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Spotlight: The London Souls

Once a trio, Neal began searching for a more concise sound—“less five-minute-long guitar duels”—in a band with more space to fill that didn’t want to lose any intensity, either.

It wasn’t long before the group began catching fellow musicians’ ears. One is Warren Haynes, who has hosted the band at both Christmas Jam and Mountain Jam in the past two years, and who, as Neal recalls, met the group when he randomly showed up at a Mercury Lounge gig in 2008. (“All of a sudden, there’s Warren Haynes. We’re obviously all fans [of his],” Neal says.)

Another supporter is Soulive’s Eric Krasno, who has become a public cheerleader of the Souls on Twitter and a notable sit-in guest. As Neal remembers it, the band saw Krasno at Christmas Jam but didn’t interact with him until the members of Soulive breezed through the Lovin’ Cup Café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the Souls were regulars.

“We’re in the corner playing and Soulive walks in,” St. Hillaire recalls. “And they’re just hanging out. They weren’t there to see us or anything—I think they knew the owner—but we were there.”

Nash laughs: “They jammed with us, I think.”

“And really, just us,” Matsuyama underscores. “They would come up, and then someone would sit out and that person would become the whole audience.”

Then, there’s the producer Ethan Johns. Famous for his work with Ray LaMontagne, Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon and plenty of others, Johns was a word-of-mouth fan who contacted the band in May 2009 about recording an album. In a two-week span last fall, The London Souls finished its debut at Abbey Road Studios in London.

“What’s funny is that when we went over there, [Johns had] been listening to a whole album’s worth of earlier stuff of ours that we had no intention of recording,” St. Hillaire says. “He had all these ideas about what could go where and we came in with a different sound.”

Neal says that the band previewed the new material for Johns on the first night was in town at a local bar in London. “He was [still] down,” Neal the guitarist chuckles. “We passed.”