In his 40 years of making music, Jon Langford has earned a reputation for not doing things by the book. That applies most notably to the Mekons, a band the Welsh native cofounded in Leeds in the late 70s, whose sound has evolved over the decades from rudimentary punk to a dark, strange melange of rock, folk, country, and even reggae. In 1984 they played a series of benefits for striking coal miners, whose communities were being starved by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to close many UK mines—a burst of activity that produced their early masterpiece Fear and Whiskey. When the Mekons went on their first U.S. tour in 1986, it was a a revelation for Langford. “Starting as a teenager, there was a longing for America and wanting to go there and wanting to find out things about it,” he says.

It was there that he met Norbert Putnam, who as a 19-year-old in 1961 had become the bassist for the original Muscle Shoals rhythm section at Rick Hall’s FAME Studios. “He was one of the few guys staying at the hotel, so I kept on bumping into him on the way to rehearsals,” says Langford. “After the performance, Norbert came up to me and said, ‘You sing like a pirate. You should come down to Muscle Shoals and make an album.’”

“[Bethany] had done a couple things with the Waco Brothers, like backing vocals. But I didn’t want it to be like that,” says Langford. “I wanted the songs to have different voices. . . . The idea was for it to not be a Jon Langford solo album, even though I was writing the songs.”

Once the band had gotten demos to their liking, they traveled to the NuttHouse Recording Studio, which is built into a one-story bank building in Sheffield, Alabama. Trump had just been declared president-elect, so they were all thankful for a chance to busy themselves with music.

In fact, the only trouble the band had was with Putnam’s southern accent—when he referred to the “Creative Grape,” a nearby wine bar, they initially misheard it as “Creative Grave.”

Langford says Putnam’s relaxed production style helped get everyone on the same page. “When he needed to step in, he was very fast and closed the gap between the session musicians and me and my people,” he says. “It was hard to meld the two ways of working together, but Norbert was really fast on speaking to people on the intercom and knowing how to translate between what they were used to and what I was trying to say.”