On New Album ‘A Pound of Feathers’

After more than 35 years of making records, Black Crowes brothers Chris and Rich Robinson have honed the way they approach what’s next.

“I’m always looking at the angle of, ‘Look, we’ve made a lot of records. We’ve been doing this a long time. What can we do with this one?’” Chris explains via Zoom from his home near Los Angeles. And from his home in upstate New York, Rich adds, “It comes down to loving what you’re doing, and there’s joy in creation that we always get involved with and tap into…It forces you to be instinctual instead of thinking about it.

“It takes it directly from the heart instead of the brain, y’know?”

That philosophy was amply applied during the making of A Pound of Feathers, the Black Crowes’ 10th studio album, out Friday, and the follow-up to 2024’s Grammy Award-nominated Happiness Bastards. That was the Crowes’ first new release in 14 years, and the first since the Robinsons reactivated the band in 2019 after a mostly acrimonious five-year hiatus.

The 11-song set was recorded during less than two weeks in Nashville with Happiness Bastards producer Jay Joyce, and with only Cully Symington, the band’s drummer since 2023, joining the Robinsons in the studio. And while its predecessor was created in a more conventional process, with songs prepared before the full band entered the studio, A Pound of Feathers was decidedly more extemporaneous.

“I think on Happiness Bastards we definitely colored in the lines, and this one it’s more like…whatever,” explains Chris, who also played drums during the writing process. “I told Rich, and he agreed…I was like, ‘Let’s much around with some stuff, but I’m not gonna write any lyrics or any real melodies. We’re gonna have the roughest of the rough sort of sketches.’ And we told Jay this as well; ‘We’re coming in with a lot of loose ends.’ It was really rough and raw, but I think we can keep some of that, the idea of it, keep it loose and funky.”

Rich, who played bass as well as his usual guitars, says that this time “we knew we wanted to use the studio as a tool. When Chris and I get on a thing we go pretty fast. Ideas come. It’s like, ‘OK, I have this. I think this is the verse, this is the chorus’ and Chris will say, ‘No, this is the verse’ and we’ll go through it and I’m normally right. (laughs) We would take stock at the end of each day and it’d be like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of done. We really like it. And by the end of the first week we had nine songs finished, done, to the point where all of us, even Jay, were like, ‘Don’t f–k around with these songs. We really like where it is.

“So we just said, ‘F— it, let’s just keep going,’ and four days later we’re finished with the whole record.”

A Pound of Feathers is another quintessential kind of Black Crowes record, weaving classic sources into the Robinsons’ particular stew of gritty, compact attacks, beefy guitar riffs, cocksure attitude, stomping rhythms and tribal energy. Chris declares in the opening line of “Profane Prophecy” that “my pedigree in debaucher is my claim to fame” while Rich digs into chords straight out of the defining Rolling Stones songbook. The octane stays high on tracks such as “Cruel Streak,” “Do the Parasite!,” “High and Lonesome” and “You Call This a Good Time,” while the Crowes dig into Americana restraint with “Pharmacy Chronicles” and “Queen of the B-Sides.”

Alongside those, the cascading “Blood Red Regrets,” the tempo-shifting “Eros Blues” and the darkly psychedelic “Doomsday Doggerel” burst out of the speakers or earbuds with epic sonic dynamics.

“The Black Crowes, to a fault, have always done thing by how they feel,” Chris maintains. “I’m a cerebral person, but the music is really caveman stuff. We’ve done a lot of spontaneous writing, and I work that way, but something like ‘Doomsday Doggerel,’ that’s a great example of one minute there wasn’t a song, and 30 minutes later there’s one of my favorite songs that we’ve ever written.”

On “It’s Like That,” meanwhile, Chris was working on lyrics in his rented house, “and there’s a tree frog out in front of the bedroom, and it’s making this noise, so I taped it on my phone and we get back the next day and I go, ‘Put up the solo section…and throw my frog in there,’ and it goes through the little guitar solo break. That’s my Nashville rasta frog.” Rich also credits his brother with the idea for adding violin to “Queen of the B-Sides.”

“There’s moments like that all over the record that I really appreciate,” Rich says. “I think a lot of that kinda jumps into this immediacy the record has, where you’re right there. You’re in it, and that’s it. That’s what I really love about it.”

The Black Crowes — recently nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for a second consecutive year — begin touring during April with shows in Australia and Tokyo before kicking off a North American run with Whiskey Myers and Southall on May 17 in Austin, Texas, bisected with a late June run to Europe. The Robinsons will be joined by Symington, keyboardist Erik Deutsch and guitarist Nico Bereciartua from the Happiness Bastards run, while Mark “Muddy” Dutton from the band Burning Tree replaces longtime bassist Sven Pipien for this outing.

Rich anticipates that “we’ll go through all of [the A Pound of Feathers songs], but not all in one night,” while he and Chris say they’ll blend some seldom-played rarities amidst the other favorites, and perhaps some covers. “We have a deepish well to draw from,” Rich notes. “The cool thing is how these new songs fit with the old songs; when we went out for Happiness Bastards I was like, ‘Oh, how’s this gonna work?,’ but when you get in a room and you set ’em right next to each other they make total sense. So it’s gonna be really cool.

“I’m always surprised. You can feel [fans’] enthusiasm, sort of along the same trip as what Chris and I do, from our living room to yours, whatever that vibration is people are resonating with, too. To go out after all that time broken up and to have people come out and support us again, that’s a gift. It’s just really cool to look out and see someone that I remember seeing when I was a kid, and they’re bringing their kids to the shows. There really is a sense of togetherness that we’ve all been on this trip together…and are still here.”