“I knew the debut album’s anniversary was coming up, but I didn’t force anything,” he says via phone from his Nashville home, where he was packing for an upcoming tour that includes a few dates overseas as well as a June 18 stop at the Beachland Ballroom. “We took our time and tinkered with it for a solid year. I was just using recording experiments to inspire each song. I was using this DI box that allowed me to plug amps into the recording system, and I was using cassette four tracks. I tried to let the experiments push the project as opposed to having an agenda. I grabbed a guitar and would just start going.”
The band recorded some of the new songs at its own studio, Zebra Ranch, in Mississippi. Dickinson and his brother, multi-instrumentalist Cody Dickinson, also have home studios that they utilized.
“And some of it we recorded on the road,” says Dickinson. “It’s by any means necessary, which I love. I love do it yourself. It’s my favorite way to roll.”
One album highlight, the ’70s-inspired “Stay All Night,” has a spooky blues feel to it with its woozy guitar riffs and droll vocals.
“We learned that song from [singer-songwriter] Junior Kimbrough,” says Dickinson. “I think he took the lyrics from a country song. We’ve been playing it off and on for years, but it never came to fruition. This version is one of my favorite songs on the record. Songs are funny like that. They pop up, and you might try one on for size, but they won’t cooperate until their time is right.”
The shimmering title track came out of a jam session that took place during the recording process.
“Cody started this [method] back in 2020. We would record a song and then keep going and freestyle until we ran out of steam,” says Dickinson. “It’s a fun way to record. I put that track together out of two different studio jams. The lyrics started coming to me. I had a phone call from Kinney Kimbrough, Junior Kimbrough’s son. It was a hilarious conversation. I was driving down the highway, and I started writing lyrics down. Almost every line is an inside joke. And it’s a straight up love letter to anyone who supported us.”
When the group first formed in 1996, Dickinson says the band had modest aspirations.
“We were not ambitious,” says Dickinson, whose father Jim Dickinson was a musician and producer. “We grew up in a musical family, and I’ve been a professional musician my whole life. We sold tapes out of the trunk. We got our first record deal off tapes. We used to turn record deals down. They were small, silly deals, but we were not in a hurry to get in the game. In the ’90s, it was so fun just playing local shows and working for [singer-guitarist] R.L. Burnside in 1997. I would book the shows, and we would make our tapes. We were not even trying to break event. We were totally satisfied soaking up the home life.”
People initially thought the North Mississippi Allstars were a blues band. Does Dickinson agree?
“Nah,” says Dickinson, who counts Van Halen and Black Flag as influences. “I hate genres. If you want to call it anything, it’s probably roots music. I’m a psychedelic folk rocker, and our music is modern Mississippi music. I could never claim to be a bluesman.”
The band is coming up on 30 years, but Dickinson says he hasn’t run out of musical ideas. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
“Music is ever fascinating,” he says. “If you stay engaged with music and interested and keep growing, it’ll feed you, and it just gets better and better. I feel more powerful and engaged and interested in music than ever.”
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This article appears in May 22 – Jun 4, 2025.