Kenny Wayne Shepherd tries something new with “Dirt On My Diamonds, Vol. 2”

Kenny Wayne Shepherd is a busy guy. The 47-year-old who busted onto the blues rock scene as a teenaged guitar phenom in the early 1990s is preparing to release his second album in less than 12 months, and he already has another project in the pipeline that he’s looking forward to releasing in 2025.

Shepherd is in a place in his life and career where he’s feeling extremely productive, and he’s loving it. “I feel inspired, I feel motivated, I feel all of these things that are just making me go and create, create, create,” he told Blues Rock Review during a phone conversation just a few days before the release of his new album Dirt On My Diamonds, Vol. 2, out September 20 via Mascot/Provogue Records. “I’m also thriving more than ever, I think, on playing music and playing live for people.”

All that productivity, which Shepherd attributes in part to his eagerness to teach his six kids about hard work and pursuing goals, is really benefiting Shepherd’s band—and, as a result, their fans. “I think we’re at the top of our game,” he said. “I think we’re making better music—the best music—and playing the best shows we’ve ever played.”

Dirt On My Diamonds, Vol. 2 follows the November 2023 release of Dirt On My Diamonds, Vol. 1. The albums mark the first time Shepherd and his band have released music in this way, with some connective tissue linking the two volumes even as each stands on its own.

The dual release strategy wasn’t what Shepherd had in mind when he first went to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., to begin writing material for a new album back in 2019. Shepherd wrote far more songs than he needed for a single album, something he tends to do for all of his projects, and waited to see what would stand out to him as the recording process began.

“Once you have two or three songs that you go, ‘Yes, I’m really feeling these,’ then the album starts to take a direction,” Shepherd explained. From there, he began assessing which of the remaining songs fit that direction and had the eight-song track list for what became Dirt On My Diamonds, Vol. 1. After looking at all of the songs that were still leftover, he discovered another album’s worth of material that had its own direction while being spiritually linked with the other tracks written in Muscle Shoals.

“At first I was just gonna do what we normally do and put one album out,” Shepherd said. But it occurred to him that it might be “compelling” to “do separate releases but tie them together, as a package.” In addition to giving the band a whole new kind of project, the dual albums provided an opportunity to “keep the fans engaged in what we’re doing and keep us out on the road, which is really what we love to do the most,” he added.

In press materials for Vol. 2, Shepherd noted he and his band have been eager to road test the new material—after all, it’s been five years since it first started coming together. While they’d had time to record some material before COVID-19-related shutdowns took hold, “there was still work to be done,” Shepherd said. “So on one hand, it seems like, yeah, we’ve been waiting a long time. But it wasn’t actually finished until more recently.”

Like Vol. 1, Vol. 2 features seven original songs and one cover. The album kicks off with “I Got a Woman,” a song that Shepherd imagined as an answer song to “Woman Like You” from his 2019 album The Traveler. It also sees Shepherd updating the way that women are often spoken about in older blues classics.

“If you look at a lot of traditional blues songs that deal with relationships, it’s a lot like, ‘My woman screwed me over this way or that way,’” Shepherd said. “There’s a lot of really great songs that are like that that I love. But this is my attempt at writing songs that are glorifying the woman, rather than pointing out all the horrible things that maybe she did. It’s like, let’s point out all the incredible qualities about her instead.”

While Shepherd described “Woman Like You” as being about “this guy observing this woman and how incredible she is, and all the things about her that just fascinates him and attracts him to her,” “I Got a Woman” finds the same guy lucky in love. “He found that woman—and maybe it’s the same woman he was singing about before—and he’s like, ‘Now I got a woman, and she’s so amazing. Everywhere we go, everybody wants to know her name. Everybody wants to know who she is, because she’s so amazing, because she’s mine.’”

It’s not the first time that Shepherd has nodded to one of his earlier songs in a new project. Even Dirt On My Diamonds is a callback to “Diamonds & Gold” from 2017’s Lay It On Down. “It’s something we’ve been doing for a long time, but it’s also something that I hope maybe the fans have started to tune into, because it helps people to pay closer attention to the lyrics and the stories that we’re telling, and they start looking to connect those dots,” he said.

The album also features moments of pure joy, such as on “She Loves My Automobile.” Like Shepherd’s cover of Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” on Vol. 1, the ZZ Top cover is fast and fun, the picture of a band having a blast in the studio.

“I love Billy Gibbons. I’ve loved him my whole life,” Shepherd said. The two guitarists “share a lot in common,” according to Shepherd, including a love of music and of cars. “It’s always been one of my favorite songs of theirs, and so I thought it was a great opportunity to do that, because it pulls all those passions together for me.”

While Shepherd isn’t one to shy away from difficult subjects, his ultimate goal is to write “uplifting” music. He alluded to the division felt among so many in the world on “The Middle,” a song that explores the feeling of being “a human being that’s living in this world that we’re all living in today, and just the things that we find ourselves in the midst of,” without taking a side or asking his listeners to do so.

“My only mission in life and in the music that I make is to bring people of all walks of life, and all kinds of backgrounds, just people that love good music, and get them in the room together and give them an opportunity to listen to music for two hours and forget about all the other bullshit,” he said.

Shepherd’s next opportunity to gather listeners together in celebration of music starts this month when he hits the road with the Experience Hendrix Tour. The all-star tribute to guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is one Shepherd has been part of for a long time, and he’s enjoyed watching it transform over the years into what he described as “this massive tour and a killer show with all these amazing artists.”

Shepherd, who will be traveling across the U.S. with the tour through October 19, identified Hendrix as “one of my biggest influences.”

“His song ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ has been the final song of my concerts since I started my band when I was 15 years old,” Shepherd said. “His influence is so big on me, and his music is such a fundamental part of what I do that I just feel so close to him and his legacy and his music. It’s always just felt like a natural thing for me to be a part of.”

Looking ahead to 2025, Shepherd has something major to celebrate: the 30-year anniversary of his 1995 debut album Ledbetter Heights. He will be marking the milestone with a 30th anniversary release of re-recorded—”and, in some instances, reimagined to a certain degree”—material, as he recently did for the 25th anniversary of 1997’s Trouble Is…. This new album will be different from Trouble Is…25 because bassist Will Ainsworth and singer Corey Sterling, both of whom were on Ledbetter Heights, have passed away.

“It wasn’t like we were going to try and recreate this album. It was going to sound different from the very get go,” Shepherd said. Instead, he went into the project aiming to “have some fun” with the music and “embrace the differences that will be there.”

Shepherd anticipates the special release will come out about this time next year, after which he and his band will tour the material. It’s a plan he’s already looking forward to putting in motion. “There’s some songs on that record that we’ve never played live in concert before,” he said. “That’ll be a compelling and interesting tour and experience for our fans, I think.”