Before Warren Haynes recorded 2011’s Man In Motion, the longtime Gov’t Mule guitarist had the idea for an altogether different project. He had intended to enter Levon Helm’s recording studio for an album that would feature Helm, Leon Russell and “T-Bone” Wolk. Those sessions never took place, as Wolk and Helm passed away before they came to fruition. However, some of the material that Haynes intended to record in that setting continued calling to him, and he eventually returned to those songs for his new record, Ashes & Dust, which also features the members of Railroad Earth.

“The first time I heard Railroad Earth was when they opened for the Allman Brothers at Red Rocks in 2009,” Haynes recalls. “Then, I did a solo acoustic show at DelFest [in 2011] and they were on the same festival, so I invited a couple of the guys to join me for a few songs and it was very cool. The big connection came when I was supposed to do a solo acoustic set at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester [N.Y., in October 2012] and I invited some of them to join me. We had a little more time to prepare and rehearse, and it went really good. It was after that when I started thinking that maybe this was the way I’d want to approach my next record. I knew some of the songs I was looking to record, and hearing them in that kind of setting and context really seemed to make sense. So it all started coming together at that moment.”

He is quick to praise the members of the group for their contributions to the overall sound of Ashes & Dust. “One of the cool things about being in the studio with the guys from Railroad Earth is that, aside from all being great musicians and having the diversity to interpret the songs in a way that reflects both the songs themselves and their own personalities, they also all play a lot of different instruments. So it gave us the opportunity to tackle each song on its own merit and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we try a banjo on this one? Why don’t we try a piano on this one? What about clarinet on the next one?’ We just took every song, one song at a time, and thought about what would sound best. We tried to record it as live as possible—on some songs we even kept a live vocal performance. We really just wanted to capture the chemistry that they had coming into this—and the chemistry I have developed in such a short time with those guys, which came about very organically and quickly. We didn’t dwell on anything.