Stephen Mougin is No Ordinary Soul

Photo By Elliot Lopes

Stephen Mougin doesn’t live up to the title of his debut album, Ordinary Soul. The multi-talented label head is anything but ordinary. Not only does he run Dark Shadow Recordings, which he founded, but balances his time between his longtime sideman job with the Sam Bush Band, teaching, producing, engineering, singing, and songwriting. He had wanted to devote time to record his own project, but he’s a giver who was focused on other musicians’ endeavors. 

“I’m not sure that I was totally ready to make one on my own just yet,” Stephen Mougin told Bluegrass Unlimited in an interview from his Nashville-area home. “I’m so much more comfortable helping other people do what they are interested in music, whether it’s teaching or producing or recording or any of those kinds of things. It’s just a little more challenging to look back at myself and make stuff happen.”

Mougin has led others to the path of success with as the IBMA 2020 “Sound Engineer of the Year” and as winner for the IBMA 2015 “Recorded Event of the Year” for “Southern Flavor,” and the 2018 “Gospel Recorded Performance of the Year” for “Speakin’ to That Mountain.” 

Mougin or “Mojo,” as his friends call him, had wanted to record an album since beginning his musical journey to Nashville, TN in 2002. At the time he enjoyed a variety of gigs with different bands but still had the time to create in the studio. He had several songs in the can, but life situations delayed finishing the project. Over the years, Mojo’s musicianship has evolved and become more refined. To reflect who he is today, he scrapped those originals except for Becky Buller’s “Handful of Dust” and began anew. 

“I’m certainly very motivated by learning and achieving new goals, musically and otherwise,” Mougin said. “The more music you’re exposed to in your sheer lifetime gives you more ammunition for licks and creative ideas. You sort of absorb what’s around you artistically. At least I do. I always play better when I’m playing with better musicians, and I’m always inspired in new and creative ways when I’m playing with the Sam Bush Band, or when we put a collective of great musicians in the studio, and everybody’s throwing out ideas. That really gets the sparks going in my brain.”

Still, Mougin admits it took the encouragement of friends like Buller and Ned Luberecki, his partner in the duo Nedski & Mojo, as well as the unusual turn of events in 2020 to nudge him to complete the album. 2020 was going to be the first year that Dark Shadow Recording would release more than one album, but a planned release for one group fell through. 

“My buddy Rick Lang was down here doing some co-writing, and we were chatting about all that,” recalls Mougin. “He looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you do your own album?’ It was like the most obvious slap in the face.”

“I realized that if I don’t do it now, I’ll never schedule this record because I’m always working on other people’s stuff. I didn’t have time to sit and stew on things like I normally would on my own material. I didn’t have the time to hyper-analyze things. I needed to get my friends in, pick the songs, make the record, get it mixed, and move on.”  

Ordinary Soul is filled with 12 cuts, all but two that he co-wrote, including “The Song That I Call Home” from which the CD title derived.

“Every part of my life involves making music in some way, but it was interesting to put that down on paper with my pal, Erin McDermott. She and I were both pondering life in general as we wrote this. I love that idea, that specific line right after ordinary soul, ‘Lyrical directions for an ordinary soul.’ It’s sort of being informed by everything around you as a normal human. But then that next line, ‘Look past my imperfections while the music makes me whole.’ [It’s about] getting over yourself, getting over everything around you to really achieve what you’re trying to achieve. And honestly, that’s a statement for me in this whole record that really speaks to me getting this darn thing done.”

For the song “A Place For A Fool,” he turned to his longtime friends The Gibson Brothers whom he met at the Smokey Greene Bluegrass Festival in 1988.

“As I was walking up the stairs to this open stage, down the stairs were Eric and Leigh Gibson. Years later, they were at a Nashville airport hotel, and their plans for the day had changed. They called me out of the blue and said, ‘Hey, you want to hang out and write a song?’

“It came from a line that I believe their dad used to say, ‘Is there place for a fool?’ We were tossing lines around for various things. But we all love classic country. I’m a huge fan of Ray Price and Buck Owens. For me, those two are in this song. I sing it in phrasing like Buck Owens might. And it has the shuffle feel that a Ray Price thing would have. But as far as the songwriting, it was just the three of us tossing lines back and forth. Then the song got lost. You know how it is with computers dying on you and something saved or you move and your box of CDs is missing and who knows. I guess Eric lost the audio, and I lost quite a bit of the lyrics, and we got some of it back. Then I remembered how it went for the most part, and we were able to reassemble it.

“I’m just really proud of the way it turned out. I think it’s a cool piece. Eric and Leigh came in and sang with me on it. So it really was this whole full circle thing going from me as an 11-year-old, to me as a 40-something making music with these people that I met all those years ago. That song is meaningful to me in that way. But I’m also really proud of the way that it sounds. Mike Bub’s work is on it with the walking bass. I mean, that dude is just a freight train, and he walks a bass from the first note to the last. And it’s not the shortest song in the world. It’s quite a workout. And then Laura Orshaw and Becky just did a phenomenal job on the twin fiddles.”

