“I am 62 years of age but I’m at my peak,” says Dave Mason on the eve of his new release, 26 Letters 12 Notes. While veteran artists often go the way of nostalgia, Mason is in fine form, playing and singing as well as he ever has. While the founding Traffic member has recorded with everyone from Hendrix, the Stones and Clapton to Fleetwood Mac, Cass Elliot and George Harrison, he still yearns for the stage as he clocks in well over a hundred shows a year.

26 Letters 12 Notes was six years in the making—not the typical time frame for recording.
I started doing it about six years ago, and I was pretty much living on my own. I had a house, in the middle of nowhere, overlooking a lake, so I pretty much wired the whole house up to play some music. I’d start recording some stuff. I’m like the song, the song and the song. So until there’s a good song, something I think really works, I won’t even contemplate or attempt to record.

Talk to me about the songs on the album.
There are songs that I wrote, there are songs that I co-wrote, and there are songs that I didn’t write. I was trying to stack the deck. I can’t come up with something great every time, and since I am at the point where I really don’t care whether they are my songs anymore, I don’t really have anything to prove that way. I had no problem hearing somebody else’s song and thinking, Wow, that’s a cool song, I’d like to do that. Like “Good to You” is by a friend of mine from Laguna beach, and they had a great reggae band, and that song was sort of done reggae, but I just loved the chorus “I wanna be good to you/Do all the things you asked me to” so I arranged it the way it’s arranged. But I’ve never really been a very prolific writer. It took me two years to write the eight songs on Alone Together, but I was a lot younger then—I had things to prove.

You said one of the reasons that you didn’t fit with Traffic was that your writing was always commercial, and I think by commercial you mean readily accessible. Would you say that held, and still holds true, when you are writing?
Absolutely. I like melodies and words, and I like hooks. That’s what I grew up on—Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, The Platters, good old rock ‘n’ roll stuff.

You mentioned that you feel like your vocals are in the best shape they’ve ever.
I think that I’m at my peak. I think I’m as good as I’m ever going to be right now.
The year’s not over and I’ve already done 110 shows.

You never stopped touring. As you said, the muscles were always staying in shape. Did these songs get worked out on the road at all?
No. In fact, we are about to start learning them. Even though I’ve done sweetening, and may have tweaked arrangements and stuff like that, the basic recordings and performances, I tried to keep as spontaneous as possible, which is one of the things that I really tried to do on this album that sometimes I didn’t pull off on previous albums. I got a little too meticulous and maybe took a bit of the soul and the feel out of things. I tried to put a combination of sound, performance and production at the peak of what I could do right now. I tried to do something that had it all encompassed.

I’m sure you’ve performed a song like “Feelin’ Alright” hundreds and hundreds of times at this point. How do you keep it fresh?
Performing is a combination of the fact that I have guys in my band that I play with, that love to play and it goes hand in hand with the concept that I don’t get paid to play, I get paid to leave the house. The music’s free. You’re paying me to drag my ass around and go do this. You schlep around the country all the time—buses, planes, cars, taxis, hotels all the time—and you’ve basically got two great hours of the day. We want to have fun in those two hours. That’s how I tackle it, and that’s how I deal with it. So I’m not tired of the songs. I think they’ve lasted well, and I’m not tired of performing and having fun in the band and the same applies to the guys I play with. There are also a number of songs that leave room for improvisation or solos. People get to stretch out a little bit. They’re not playing exactly the same thing every night, so that helps keep it fresh.

One of the songs you still do is “All Along the Watchtower.”
Well, yeah. Most people want their money back if I don’t.

You helped Hendrix record his original version of that, and then you recorded it yourself.
I did it because I was on that original Hendrix version, and we both heard it at the same time, at the same party when we were listening to the John Wesley Harding album, so it had a little bit of nostalgia, a nod to Jimi when I did my version of it. I still think his version is way better than my version. But there are a lot of people that like my version. Why has it become so popular with people, and why can I guarantee that at every single show I’ve ever done, somebody’s going to be out there going, “Do Watchtower”? I don’t know why.

Of the initial days of Traffic, when you retreated to a communal country home to record, you’ve said, “We created a whole lifestyle for ourselves, a way of living, out of which the music came.” How much does physical place ultimately have to do with the resultant sound?
Well, like I said, I was in a very similar kind of situation, but many years later. I had a house, there wasn’t another house to be seen where I was living. It was overlooking a lake. My kids were gone. I’m not married. So for me it was kind of like going back to when I was 19 and how we tackled doing that stuff when we first had that place as Traffic. I was conjuring that environment where I didn’t have anybody to answer to, but I had 40-plus years more knowledge.

Gram Parsons was a good friend of yours. How instrumental was he in getting you to move from England to California?
I don’t think he was instrumental in me moving. After the second Traffic album [Traffic, 1968] there wasn’t much appreciation for the five songs that I had written for that album. At that point it became obvious that my place in that band wasn’t needed or wanted. I knew Gram because I had met him around the Stones and I slept on his couch for a little while, and then got to meet Cass Elliot, and just different people like Delaney and Bonnie. I had known those people beforehand a little bit and I was 22 years of age—what the hell, you know? Cast your fate to the wind and go for it.

Cass was one of the main people out there and her home was ground zero for that whole Laurel Canyon scene. I’ve seen this picture that [Henry] Diltz took of Clapton watching Joni Mitchell play while Crosby is smoking a joint and it seems to encapsulate what I envisioned this experience to be. Obviously you spent a ton of time there. Is there a peak experience for you out of so many?
I spent a lot of time there. Oh gosh, there were a number of them.

One that you would be willing to share?
[laughing] All kinds of people would come. Barry Maguire, I remember him, trashed out of his mind, and then the Wham-O people used to bring all their new toys to check out. Some of it never went to market. Graham [Nash] was there, who I’d known from The Hollies. So it became sort of a place for me because I was 22 and 7,000 miles away from where I grew up. Voytek Frykowski and Abby Folger would come over a lot to Cass’ house, and it’s possible that I could have been at that house the night Manson slaughtered all those people. There was a lot of bizarre stuff going on and for a kid that had just come to a brand-new country, a long way away, it was a new experience.