Sounding like a mix of Tora Tora, Roxy Blue, and Babylon A.D., Voodoo Moonshine is a bluesy, groove-based rock ‘n roll band from the Southern US. And if the name rings a bell, that’s because Voodoo Moonshine released their debut album, The Decade Of Decay, in 2005. 17 years later, and it’s time for the sophomore CD, Bottom Of The Barrel, available February 4 via Dark Star Records.     

Sole remaining original member, guitarist Jeff Losawyer, brings Brave Words up to date on all things Voodoo Moonshine. “It’s been a long work for me, personally, with this CD,” begins the six-stringer. “I started it ten years ago. I thought I was done, with another singer, and just shelved it. Then I started getting some random weird calls from music guys and I was like, holy shit! I guess I got to put the band back together.”

Losawyer provides a quick history lesson: “The Decade Of Decay ended up taking off, and I was really busy with that for a couple of years until 2008. Around that time everyone was tired and wanted a break; and life happened. My grandmother got sick, our original bass player died; I had multiple people die, and I hadn’t been back home to Oklahoma in 12 years. So, I went back home because my grandmother had got ill. After being busy for so long, it was a totally different world. I could relax and kick back; it was peaceful.” 

“In 2009 I did a solo album, Life And Last Wishes Dismissed. It was basically songs I had written for funerals and people I loved that I had lost. I had a manager at that time, and we had some interest in it. He asked, ‘Do you want to put it out?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ I told him, if we put it out, I want all the proceeds to go to the Cancer Society, and things like that. So, it was released on a small scale, nothing pushed. It’s never been reduplicated; I’m not even sure what it sold. It was just for me and my loved ones. You won’t find it. It’s not distributed anywhere. I had a lot of bad management issues at the time. Being home and writing that, it got me back in the mood of writing. After I wrote that and we released it, that’s when I started writing Bottom Of The Barrel. Basically, I got in my van, and headed back to Memphis. I called our drummer and said, ‘We need to get some people together so we can start writing and recording.’ There’s really been no plan… it just happened. You work hard, but I’m not pushing like I was when I was 18, chasing it. Things have kind of fallen into our lap, and we just go with them.”

Pulling a page from Journey’s playbook, Voodoo Moonshine found their current singer, Pedro Espada, on YouTube. “Yeah, it’s really weird, man,” admits Losawyer. “I had started recording this CD back in 2010, something like that. I was married at the time, and my wife got ill. So, I stopped everything to care for her. Do the working thing and give her the best insurance possible. So, I’m working, not even checking social media, not really pushing anything, just checking the old websites occasionally. I had been contacted by a pretty big manager at the time, He didn’t say anything over than, ‘I really like what you guys do, just be careful in the industry.’ Wasn’t trying to sell me nothing, wasn’t asking anything. A few days later I got a message from a big producer, and I’m like, ‘This is some bullshit.’ It was all out of the blue, I thought it was some social media bullshit, a couple of bored guys. But he was wanting to produce it. I’m like, ‘This is just odd.’ So, I checked into it, and it was legit. At the time, I had a singer, Henry Rundell, who used to be in a band called Voodoo Six in England, and he originally recorded these tracks with me. I knew I wasn’t going to work with him. He was in another band at that time, because no one’s going to sit around and wait while I take off for seven years to take care of my wife. With these calls and these conversations, I had to find a singer. My original singer off The Decade Of Decay, Gary Geiger, he had retired, he was the smart one, making six figures a year. I’m just looking at shit on Facebook and YouTube, and I happened to see Pedro.” 

“Pedro was doing some of his videos, in the studio, and the dude was amazing! I saw him do Steelheart – ‘I’ll Never Let You Go’, and I was like, holy crap! Then I thought, ‘Well, this is in a studio setting. He could sound like Geoff Tate. He could sound like Steelheart. I want to see some live stuff.’ So, I got online and saw his cover band playing live at Bike Fest in Florida. They were doing ‘Everybody Loves Eileen’ by Steelheart, and it sounded exactly like it. I was like, holy shit! So, I just sent him messages, and of course, he had the same mentality as me. ‘This is some bullshit on social media.’ I said, ‘I’d like to work with you, check out these songs.’ He kind of blew me off for a couple months. Then he finally started listening to them and liked what he heard. I was in Georgia, and he’s like, ‘We’re playing at Bike Fest, why don’t you come down and just jam with us?’ Our first jam was at Bike Fest, which was in front of about 3,000 people. I had been in retirement, so that was kind of the audition for each other, in front of all these people. I got out on stage with him and screwed up some Skid Row and Metallica. But it went from there, and that was in 2018. We started working together then. The first song we did together, that he laid down, was ‘Eden In Your Eyes’, which we ended up doing a video just me and him; an acoustic version of it.”

