Set Me Free

The Zoo Crew just laid the needle on “Set Me Free,” and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks riding along with THE ZOO, you already know this one has that loose-hipped groove the old freeform stations used to sneak in between the heavy stuff. Matt Pearce & The Mutiny cut it for the 2019 album Gotta Get Home, and it still sounds like a record that was pressed in a back room where somebody had Free, the Stones, and a little Prince on the same shelf. Pearce sings it with a grit he does not always show on the rest of the record, and Jon Moody’s electric piano keeps the floor from getting too rough while the guitar lines wander out and come back home. Classic Rock magazine named it a Track of the Week. Planet Rock put it on the playlist. Over on the Amazon blues charts it went to number one, the same week the album itself hit the top of the best-selling blues albums list. Writers who live for this kind of thing called it a classic in waiting, the kind of tune that could have sat next to latter-day Free or a Green-era Fleetwood Mac jam without looking out of place.

The story behind the cut is the story of the whole record. Pearce, the Glasgow-born guitarist who had spent years as an original member of the hard-rock outfit Voodoo Six, found himself at a crossroads after a relationship came apart. He told interviewers he felt disobedient, he felt defiant, and he felt like he had to mutiny. He had always been drawn to the bluesier, groovier songs from the bands he loved, the Stones, Zeppelin, and Free. He loved the rock and roll spirit, but it was the rhythmic grooves in the funkiest tunes that really got under his skin. Those bands had soul, he said, and he wanted a band of his own that could chase that. The name Mutiny was not a marketing trick. It was the mood he was in when the songs started showing up.

He has said the songs on Gotta Get Home almost wrote themselves, that they tracked him down rather than the other way around. “Set Me Free” fits that claim. It is not a novelty lyric or a throwaway single. Reviewers kept coming back to the vocal honesty on it, the way Pearce pushes the voice a little harder than he does elsewhere on the album and still keeps the melody in his pocket. Blues Rock Review called it one of the can’t-miss tracks and even named it the big hit of the set, pointing to Moody’s piano and Pearce’s lead lines as the glue. RAMzine heard hints of Rory Gallagher in the same stretch of tape. Get Ready to ROCK! said that if Joe Bonamassa had cut the same song, listeners would have been all ears. The band on the session was the cream of the London blues scene he had been able to pull in: Joe Lazarus on drums, Kez Gunes on bass, Jon Moody on keys. Pearce produced it himself at Soup Studios. His Voodoo Six bandmate Tony Newton mixed it, the same man who had been in the chair for Iron Maiden’s Book of Souls live release, and Ade Emsley mastered it. Acantha Lang sings on other cuts from the album, including the gospel-tinted title track, but “Set Me Free” is Pearce out front, asking for the door to open.

The single landed in the fall of 2018, ahead of the album, which Mutinear Records put out on the third of May, 2019. A day later Gotta Get Home was sitting at number one on those Amazon blues and hot-new-release charts. Pearce has described the sound he was after as a funky soul-a-delic blues rock jam thing, then laughed and said you could just call it a seriously funky blues band, like the Black Crowes playing Prince songs, or the other way around. “Set Me Free” is the song that made that pitch real for a lot of radio people. It is catchy without being cute, and the lead guitar does not show off so much as it argues with the vocal and then agrees with it. Darren Redick at Planet Rock later said the Mutiny sound was vintage and modern at the same time, which is about as clean a description of this track as anybody has managed.

Pearce did not come out of nowhere to make that record. He was born in Glasgow and based himself in London, and back in 2005 he was one of the founding members of Voodoo Six. With that band he cut five albums, one of them tracked in Los Angeles at Steve Vai’s Mothership Studios, and he kept a day job in heavy rock while the bluesier songs kept tugging at him. He also turned up in the Metalworks collective and in AOR Legends alongside vocalist Jimi Anderson, so the calendar was already full before the Mutiny idea took hold. When the mutiny did come, he was lucky enough, in his own words, to work with players who could make the dream a record instead of a notebook full of riffs. The live trail that followed was not a small one for a debut. The band played HRH Blues, Winterstorm, Cambridge Rock Festival, HRH C.R.O.W.S., and the British Blues Invasion in Moscow, sold out a debut London show upstairs at the Garage, and toured the UK opening for Laurence Jones. Early 2020 brought Skegness Rock and Blues, Planet Rock’s Winter’s End, Legends of Rock, and a support slot with Savoy Brown before the road shut down. A second album, The Soul Food Store, arrived in 2022 on the same Mutinear label and also hit number one on the blues charts, and a live set, Soul Food Served Live, followed from the 2024 UK dates. Pearce has said Gotta Get Home was the statement of intent, the proof that bluesy rock could be funky, and that the later record was about being at home with all the music he loves. “Set Me Free” is still the door that first statement walked through.

Zoo Freaks who want the long version can dig into the whole Gotta Get Home album and hear how the single sits between the slide-driven title track and the more stripped-back numbers. The man himself keeps the story posted at the official site, Matt Pearce & The Mutiny, where the debut and the later records are laid out with the same quotes he has been giving since the mutiny started. The band page on Facebook is where the gig clips and the old lyric films tend to land, and the picture feed lives on Instagram. Short dispatches go out on X. There is no separate fan site standing apart from those official doors, so the straightest road is the one Pearce keeps himself. The Zoo Crew will keep the record spinning for the Freaks, the way a freeform station ought to when a song still feels like it just walked in off the highway.