You’d think after a few decades on the road, Derek Trucks would be immune to stage jitters. But even he admits: “Usually when the cameras come out, everyone tightens up and the show suffers a little bit.”
And that’s a problem when the whole point is to immortalize the good stuff.
Trucks and the Tedeschi Trucks Band didn’t just want to capture a solid set. For Live From The Fox Oakland, they wanted a statement. “We wanted the live record to be the night we were filming,” he says, “but I wasn’t counting on it.”
The first night, “It was mayhem backstage. Friends, guests—too much noise,” Trucks says. So he went full band dad. “We shut it down. I told the road manager: no guests. We’ve got a show to do.” They called a powwow, got the team in a “locker room mentality,” and rolled into night two like it was Game 7. “We hit the stage and it was just a different beast.”
Trucks doesn’t mind talking shop, but he’d rather talk feel. “There were four or five moments in that show that we’d never had before… everyone let things unfold. It’s that thing you can’t plan for. You don’t know how you got there, or if you’ll get there again.”
The goal wasn’t to Frankenstein a ‘greatest hits’ composite from a dozen different cities. “I like the continuity of it being from one show,” he says. “It’s not just a filler or holdover—it’s the next step from the last studio record.”
That studio record, 2016’s Let Me Get By, closed the live album—just one of nearly 70 songs the band rotates nightly. And while some acts obsess over “playing the single,” Trucks shrugs. “Didn’t feel good last night—we’ll get back to it.”
The real secret weapon is that unspeakable link between him and Susan Tedeschi, who happens to also be his wife. “It surprised us how good it’s been,” he says. “We’re closer than we’ve ever been. There’s this line of communication that’s wide open when you play music together.”
In fact, that’s band policy. “We have a hot wash after the show—shut down a bar or two and talk it out. We’ve been around those groups where no one talks to each other for 20 years. We’re not doing that.”
So they improvise. Not just onstage, but in life. “You gotta keep the coals lit,” Trucks says. “If you stop, you sink.”
He’s not kidding. It’s 12 people on stage every night. Twelve creative minds, each a little musically restless, who feed off of one another with jazz-brained looseness and jam-band instincts. They keep it varied for the audience, sure—but mostly, they do it for themselves. “You want to make sure the setlist varies,” Trucks says. “But a lot of it is really for the people on stage.”
And maybe that’s why Live From The Fox Oakland works as more than just a concert souvenir. It’s not a rehash or a keepsake—it’s a snapshot of a moving target.
And they’ll be chasing the next one before the gear’s even packed.
Listen to the interview above and check out the trailer for Live From The Fox Oakland below.
