Big Head Todd & The Monsters: Where Anything Can Happen
What sets this band apart from others in their genre? The memorable name, for one thing. And picture the music of a BHTM single (a selection one space-traveling fan specifically requested from Houston) zooming through the atmosphere for the purpose of waking up the astronauts in the Space Station. And sometimes they're a jam band, sometimes they're not.
They've played onstage with B.B. King, Neil Young, and Robert Plant. Perhaps most remarkable of all, in this business, is that the band's same core four have been together for 30 (that's three-oh) years. And still going strong: they just released the brand-new album "New World A-Risin'."
Todd Park Mohr, the group's frontman and co-founder (whose head, on a cursory examination, doesn't look any bigger than anybody else's) says " For me the biggest part of it is songwriting. The songwriting for this project was over a 20-year period. I’m always looking for things that stick out when writing and I'm playing music everyday. When a song walks up and says hello, I pick it up. We recorded this album in Boulder. We do a lot of live recording. It’s a very live, rock n’ roll record."
So what 's on this tour's set list? Your guess is as good as theirs. "Well, we play a different show every night," Mohr says. "We take into consideration what fans scream out from the audience. We have a new album coming out, so we’re going to be featuring a lot of those songs. We have a huge catalog of songs. I think my list is about 260 songs, so anything can happen."
"I check our Facebook page everyday to see what people are interested in hearing. If I can accommodate it, I do. We try to change things up as much as we can"
Where do their new songs come from? "It just depends. I usually keep an ear out for things people say that strike me as funny or unusual. When I’m playing the guitar or just doodling, I come upon licks of musical ideas. I keep a log of those and then something will motivate me to finish a song. That’s basically how it goes."
When asked by an interviewer if there's anything Mohr wished he had known 30 years ago when the band started out, he replies with a smile: "Yeah, how to play guitar. That would be the big one."