The Robert Cray Band

Legendary soul-blues musician returns with All Over Again, his first album in 7 years. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, All Over Again captures 5-time Grammy winner Robert Cray at the peak of his powers. Illustrious drummer Steve Jordan is All Over Again’s producer and plays on every track.

“Steve understands my sound,” says Robert Cray of a working relationship with Steve Jordan that stretches back to 1986 when Keith Richards hired both men to join a supergroup backing Chuck Berry for Taylor Hackford’s Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll concert film. “He’s a killer drummer, so keeps me on my toes.”

Cray notes that recording All Over Again at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, was a first for both men. With passion he says, “where the likes of Wilson Pickett, Etta James and Aretha Franklin – to name just a handful – all made seminal recordings.”

All Over Again is, for Cray, a homecoming album (of sorts): aged seven years old in 1960, young Robert and his siblings went to live with their maternal grandmother in Alabama for three months while his father relocated to Germany (his father served in the US military). Here they experienced segregated schools and water fountains. “It was a different world to what I had seen before,” notes Cray.

The experience of recording in Alabama, alongside his anger at Donald Trump’s government, inspired Cray to write several original songs for All Over Again focusing on the state of the nation.

“1965, when voting rights for black people were enacted, wasn’t that long ago,” says Cray. “I turned 12 that year, my parents were finally able to vote. I’m not the first to write these types of songs. But I know why they are written – it’s just too bad that we have to.”