On New G. Love Record, Logan Tichnor Shows He’s Got Chops

ORLEANS – The jams were flowing, and so was the whiskey. Garrett “G. Love” Dutton was burning the late night oil with the late Mississippi bluesman R.L. Boyce, the aftermath of sessions that would make up Dutton’s 2022 record, “Philadelphia Mississippi.” 

“I had never heard of R.L. and I didn’t know about him,” Dutton said. “The first time I heard his music was when we were sitting there playing. I was totally blown away. It was one of the greatest nights of music of my life, just to be able to sit with this old-time blues guy.”

The late night session didn’t make it to the record, but Dutton sensed something could be extracted from what was put down on tape. Five years later, those sessions have been brought to light, albeit in a completely different form.

“Ode To R.L.,” released last month, pays tribute to Boyce, who died following a bout with lung cancer in November 2023. An ethereal trip through hip hop and hill country blues, the record’s 10 tracks are built using pieces of the aforementioned recording session produced and engineered by Harwich resident Logan Tichnor. The result is a record that pays homage to Boyce, a dyed-in-the-wool bluesman who found critical success later in life, while also taking Dutton’s music down new musical avenues.

“For me as a songwriter, it was really liberating,” said Dutton, who first achieved acclaim in the 1990s with his long-running trio G. Love and Special Sauce. “I’ve been sitting and writing songs at my guitar for 30, 35, 40 years. And obviously I love to do that. But writing to these hip hop tracks, I got really inspired.”

And for the 25-year-old Tichnor, who has been honing his craft as a recording engineer at Checkpoint East Studio in Orleans since 2021, it could be the break as a producer that he’s been waiting for. “Ode To R.L.” is his first official credit as a producer on a major release. The record got its physical release on vinyl on Black Friday, which was also Record Store Day.

“The vinyl thing specifically is really cool,” he said prior to the record’s release. “I might go hunting on Friday to try and see one out in the wild.”

Tichnor started working at Checkpoint East after his dad had a chance encounter with Clarke Doody, who owns the studio and the Trove Art Gallery and Boutique upstairs. At his dad’s encouragement, Tichnor stopped into Trove to speak with Doody.

“I walked in and was like ‘Hey man, I like music and recording.’ He’s like ‘Great, come in and run a session,’” he said.

Dutton, an Orleans resident, has become a frequent collaborator with Tichnor at Checkpoint East, where he often stops in to record guest spots for other artists’ records.

“We started working, and we have a good working relationship,” he said. “Logan’s an excellent producer. He’s excellent on the Pro Tools. We just got in a good creative flow.”

The goal for “Ode To R.L.” initially was to work the 90 minutes worth of spontaneous jams into an album of songs in the typical blues and rock vein. But Dutton and Tichnor said after struggling to make that work, an idea was born to take the music in an entirely different direction.

“I don’t know if frustrated is the right word, but I kept thinking there’s something else we can do here,” Dutton said. “Which is kind of how we stumbled upon the stuff we ended up doing.”

“It was a lot,” Tichnor said. “It was a lot of stuff. And a lot of it was uncut. It wasn’t like ‘Here’s a song, here’s a song, here’s a song.’ I got one session, and it had all this in-between stuff and this talking.”

Undeterred, Tichnor pored over the sessions, keeping his ear open for what he might be able to use. He estimates it took about three hours for each of the record’s 10 tracks to put together beats.

“I would just listen to the session for something that caught my ear,” he said. “Sometimes I’d have an idea for drums, and I’d start there. They were all different, but for quite a few of them I’d come up with some drum thing I thought was cool. And then I’d just start playing the session back.”

The first track the pair worked on was “Gumbo,” which set the tone for the rest of “Ode To R.L.” The song meshes the familiar sounds of Dutton’s rhymes, harmonica and bluesy acoustic guitar with Tichnor’s beats, all with Boyce’s soulful vocals interspersed throughout.

“A week later or whatever we resumed our next session, and he pulled out that track…and I was blown away,” Dutton said. “It was like nothing I could have imagined but everything I could have wanted.”

For Tichnor, who has logged countless hours behind the boards with other bands and artists, “Ode To R.L.” represents a dream realized, the result of years of work at Checkpoint East coming to full fruition.

“This is the first big record that I’ve worked on. I’m really grateful that it’s something that’s so interesting and cool. Paying respects to this old blues musician is just awesome. I like the story behind it.”

Inspired by the end result of the new record, Dutton and Tichnor already have a handful of new tracks in the works that Tichnor said lean even more so into the hip hop realm. But for the moment, both musicians are taking time to bask in the release of their latest collaboration, which Dutton hopes will bring some well deserved recognition to his hometown.

“Look, I think we’re going to win a Grammy with this one,” he said. “How cool would that be if we won a Grammy in this studio?”