Blues and soul collective the Tedeschi Trucks Band have woven the isolation of the pandemic and a classic Arabic tale about star-crossed lovers into a four-album project that’s both epic and intimate.

Words: Bill DeMain

In July 2019, when Tedeschi Trucks Band recorded Layla Revisited – alive reimagining of the classic Derek And The Dominos album – it was both an affectionate look back and an unexpected doorway to their future. “I feel really strangely tied to the Layla album,” guitarist Derek Trucks tells Classic Rock. “It’s a cornerstone of that era for rock music, and it feels like it’s part of my DNA. First, I was named after the album. Then my dad would play it for me and my brother to fall asleep to. As a kid learning guitar, I was obsessed with Duane Allman’s slide playing. And my wife Susan was born on the same day the Layla album was released, which is pretty wild. Digging back into that source material feels like something I should’ve done already, but I hadn’t.”

The archeological dig ended up going much deeper than the 1970 original album, eventually leading the members of Tedeschi Trucks Band back through hundreds of years to a 12th-century story by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, named Layla & Majnun. What Lord Byron once called the “Romeo And Juliet of the East” is a tragic tale of star-crossed love and separation that drives the young male suitor to madness (‘Majnun’ is an Arabic word meaning ‘crazy person’). During the darkest days of lockdown, it became both an escape hatch and the touchstone for the group’s most ambitious undertaking to date: a four-album set, with accompanying films, called I Am The Moon.

“The seed of this whole project came Susan Tedeschi from our singer Mike Mattison re-reading Nizami’s original story, and asking a question: ‘What did Layla think about all this? What did she think about this lovesick psychopath wandering the wilderness?’” Trucks says with a laugh. “It was a lightbulb moment. Mike sent out an email to the group and said: ‘I had this thought. Maybe we should all read Layla & Majnun, and then write songs around it.”