The Robinson brothers are coming back to the Garden State.
As a marquee event of the North To Shore Festival, The Black Crowes are set to ignite Newark’s Prudential Center on Saturday, June 20, for a high-voltage stop on their massive “Southern Hospitality Tour.”
This isn’t just a victory lap for the legendary outfit anchored by guitarist Rich Robinson and his lead singer brother, Chris. Fresh off a career-spanning resurgence, including a 2025 Grammy nomination for their Happiness Bastards LP and their first-ever nod for the Rock + Roll Hall of Fame, the band is pushing forward with their 10th studio album, A Pound of Feathers, released in March. Joining them for this rock ’n’ roll collision is modern powerhouse Whiskey Myers, in a pairing that Rich describes as a natural fit between the pioneers and the “next generation.”
In our recent conversation, Rich opened up about the creative synergy of the tour, the band’s “nimble” and playful approach to recording new material and the delicate art of crafting a setlist that honors their legacy while embracing the present. Whether you’re there for timeless anthems like “She Talks to Angels” or rare songs the band is currently digging out of the archives, the Newark show promises to be a “soulful and soaring” reminder that rock is best served loud and a little dangerous.
With the “Southern Hospitality Tour,” you’re sharing the stage with Whiskey Myers. What is it about the two bands that makes you such a good fit?
A while ago, I had written some songs with Whiskey Myers; they had reached out and wanted to write songs, so I went to Nashville. I always liked those guys, and they came from more of a country background, but now they’re getting more rock ’n’ roll music and they’re great players, great songs, great singing, so we just thought it’d be a cool match, to get out and go on tour. And they’re kind of the next generation and we thought it would be cool to combine what we’re doing.
You guys have a new record – following up on the Grammy-nominated success of Happiness Bastards, how did you and Chris approach writing and recording this one?
The good thing for us is we never make records based on the previous record. We just make records, and we just write songs. We made Shake Your Money Maker when we were kids, I was 19, and we could have been like, ‘Oh my God, what are we gonna do?” But we weren’t. We spent 350 shows in 20 or 22 months, however long that tour was, and Chris and I had written about 25 songs during that time and then came back and wrote more for Southern Harmony. And we weren’t gonna allow ourselves to be stressed out or manipulated by the success of the first one.
And we’ve always been that way, and every record we’ve made has been its own thing, and it’s, forget the past, this is where we are right now. And if you listen to our records consecutively or look at them consecutively, they show the difference from Shake Your Money Maker to Southern Harmony to Amorica to Three Snakes and then By Your Side and Lions. I mean, we really cover a lot of musical ground, and we’ve never been hindered by that.
And so, based on all of those things, making this record too, we just went in and made the record. The difference is we have a concept of how we want to record. So, Happiness Bastards, I’d written 45 songs that I sent to Chris to write lyrics, and so we had a lot of time. I started writing during COVID and compiled, and we made a more traditional record. We had the songs finished. We went in and we recorded it. It took about a month, that was it, and the whole band was there, and it was more concrete.
When we started this record, we had more parts, some songs were more finished than others, but none of them were finished. There wasn’t some concrete finishing of a song, so we decided to take a week without the band, go into the studio just me, Chris, Cully (Symington) our drummer, and (producer) Jay Joyce and just worked the songs out, and we found it was fun. It was great. There’s excitement there. It’s like, “Oh man, try this. I don’t know, let’s do this, and let’s do this,” and I’ll give Cully credit all day for jumping in. Everyone has a different work speed when they’re writing or playing music and with us you need to be nimble. Sometimes we could be like, “Oh, try it this way. No, try it this way. Let’s do this, change the key,” and there’s an excitement to it, a playfulness to it, and I think that’s what really came about on this record, just to flesh these songs out and move with that flow. And by the end of the first five days, we had nine songs finished, and we were like, “Well, this is working. Great. Let’s just stick with this.”
With that legacy career behind you, how do you set up a set list where you touch on what you’re working on now but also give the folks what you feel like they need to hear over the course of an evening?
We were pulling from hundreds of songs in the ’90s and in the 2000s when we were touring. We were doing two-to-three-hour sets and that’s a lot of information, and we didn’t learn the lesson that maybe there’s a large portion of people that want to hear “She Talks to Angels” every night or “Hard to Handle.”
I think we have a more balanced approach now, where there’s songs that we play every night. We know people want to hear “Jealous Again” and “Hard to Handle” and “She talks to Angels” and “Thorn in My Pride” and these kinds of songs, but we also leave space for us to change the set and add new songs and add covers and add maybe more rare songs and unreleased songs that we’ve written. And so, the set has a framework now that we can work from that we really like and appreciate, and the cool thing about it is how well songs off of Happiness Bastards and A Pound of Feathers work with the older songs.
Since the last record we made before Happiness Bastards, there was some long amount of time and you don’t know when you make a record, “How’s this gonna work with the old songs?” But they work seamlessly, and so we change the set every night, minus the songs that we play every night, and we add different things, and two songs can change the feel of a whole set, just where you place them and what it is and how you build a set and the movement of a set. To me, it’s really cool and it’s exciting to be able to throw one or two new songs in and make it work and it’s just been great. We just got back from Australia and Japan, and those shows were really fun and we got to play a lot of cool songs and were bringing back some songs that we haven’t played in a while and we were playing some rare songs, and so it’s going to be good.
Last year, the band was nominated for the Rock + Roll Hall of Fame. What did that nomination mean to you guys?
It carries a weight. But, I mean, we got nominated for a Grammy, too. It was great to be nominated, that’s how I felt. And winning would be great too, but it was just cool to be acknowledged by your peers. And that’s just how I look at it. It was a really humbling experience. It’s always really cool to be acknowledged by a body of your peers, and if we ever got nominated or won, I’d be happy and if we don’t, I’m happy, you know what I mean?
The Southern Hospitality Tour featuring The Black Crowes and Whiskey Myers, part of the North to Shore Festival, 6:30 p.m. Saturday, June 20 at the Prudential Center, 25 Lafayette St., Newark. For tickets and more information, click here.
