North Mississippi Allstars have simple take on music

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North Mississippi Allstars have simple take on music
February 4, 2010
By Kevin Coffey
Omaha.com

Fret not, aspiring musicians. You don't need a lot of fancy equipment to do it like the big boys.
Most of you have the exact same tools that the North Mississippi Allstars use to write and record music.
When Luther Dickinson has an idea, he records it on his cell phone. Then he e-mails it to himself and polishes it on his home computer with audio recording software. In this case, he used Apple's Garage Band.
“It's brilliant. I hit one button and hit another and I'm recording,” Dickinson said, calling from the band's tour stop in Santa Cruz, Calif.

“It would be much easier to sit down and write a song on acoustic guitar and sing it, but that's never been my bag,” he said. “I'm always recording musical ideas and lyrical ideas and I sort them out later. You got music floating around and lyrics floating around and before you know it, they come together.”
The songs Dickinson writes are the kind of Southern blues rock you would expect from three guys from Hernando, Miss.
After the Allstars' debut in 2000, they were nominated for a Grammy and given the “W.C. Handy Award” for best new artist. That's the highest honor a blues group can get.
The group — including his brother Cody Dickinson and Chris Crew — is working on writing songs for an album right now and expect to record and release it later this year.
Dickinson said he's taken a different approach to life and music — and the coming album — since the death late last year of his and Cody's father.
“You need to play every record like it's your last because one of them will be,” he said.