Mortal Prophets – “Me and The Devil” (Song Premiere)

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Today I’m excited to bring everyone an early listen to Mortal Prophets and their new single “Me and the Devil.” The album was produced by David Sisko, and features some collaborations with Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart), among others. Band leader, John Beckmann shared, “The songs on ‘Me and the Devil’ are especially poignant and timeless in so many ways. I had to get these songs out of my system because they touched me so much. The lyrics are a form of incantation.” If you’re enjoying the early listen, please consider purchasing the full album on December 9th.

Mortal Prophets · ME AND THE DEVIL

I was also able to catch up with Beckmann for a brief interview.

With regard to this forthcoming LP, how did everything come together? How would you say your collaboration with William Declan Lucey impacted the final result?

I started this new album with William Declan Lucey while I was also literally in the middle of making ‘Stomp the Devil.” I had gathered a great deal of material I was obsessed with, and it simply wasn’t possible to get it all done with one producer because of time constraints. Hence, I reached out to William, we started our adventure in early June 2021, and finished the album toward the end of February 2022, and mastered it just before “Stomp’ was released in May of this year. It’s purposefully a very live-sounding album, we recruited some very talented musicians that William has worked with before. William and I have similar musical interests, very early Delta blues, and we’re both fond of Brian Eno, Daniel Langois, and Tom Waits among others, so it was a very natural fit, we have a smooth working relationship, it’s very fluid, not heavy-handed. One prerequisite was that I wanted to incorporate as much of the music from my initial demos as possible because there were some electronic textures I wanted to retain.

”Me and the Devil” is essentially a take on a blues track by Robert Johnson, and a handful of other tracks on this record were inspired by other seminal works of music and literature. How would you describe the story behind this first track and its significance to you?

I’m a huge fan of very early Delta blues, and certainly Robert Johnson, so the first two songs on the album are a tribute to him, other songs are by Big Joe Williams, Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, Lead Belly, Son House, and Blind Willie Johnson, all pivotal figures. Robert Johnson’s “Me And The Devil” has such raw energy, and the lyrics are brutal, it tells the story of the singer waking up one morning to the devil knocking on the door, telling him that “it’s time to go”. The lyrics conclude with the lines “You may bury my body down by the highway side” / “So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” It was his final recording session. These songs are the essence of America’s primal scream, they are chilling, profound in their austere beauty and directness, full of tragedy and hope, lost loves, and reflections on both personal and societal struggles, frankly, not much has changed in a hundred years.

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