In fact, there are two versions of “Eden In Your Eyes” on Bottom Of The Barrel – original and acoustic. “Actually, ‘Eden In Your Eyes’ was an instrumental on my solo album,” explains Losawyer. When I started working with Henry (Rundell – vocalist) in England, he loved that song. He’s like, ‘Dude, we’ve got to put some lyrics to this.’ So, I started working on lyrics. That’s how it came about, it was just a fluke; wasn’t expected to happen. The acoustic version, the extra song on this CD, is the version that me and Pedro did, the video on YouTube. Even with just vocals and a guitar, it’s a beautiful song, so we thought we’d throw that on there too. The other version on Bottom Of The Barrel is orchestrated with violin, viola, cello, all that stuff.”

The initial lineup of Voodoo Moonshine was a five-piece, with two guitarists. In 2022, the band is a four-piece, with Jeff Losawyer as the one-and-only guitarist; he elaborates upon the downsizing: “We had a couple. When I went down there and jammed with Pedro and his cover band, the other guys liked the songs too and asked, ‘Why don’t we join?’ I’m thinking, ‘These guys have been together about ten years, why don’t I just try to get the whole damn band? They obviously aren’t going to kill each other.’ I didn’t take on the whole band, but we had the guitar player. He’s actually in ‘Locked And Loaded’, along with Pedro and his old bass player; that’s the first video we did for this album. Not two months after we did that video, I had to get rid of him. Things didn’t work out. It’s a business. There’s a different mentality, and guys are older now. There’s so much they want to do, and so much they don’t want to do… I don’t expect anyone to sacrifice and push as hard as I will, because it’s been my baby since day one. But if I’ve got business set up, you’ve got to take care of it. And if you can’t handle your business, then unfortunately, you can’t be involved. So, it didn’t work out with those guys. I think it’s just easier for them to do the weekend stuff with cover bands.” 

“So, I tried another guitar player. We had opened for Saliva in Tennessee, which was this other guitar player’s first show. Then we went up and played with Texas Hippie Coalition in Ohio, and it was just a catastrophe with that guy too. It takes a lot of time to get these guys worked in. Not only that - this is a business, and it’s expensive. These videos cost money. You have to redo the pictures, all this nonsense, just to put the CD out. The CD came out a year later, simply because the other guys were in all the pictures, and I’m not about to promote them; they didn’t do anything on the album. Finally, me and the guys – Pedro, Eddie our new drummer, and Hector our bass player – it’s like, we don’t need a second guitarist. I can pull it off. And Pedro plays guitar, if he’s got to play guitar on some things with me, that’s cool, that’ll work. But otherwise, we really just don’t want the headache.” 

“To be honest with you, it started out a five-piece back in the day, and that guy was actually my brother-in-law; unfortunately, I had to terminate him too. This band has never been everyone living together and working like when you’re 18 years old. This guy lives in Oklahoma, this guy lives in Minnesota, and we all come together. This is our plan, we all get together, rehearse for a week or two, and go out and play. If you’re a professional, you don’t have to practice every day. That’s always been a good thing, and a bad thing. A good thing because we’re not around each other all the time, wanting to kill each other. A bad thing because we can’t rehearse all the time. With writing, it’s working out pretty good, and thank God for technology. I can come up with an idea, I’ll shoot the file over to Pedro, we’ll send ideas back and forth. All my guys are in Florida, and I’m in Georgia; it’s a seven-hour ride. When we’ve got something to do, it’s not a big deal. We’ll hop in the vehicles and come together. It’s just easier with us four, as opposed to adding another guy.”

Not only is Bottom Of The Barrel the title of the new album, it was also the name of a Moonshine Voodoo DVD, released in 2005. “Yeah, nothing we’re doing is in order,” confesses Losawyer. “The DVD back then was called The Bottom Of The Barrel. We did a few pressings of it, sold a little bit of it, but it’s nothing at all; it wasn’t distributed. Originally, when I started writing songs for this, it was going to be called Back Porch Boogie And The Peace Pipe Tribe. Well, that was too long of a title – nobody liked it. So, Bottom Of The Barrel popped back up in my head. It seems like I’m always having to scramble to get things together, so I thought that was perfect, Bottom Of The Barrel. Everyone loved it, so here it is again. Now it’s the new CD.”

