. So, it’s kind of a song for them.”

Dealing with chicken poop – in any aspect – doesn’t make for a glamourous job. Thankfully, Matt and the rest of Blacktop Mojo don’t have to punch in and out anymore. “We’ve been full-time musicians for almost two years now. We all moved into a house together and everybody quit their jobs, back before we went to record Burn The Ships. That’s kind of where the title of the album came from – no going back.” Being around your bandmates 24/7 could easily create nightmare scenarios. Not so for Blacktop Mojo. “We all get along really well, we all have a lot of respect for each other. We’re basically family at this point, and we actually enjoy spending time with each other. People don’t usually believe that, but we have good times together.”

Blacktop Mojo do an incredible cover of the Aerosmith classic “Dream On” – an iconic song by one of rock ‘n roll’s biggest bands. “That actually came about when we were writing songs for Burn The Ships,” recalls Matt. “It had been a while since we put out anything, so we started putting out little cover videos on our YouTube for the people who were following us, and they were going really well. We had a buddy come up to us and say, ‘You guys should do ‘Dream On’ by Aerosmith.’ We all looked at him like he was the craziest person on the planet! You don’t touch Aerosmith, cause they’re Aerosmith. But, our producer Philip Mosley caught wind of that sentiment and said, ‘Why don’t we just try it? If you don’t like it, nobody ever has to hear about it.’ So, we went in the studio and worked on it for a few days. We had a rough cut put together and took it to some of our trusted friends and family – cause our families never shy away from telling us if something sucks. But they didn’t hate it, so we ended up putting it on our YouTube channel, and kind of forgetting about it. By the time we went in to go record Burn The Ships, it had almost a million views on it. It was getting a lot of attention. So, we decided, with the theme of that album being, no going back and following your dreams, that ‘Dream On’ would be a perfect addition.” Blacktop Mojo’s cover of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” is currently at 3.7 million views on YouTube and counting.

As record stores die a painful death, Blacktop Mojo has embraced YouTube, really making it work for them. The band has music online that’s not available on their five-song demo, I Am, or Burn The Ships. For example, a cover of “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins; a great version with a very casual vibe to it. “For ‘In The Air Tonight’, we’re sponsored by a whiskey company called Texas Silver Star Whiskey. We were up at their distillery, which was an old bean factory at one point. They had a big, abandoned silo… we were kind of half drunk and said, ‘Let’s go do a song in the silo; it sounds cool in there.’ That was a huge surprise on how well that took off across the Internet. We didn’t rehearse that at all; it was just us messing around. We have played it a few times in our acoustic sets and it’s always a fun one; it’s one of my favourites.”

Even though Blacktop Mojo is currently on the road until the middle of June, they’ve already started work on album number three. “That is correct. We’ve started doing some demos, we’ve been writing pretty consistently. We’re kind of looking forward to going on the road and getting a little bit of different scenery, seeing what comes out.” Fans should expect the new album in 2019. “Yeah, most definitely. A tentative recording date would probably be this winter.” However, a sneak peek may surface on this North American tour. “I would say there’s a definite possibility that we’re going to be testing out some stuff. It should be fun.”

Catch Blacktop Mojo live in concert at a venue near you:

April
20 - Rock Box - San Antonio, TX
21 - Lago Del Pino – Tyler, TX
22 - OK City Limits - Oklahoma City, OK
24 - Phase 2 – Lynchburg, VA *
26 - Debonair – Teaneck, NJ
27 - Wally's – Hampton, NH *
28 - The Queen – Wilmington, DE *
30 - Capone's - Johnson City, TN *

May
2 - Mainstage - Morgantown, WV
3 - Smiling Moose - Pittsburgh, PA
4 - Whistlers - Watertown, NY
5 - Rockpile - Toronto, ON
6 - Token Lounge - Westland, MI
8 - The Forge - Joliet, IL
10 - Route 20 Outhouse - Racine, WI
11 - Phat Headz - Green Bay, WI
12 - Cheers - South Bend, IN
15 - Spicoli's - Waterloo, IA
16 - Shovelhead Saloon - Danville, IL
18 - Warehouse - Clarksville, TN
19 - Sidetracks - Huntsville, AL
26 - Slidebar in Fullerton CA
31 - Knitting Factory - Spokane, WA

June
4 - El Corazon - Seattle, WA
6 - Diamondz - Jerome, ID
12 - Black Sheep - Colorado Springs, CO
13 - Streets of London - Denver, CO

* with Black Stone Cherry