HOBOKEN, N.J. (AP) - When Warren Haynes tells you something in song, you
believe it.

Haynes, frontman for Gov't Mule and a guitarist for both the Allman
Brothers Band and the Dead, is considered by many to be the hardest
working man in rock and seems, whether he has become one or not, like a
parental figure in music.

This particularly applies to the vibrant composite known as the "jamband
community," in which Haynes is a benevolent fixture whose sense
of collaboration and exploration draws the kinetic, improvisational
fervour of his fellow artists into a beautiful kind of orbit.

The 40-something North Carolina native traces his musical roots to his
initial infatuation with gospel and soul, with some of music's most
emotive voices - Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Levi
Stubbs.

Their testimonial spirit is captured in the nakedness of Haynes' live
performances, which yield moments like a moving Patchwork Quilt solo
during a recent performance at The Starrland Ballroom in Sayreville, a
duet between Haynes' voice and his instrument.

"The beautiful thing about the human voice," Haynes explained recently
before a session at Hoboken's Water Music Studios, where Gov't Mule is
recording a new album, "is there's a thousand notes in between, and it
allows for much more expression, because everyone feels that
differently. All my favorite players were players that emulated singers
. . . Maceo Parker playing saxophone, Little Walter playing the blues
harmonica, it's like they were singing through their instruments, and
that to me is the most expressive way that you can approach your
playing."

Yet Haynes' soul influences are tempered by his command of a gritty,
blues-based guitar sensibility reminiscent of an Eric Clapton, Stevie
Ray Vaughn or John Lee Hooker, and a consciousness which seems at times
to be some endearing composite of the thousand nameless, smoke filled
nightclubs of the South.

Haynes possesses what is in many ways the ideal rock and roll voice, at
once gravelly, booming, and delicate, soulful enough to maintain his
emotional peaks and raw enough to accommodate the themes of death,
perseverance, and internal struggle that permeate his work. There is an
overwhelming feeling of validity to Haynes performance, a truth borne
marginally from his delivery, but more profoundly from the brilliance of
his songwriting. His work strikes at the bruising instabilities and
contradictions that comprise existence, at simultaneous attraction and
repulsion. Haynes' lyrics maintain a kind of balance, refusing to let
their light and dark themes - love and loss, life and death, weariness
and endurance - separate from each other, instead binding them and
grasping desperately at the dwindling tradition of meaningful stories in
music.

"That aspect," Haynes says, "comes from a lot of different areas, mostly
my love of songwriting. Starting with Bob Dylan, who, I think most
people would agree is the pinnacle, but also studying Neil Young, Roger
Waters, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, all the great singer
songwriters I grew up around in Carolina. If you keep your aspirations
high, you're going to constantly strive to write something more than
stupid love songs. A lot of people sit down and write songs, but don't
really believe what they just wrote, and I don't want to be one of those
songwriters: 'Everything's perfect, you're the love of my life,' and
you've said it all in the first line, and there's no story."

Yet ultimately, the complete effect of Haynes' songs is in the way these
lyrics are immersed in the virtuosity of his play, his ability to
produce that utterly appropriate and unusual chord, the one with just
the kind of open-ended dissonance that captures the sadness and subtle,
moving hope that characterizes songs like Beautifully Broken.

As a result, if one hears Gov't Mule launch into, as they have, The Bee
Gees To Love Somebody, Van Morrison's Into the Mystic, Greene's Take Me
to the River or Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, and then scampers the
next day to a CD to recapture the moment, something will be missing.

"I've definitely maintained that there's music that you can make in
front of a crowd that you can't make any other way," Haynes says. "That
energy, you're feeding it to them, they are feeding it back to you, and
it's just this constant thing that's growing, and as much as I love
making studio records, you can never achieve that."

This is the dichotomy that provides Haynes with his own unique
electricity, injecting life into the esoteric spaces left by Garcia in a
Dead no longer Grateful and an Allman Brothers Band short one virtuoso
brother and looking to reassert its revered place in rock. Yet despite
the immense vacuums left by such icons, Haynes has preserved his own
distinct presence amid the mythical quality of each band.

"I don't think I'd be nearly as good a guitar player today if I hadn't
been working with Warren," Dickey Betts, the former Allman Brothers
member, told Guitar World magazine.

"Everybody thought I was crazy for wanting to get him in the band. All
the business people said, 'Are you sure you want him? He. . .uhh...'
They wouldn't quite say it, so I asked, 'Are you afraid he's going to
blow me away?' And they said, 'He's awfully good. Are you sure you want
to deal with that?' And I said, 'I don't want to get some . . . lackey
in the band. We might as well not have another guitarist.' I have to
work like hell to keep up with Warren, and he drives me to play things
that I wouldn't otherwise."

"When I joined the Allmans," Haynes notes, "I was always told, 'Play
like you, it's up to you how much Duane Allman you want to bring to the
table.' And it's the same kind of thing in the Dead so far, they seemed
to be into leaving it up to me and (fellow guitarist) Jimmy Herring how
much Jerry Garcia we want to bring to the table."

Phish bassist Mike Gordon, who directed the documentary Rising Low,
which in part detailed Gov't Mule's Deep End project that rotated some
of the world's great bass players through the band, is amazed by Haynes'
combination of discipline, maturity and humility. "Bringing that
together is what really gets me," Gordon said in an interview. "I mean
now he's playing in five bands, if you count solo acoustic, and he's
just always got albums, DVDs in the works (including the June 8 release
of the "Live at Bonnaroo" CD on ATO Records), he's writing songs for all
those bands, and at the same time has his head on his shoulders and is a
very nice, sweet-natured person who is easy to talk to, and that's
unique."

"The best you can ever approach your music is without ego and without
pretense," Haynes says. "To me the best you can ever perform is when you
forget you're performing at all. These are rare times. You can probably
count them, well, on four hands, where I've gotten so lost in the music
that I've almost felt that it was an out-of-body experience and
completely forgotten that I was on stage performing and then I don't
realize it until I come back and go out on stage and go, 'Wow, I'm on
stage performing music.' "