“Locked And Loaded” initially appeared on Voodoo Moonshine’s debut The Decade Of Decay, with Gary Geiger singing. Now it’s resurfaced on Bottom Of The Barrel, with Pedro Espada on vocals. According to Losawyer, “‘Locked And Loaded’ was the most played song, and it did the best off that first CD. What had happened, with this CD… when Pedro joined, I had all the songs, I had 11 songs. Well, he didn’t like two or three of them. So, we were a song short. The Decade Of Decay, my old singer had the external hard drive with the files on it. And I had an external hard drive with the files on it. His house got robbed, that thing was stolen. My house got robbed about three months later, it was stolen. So, I don’t have the files for that anymore. I just happened to have a disk; I had sent it to Pedro when we started talking, and I forgot they were the actual files. So, for the album, we had nine songs. We were going to have to write another song. We needed at least ten songs. I forgot I had sent him the files for ‘Locked And Loaded’ on that disk. Just out of the blue, Pedro goes, ‘Do you have the lyrics for “Locked And Loaded”’? I sent them to him. About two days later, he sends me the song back with his vocals and he says, ‘That’s song ten, I’m done.’ Holy shit, great! That was another fluke that just happened. I was really surprised with that video. If you look at our videos, there’s shit for numbers on all our other quarantine videos and everything else. But that video has been played over 21,000 times, with very little promotion. So yeah, everything’s just kind of by the seat of your pants, fluke-type shit going on over here.”

Speaking of “Locked And Loaded”, In 1997, Jackyl had a song called “Locked And Loaded” which Brian Johnson from AC/DC sang on, alongside Jesse James Dupree. “I like Jackyl, but I never really bought their CDs,” says Losawyer. “Other than the songs that radio shoves down our throat, didn’t even know they had one called ‘Locked And Loaded’. Did not pay attention to that, until I started putting out videos, and all of a sudden we got a copyright claim – no, this is our song. Actually, ‘Locked And Loaded’, I wrote when we were out in LA, me and my original singer in ’89. I had written the riffs for that song way back then, and we didn’t finish it until the first CD. When you start searching, there’s all kinds of bands that have songs called ‘Locked And Loaded’. I didn’t even know Jackyl had one, thank God you can’t copyright titles.”

The other familiar title on Bottom Of The Barrel is “Round And Round” – without a doubt Ratt’s most famous song, from their 1984 album, Out Of The Cellar. “Yep, I was concerned about that. Like I said, I had the singer Henry, from England, that was originally something he had come up with, and it was titled ‘Round And Round’. I rewrote it, and I’m thinking, that’s the first thing that’s going to pop up – ‘Round And Round’. You hear that title; you think that type of song. Then you start it, and it’s a ballad; so, I think we’re okay. I never sit down and go, ‘Let’s write a song that’s titled the same as another old hit. But I’m not going to change just because there’s another song – now, I don’t think I’d write a song called ‘Purple Haze’ or ‘Stairway To Heaven’.”

Lyrically, the song “Sometimes Ya Just Wanna” is very similar in intent to “I Just Wanna” by KISS. “You know, I didn’t think about that. Thanks for putting that in my head. At the time, when I was writing the first version of this CD, I had nine songs, and I had one left that I needed to write. I’m sitting locked up in a room with my pit bull, eating Taco Bell, and that idea popped in my head about going out to a club and getting laid. There’s no deep thought about it. But yeah, I didn’t even think about that. Good thing it’s changed up a little bit, huh.” 

When it comes to Voodoo Moonshine touring in 2022… “Of course, there’s plans. My plan right now is for us to kick this CD off. Obviously, you want to grow your fan base, you want to play. But we’re not going to go out and play in every dive just for the sake of playing. Plus, right now we really can’t gauge what the hell’s going to happen. We got agencies we’re working with, but we’re not calling them every week going, ‘We’ve got to get shows, where are we playing?’ Right now, we’re fixing to record an acoustic livestream, and we’ll put that out for everybody because of this. People can’t go to clubs, and people are afraid to go to clubs, cause you don’t know. So, we’re going to do that, and in the meantime, everyone is working on shows. We’re working on a CD release show, which’ll probably be done in Florida, cause all the guys are down there, plus it’s more of a free state really to do it. We’re trying to do everything as smart as we can. As much as everyone thinks, ‘Hey man, you’re in a band, you get together, drink beer, play a show, and everything’s great – chicks and drugs.’ Well, it’s not that, it’s a business. We want to try to do something with this, and it’s a couple grand to get on the bus and go play somewhere; there’s expenses involved. We want to play to everyone we can, but it’s got to be beneficial for everybody involved.”