Songlines has an open and natural human feel. Honest music for music’s sake.

Derek Trucks has earned a reputation as one of the finest slide players to come on the scene lately, gaining notoriety through his work playing with the Allman Brothers. Trucks even has the title of the youngest player to make Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list. Yet his new album, Songlines, travels way beyond traditional blues and rock.

Songlines blends jazz, rock, blues, Latin, Eastern Indian, and other world music into an exploration inspired by the Aboriginal creation myths. The stories told of legendary totemic elder beings who wandered the Australian continent singing the earth into existence along invisible pathways that were later known as songlines. I love the idea that a song can be used as cultural map across great distances, and that you can trace the roots of a sound to a place. We do it all the time and don’t realize it; we hear a song and relate it to where the band is from. But today, musical influences are not bound as much by geography. It’s more about how hungry your ears are and how much you choose to absorb.

There is a wide variety of music styles, including Roland Kirk’s “Volunteered Slavery,” traditional acoustic slide and Delta blues, a 700-year-old Pakistani jam, the Jamaican reggae of “Sailing On,” a New Orleans–style funk tune, and much more. The disc still has a smooth flow and does not seem to jump around, because all of the music is built around the sound of the band itself and the interaction of the players.

The vocals of Mike Mattison are soulful and fit beautifully into the band’s sound. All of the musicians are top-notch and play with sincerity. Their percussionist, Count M’Butu, has worked with a wide variety of musicians, including Col. Bruce Hampton & the Aquarium Rescue Unit and Frank Zappa. The Hammond organ work by Kofi Burbridge is warm, fat, and funky. DTB’s core is still Todd Smallie on bass and Yonrico Scott on drums. They are solid and sensitive, tight and loose, up-front and laid-back, all at the same.

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