Howard Mahan’s blues-infused album Hope on Credit pays dividends

Photo by Rob Smith

If you find yourself chasing that magic intersection of blues-rock-jam-funk where your favorite 1970s albums lived, mark your calendars for the Valentine’s Day release of Lawrence musician Howard Mahan’s Hope on Credit.

With album highlights like “Tell Me A Story” and “Worth Waking Up,” Mahan gets bigger and bolder, with the new record sounding as though he and his extended band are playing right in your car or living room. Intimate material is given a powerful palette that can fill any space with a sense of scale and immediacy. 

The first three tracks sail from bouncy opener “Stuck on My Mind” to the rocking “Gin Soaked Poet” to slow-swayer “Leave My Heart Alone.” Mahan’s new work shows his ability to travel between genres while still crafting a cohesive journey. The genesis of the whole LP started with one track and parsing a difficult situation.

Photo by Angela Masters

“‘Tell Me a Story’ is actually the first one that I wrote for the record,” offers Mahan. “Basically, the concept was the relationship I was in at the time wasn’t necessarily going super great, but I was trying to ask how it could work out instead of surrendering that it was all going to shit.”

Another part of what makes Hope on Credit fire on all cylinders is the fact that Mahan is playing with the same basic group as his 2023 album Marigold, which is himself on guitar and vocals, Vivid Jojo on drums and percussion, Jimmy Lacy on electric bass, and TJ Erhardt on keyboards. Additionally, they added Chase McRoy of The Vincents on upright bass, along with Randy McAllister on harmonica.

Adding in new players continues the trajectory Mahan has seen over the course of his full-length releases. Lost and Found, his first, was recorded specifically in mind of, “These are acoustic guitar songs, and you put a band around it,” explains the musician. With Hope on Credit, Mahan was feeding off recordings from Little Feat and The Allman Brothers, so he approached the album trying to work on the arrangements to layer depth and complexity to the texture.

“In addition to thinking larger scale from an orchestration standpoint, we also tried to think groove-wise,” Mahan says. “If we were to open for somebody really cool, what would be the bangers that we would want to play in that room?”

The live shows also allow for some changes to take place between writing and recording, with much of the material on Hope on Credit road-tested before going into the studio. Mahan says that the material evolves quite a bit from the initial concept to its final version.

“We’ll rehearse them and tweak the arrangements, and then we’ll go play them and realize that didn’t work, so we have to try something else, or we have to cut that section,” the musician says, tracing the evolution of the songs. “It’s kind of fun because there’s a few of them that have stuck in the set over the last six, seven months, and there have been people asking me for those songs, so that’s a good sign.”

Photo by Angela Masters

What comes through on the record (or watching Mahan’s YouTube videos) is that the musician takes this seriously, but he’s having fun. There’s frequently a stigma among folks who aren’t fans of blues that it’s a genre full of seriousness—whether it be lyrically or performatively—but Mahan is quick to dismiss that.

“I’ve never been to a blues show where it’s like that,” Mahan says. “The hardest partying that I’ve ever seen has been at blues shows. People dance at those shows. And those party shows where people will come up and ask me later, ‘What was that lyric in that song?’ Makes me feel like I did something that has intellectual value to know the effort that I put into songwriting broke through.”

Hope on Credit comes out on Valentine’s Day, Friday, Feb. 14, with a release show at Knuckleheads. There will be expanded musical accompaniment, with Sean McDonald on second guitar, Jacque Garoutte subbing in on bass for Jimmy Lacy, and (fingers crossed) a guest spot from Chase McRoy on upright bass. The Old No. 5’s, with whom Mahan has frequently guested over the years, are opening the show. 

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