BluesClassic Rock
Evil Teen Records · 18 September 2026
The record opens and closes with the two halves of «Dreams and Songs», and in between sit fourteen songs spread across Warren Haynes’ four musical lives: the Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule, his own solo career, and the songs he sings that belong to other people. The recording dates from 2019, at Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, the city where he grew up, with the sixty-four players of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra and a live band featuring Oteil Burbridge on bass, Jeff Sipe on drums, John Medeski on keys and Greg Osby on sax. The tape has taken seven years to come out.
The orchestration isn’t the work of one hand. There are six arrangers (David Campbell, Jim Gray, Tom Matta, Vince Mendoza, Sean O’Loughlin and Chris Walden), each handling specific pieces, so the treatment shifts from song to song rather than applying the same coat of varnish to everything. «Thorazine Shuffle» is where the system pays off best: the horns come in as a countermelody while the band holds the groove, and the track keeps the long solo stretches it had live with Gov’t Mule. «Banks of the Deep End» carries the weight of the strings and vocal harmonies without losing the bassline.
It’s harder going with the Grateful Dead material. «Black Peter» used to live on scarcity, an almost-acoustic song set against silence, and here orchestral accents arrive that strip away the air that held it up. «Terrapin Station» and «Shakedown Street» fare far better, because they already had a rhythm section and written development before anyone thought about an orchestra.
Don Was is credited as co-producer with Haynes, and Bob Clearmountain mixes it, and the result has a studio finish that isn’t what you’d usually expect from a single night’s recording. «Whipping Post» closes past the twelve-minute mark with Osby’s sax crossing paths with the strings, and it’s the track that best explains why this material didn’t stay on the shelf for good.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Enric Vilaplana