MUSIC SCENE: Mix masters

"I feel like I’m just on a sailboat, manning the tiller,” J.J. Grey was saying from his Jacksonville-area home. “I only need to occasionally turn the tiller, but all these songs just kind of arrive.”

Grey’s new album “Ol’ Glory” is slated for release on Feb. 24, but he’ll be headlining the House of Blues in Boston with his septet Feb. 20, as the tour promoting the record gets underway. Unlike his previous four CDs, which were on the Chicago blues label Alligator Records, the new one is on Provogue Records, a label based in Holland.

Grey’s blend of Southern rock, funk, blues, gospel and country elements is generally considered swamp rock, and it has always had a firm foundation in the land the singer grew up on, the northern Florida small town communities and people. Although it was his third album, Grey’s first offering on Alligator, 2007’s “Country Ghetto,” vaulted him into the national consciousness with its gritty portrait of working people, amid steamy grooves and joyful dance jams.

Grey’s songwriting has always celebrated the natural world and reveled in the beauty of the swamps and forests he came of age exploring. But there is also a solid, if non-denominational, spiritual element, that inescapable gospel tinge to much of his work. There’s a continuing thread of expressing wonder and awe at the thrill of being alive and appreciating the people and places in your life, and it gives Grey’s work a depth and passion not often found in contemporary jams.

But getting back to that sailboat analogy, we were discussing some of the tunes on the new record. The title cut is certainly one of those odes to living in the moment, while “Everything Is A Song” and “Every Minute” can be seen as similar paeans to not wasting a moment. “Home In the Sky” is a bit more metaphysical, contemplating something more.

“Home In the Sky” is definitely looking at a little more,” Grey agreed. “I think as that song came to me, it is about me looking at, and honoring a power I can’t see – but I can see its effect. It is hard to express, impossible to explain, but you just feel there is something there, some plan to all this”

“The songs like ‘Everything Is A Song’ are all selective moments,” Grey explained. “For that one, I was driving along with my family, and my little daughter just started singing something. She couldn’t even make up words yet, but she had the melody and she was just singing along in this kind of pure joy. I just had this moment of clarity, where I felt like ‘everything is a song’ if you look at it the right way.”

Perhaps the most invigorating song on the forthcoming album is “Brave Li’l Fighter,” a boisterous rock march where a burbling organ line adds funk and the horn section gives it all a soaring, uplifting aura, before a final trumpet solo from Marcus Parsley that is the perfectly soulful coda.

“‘Brave Li’l Fighter’ is about a friend of mine, who made a bad decision, the kind you don’t come back from,” said Grey. “He had been my bossman at one time, and I honestly probably wouldn’t be here today if not for him. He taught me a lot. Those lyrics wrote themselves. As I said, he was a good man who just made one fatal decision. I’m not 100 percent sure myself what that song is really about, but I know he’s in it.”

The title cut is a wonderfully loose-limbed funk-rocker, all tumbling rhythms, and jazzy vocals that almost seem as if Grey is improvising them on the spot. Turns out he was.

“‘Ol’ Glory’ was one of those songs where I’m just working in my studio, do a drumbeat, add some bass, looped it all up, and had eight-to-10 minutes of music,” Grey noted. “Then for the vocal I just played it back and made it up as I went along, just decided to go with it. I intended to play my demo for the band and have them play it, before I sang it again. But dynamically, the more I listened, the more I felt my first vocal was where it needed to be. So, once the band got the feeling and played it through, I just ended up using my vocal from my first demo, which was basically improvised.

“The idea of the tune is that there is glory shining through everything,” Grey added. “All it takes is an honest moment to stop and observe it. It’s kind of a recurring theme through the whole album, which is one reason we chose that as the title.”

Leaving Alligator for Provogue was simply a matter of one contract running out, and another label making an attractive offer, Grey said. American fans may not know the label’s name, but they certainly know some of the artists who are on it, including Robert Cray, Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa, The Rides (Stephen Stills and Kenny Wayne Shepherd), and Gov’t Mule.

With six previous albums under his belt, including the most recent, 2013’s “This River,” Grey has had plenty of studio experience since his 2001 debut. What did he want to do with this record?

“The main thing when I listen back to all my records, is that I hear some moments that stand up to the test of time,” said Grey. “Now, when you’re playing these songs on the road for a year, or year-and-a-half, there are songs that morph a lot. A couple might sound just like they do on the record, but the others change, even if subtly, the more we play them. Often they sound looser, as the band is more locked in, instead of how they sounded when we recorded them. Often, after that year of touring them, I’m saying ‘damn, I wish we could re-record that one.’ I wanted to avoid that this time, especially vocally.

“We are on the road so much, recording has always been on a tight schedule,” Grey pointed out. “This time I made sure to put some time aside, to get some distance from touring to put this one together. I have a little demo studio at home, and I’d make my little demos there. The song ‘The Hurricane” (an acoustic guitar ballad) on the album is just my demo, because we decided that’s how it should sound. But I would also get the material to the guys in the band earlier, and not wait until we all got in the studio. I would also play the tunes for them on the road. I did not want to have the guys learn the music note-for-note, but let more of their personalities come through. We’re all more used to the studio work now, also, so we got into it pretty quickly and I think the whole process was better and more efficient.”

Grey has always had a strong fan base in Boston, and he’s eager to get this new music out there for them. He’s also savoring what he does, embodying the themes of his album.

“Something has just clicked over the past three or four years,” Grey said. “The guys I’ve had through the years have all been great, but I wasn’t always totally there, for parts of the shows I might have had my mind somewhere else. But these last few years I have realized why I do what I do. I don’t do it for money or fame, although making a living at it is great. I’m ecstatic to have this music to share, and I feel like I’m only a conduit. It feels like the show plays itself. When we come back to places like Boston, the whole night just feels like a family reunion, and I honestly love playing.”