Mougin also laid down tracks for “Railroad Man,” that he recorded with the Sam Bush Band and wrote with Buller, who is one of the artists on his record label. 

“I really wanted Sam on fiddle on this one. Everybody knows he’s a great mandolin player, but he’s also a championship fiddler, and in all of our shows, he plays a tune or two on the fiddle. I really like the way Sam’s bow arm works. It has so much groove in the pulse of the way that he attacks the fiddle. He doesn’t sound like anybody else. I really wanted that sound on this particular song.

“The song came about because my father-in-law, who was high up in Slovak Public Television had a documentary made about this railroad man who made violins over there in Slovakia. The violin that he made in the documentary was fantastic sounding. My father-in-law was a violinist so he actually purchased that violin and had it in his collection. I remember the first time I went over to visit. He didn’t speak English very well. He kept saying, ‘Railroad man, railroad man.’ That was what he called that fiddle. On the back of it you can see there’s wormholes and all that stuff, because the guy had carved it out of an old junk dresser, but he made it this beautiful violin. It is an amazing sounding instrument. I was just thinking about that one day when I had a co-write with Becky Buller.

“All the facts in there about the instrument itself are 100 percent correct. The story within the song is all made up, but we thought it was kind of an inspirational thing, handing down the fiddle to a future generation of enthusiasts.” 

Mougin produced and engineered his own album, which he does with all Dark Shadow artists in his own studio. But to be behind the controls solo for his project, he admits, may not have been the best idea.

“When I start another record, I will probably ask someone to co-produce with me,” Mougin says. 

This time in the studio he relied on his family to be an extra set of ears.

“My wife and my son sat in the control room while I cut vocals and and helped me make sure that I was being objective and not over-analyzing things. My 10-year-old son actually did all the vocal engineering on this record, which is pretty cool. All the harmonies I engineered for other people, but all of my lead vocals were recorded by my 10-year-old. He knows what he’s doing. He’s been around it a long time. It was really necessary to have them in there to make sure that I wasn’t wasting a bunch of time on stuff that didn’t matter, but also encouraging me to do something again if I got frustrated and thought, ‘Well, I think that’s what I sound like.’ If it really wasn’t good enough, they’d say, ‘Hey, do it again.’ My wife, Jana and Sammy were definitely a large part of the vocal sound.” 

Another approach he has to producing is allowing the song’s arrangement to be fluid with the other musicians behind the mic chiming in with their muses.  

“That’s really a key component to my producing style. I have hundreds of different arrangement ideas that are always firing when we’re working up a tune. I’m really inspired by the people who are making music with me, and I want to hear their ideas. I want to hire a certain musician and hear what they can bring to the session. A good example, there’s three songs that feature an acoustic country band. It’s twin fiddles, Laura Orshaw and Becky Buller. Mandolin was Cory Piatt. And then I specifically hired Mike Bub to come in on bass because that man is a walking encyclopedia of 50s and 60s country music. Having Mike in the room definitely, definitely informed some things. He sure knew what to do on bass on all of those three cuts; ‘Color Me Lonely,’ ‘Play Me A Sad Song Again,’ and ‘A Place For A Fool.’

“When you’re listening to musicians, they give you more when they know that you want their input, not just their picks and strings,” Mougin says. “On my own record, in a certain way, my producing was bringing my ideas but also incorporating the ideas of all the other musicians in the room and trusting that they’re not gonna let me do anything stupid.”

Another element that took Mougin’s album to a higher level was bringing the musicians together rather than overdubbing parts. 

“I feel like number one, it costs more to do overdubs. It’s significantly less time when you capture it all at once. Plus, it’s just more fun. It feels more like making music rather than trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I just like the environment of all the musicians under one room and firing ideas back and forth that people can react to. One of the problems that I’ve seen with overdubs is that there’s no react ability. So if the Dobro™ plays something and then the mandolin goes back and echoes that and then the Dobro™ plays off what the mandolin plays, then pick your two instruments. Those sorts of maneuvers don’t happen if it’s all overdubs. Because whoever went first gives one idea and keeps playing off of that. And then who comes in second is informed by that first idea and then can give off some other ideas. And then whoever comes in third is informed by both of those ideas. But they can never speak backwards to the person who came before them.”

The first single from the album, “I’m Gonna Ride” is a tune Mojo wrote with Rick Lang whom he met at an IBMA convention in the early 2000s.

“I wasn’t sure exactly where I was heading in my career path at that moment. I was happy to be in the Sam Bush Band and that wasn’t going to change, but as far as the label and where we were going with our studio work and teaching, I just wasn’t sure that I was in the right place. The day that we wrote that song we were chatting about my thoughts about buying a new property and trying to build my own studio. I’d had my gear for years, but I’ve been renting space from other people. It was a struggle every time we had to make a record. And he told me about his experience in building his company, Highland Hardwoods, all those years ago, which is now a successful, amazing lumber company in New Hampshire. It was odd the similarities between where he was before he started that company and where I was at that very moment. As we talked, he really inspired me to take on this new path.

“In that moment we wrote this song, which talks about grabbing life by the horns and going after the thing you really want. There’s a line in there, ‘Is it just the fear of falling or afraid that I might find wings to fly?’ And I realized that one of the things that was holding me back was not only the fear of failure, but the fear of success because with that comes the pressure to do more of that. There is a bit of that in anything you do that that’s kind of a risk-taking adventure. What do you do if it actually works? Even with my record, I was afraid nobody was going to like it. Or was I afraid that it was going to be somehow successful, and then I would have to try to make another one that was even better? It’s sort of a constant inner battle with artistic people. Self-doubt and questions about self-worth and all of that are a constant enemy of getting things done.

“This song is really about getting over it, figuring out what you want to do, and then doing it. It was the moment I really realized I wanted to dig deeper into the Dark Shadow Recording label. I wanted to do bigger and better things with the label itself. I wanted to help out some more artists and move it in a different kind of direction than I was. I wanted to take more control over all of the elements in my own career that were outside of the Sam Bush Band. I love that whole organization. It’s a dream gig and wouldn’t change that for anything. But everything outside of that I really needed to make some adjustments and so I did, and here we are.” 

Where He’s Been

The musical jack-of-all-trades first became interested in learning music by watching his dad. When Mougin was around age six, his dad got a wild hair and decided to learn how to play guitar. 

“I wanted to do whatever dad was doing. So they got me a tag sale guitar, and I started messing with it. My dad had some old family friends who he never knew were musicians who started inviting us to jam sessions, and they would play classic country and bluegrass. My mom decided she was going to learn banjo, and we found a guy in the area who would come to teach her. The first week he came to give her a banjo lesson, and I was over in the corner noodling on a guitar. When he was heading out the door, he told my dad, ‘It’s not your wife that needs the lessons; it’s that kid.’ Sure enough, the next week he brought his protégé’ [Wayne Chalet] to teach me guitar.”

When Mougin turned 15 years old, he joined Chalet and his brother, Will, in the band Center Mountain Bluegrass that he played with until he moved to Music City at age 25. During this time he was influenced by JD Crowe and the New South, Jimmy Martin, the Osborne Brothers, the Bluegrass Cardinals (“David Parmley’s rhythm guitar playing still knocks me out.”) and the Johnson Mountain Boys, to name a few. And of course, Bill Monroe, who he met at the Peaceful Valley Bluegrass Festival in the summer of 1988. 

“I was probably 12 and playing a mandolin I had just gotten, and he was going to give a mandolin workshop. My dad and I walked in the little room where the workshop was going to be, and Bill Monroe walks in way early. He looks at me … and said, ‘Oh, what have you got there?’  I flopped my mandolin case on this little table, flip the latches and hand him my mandolin. It was a little A-model Kentucky, which I still have here. He played that mandolin for the entire workshop. It was really cool to see what I knew even then was the biggest name in the industry taking time out to hang out with a young person who was into this music. I really feel like some of that definitely led to my mentorship. For him to take time to show a young kid some stuff on a mandolin is really remarkable, and that’s really a core component of everything I’ve ever seen in the bluegrass world.”

That passion for helping others musically consumes the vocal music education major. Peers saw that devotion, and in 2016 honored him with the “IBMA Mentor of the Year” Momentum Award. 

He nurtures new and established groups with not only teaching but band coaching. 

  “Band coaching, as I describe it to people, is amplifying the things that a band does well, addressing the things that they could use work on, teaching them how to play together in a cohesive fashion, teaching them how to arrange stuff to best suit their band, teaching them how to choose keys, how to blend their harmonies, and what order to stand in that makes the most sense for their unique band. 

“I get them in a room, have them start playing a tune, and we just dig on things that I can help them with. Within a couple of minutes you can hear substantial changes in the sound of a band that are tighter, more cohesive, and that they feel better about. It just comes from my background in teaching, but also my producer view of how things should play together and what works and what doesn’t.

“Of all the things that I do, I feel like teaching is the thing I’m best at. Part of that comes from my love of wanting to pay forward, but also my passion for music. I want everybody to know what I know. I want them to be able to feel what I do when things work. It’s a thrill to share that, and whether it’s with a whole group or with an individual student, it’s very rewarding.”

Maybe Extraordinary Soul would be a more fitting title to describe Mougin. He’s a  gifted musician who brought his best to the table with his first album and a man whose compassion for serving others with music is incomparable.