Hey Hey Mama

You are locked in with The Zoo, the commercial-free home of album rock that still believes a five-piece can light a room without a click track or a committee. Robert Jon & The Wreck come out of Orange County, California, and they have spent the years since 2011 proving that Southern rock did not die when the last Marshall Tucker bus left the lot. They took the East Coast language — twin guitars, a Hammond that actually breathes, vocal stacks that sound like a bar full of cousins — and built it on the Pacific side of the map. Frontman Robert Jon Burrison grew up on his father’s Motown and gospel records, started on drums and piano, then found classic rock as a teenager and never put the guitar down. The band that carries his name has shared stages with Joe Bonamassa, Blackberry Smoke, Peter Frampton, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Black Crowes, Little Feat, and Rival Sons. That is not a press-kit wish list. That is the company they keep, and the rooms they fill from California to Brussels.

“Hey Hey Mama” is track nine on Good Life Pie, the 2016 album that followed Glory Bound and confirmed these guys were not a one-record fluke. The band marks the release as May 13, 2016, on Spitfire Music. Warren Huart produced it, the same hand who had steered Glory Bound. Sessions went down at Hybrid Studios in Santa Ana, engineered by Brennan Edmondson and Steve Maggiora, with assistant engineering from Joshua Phillip Brooks. Extra guitars and vocals were cut at ASP Recordings in Orange, Maggiora at the desk, and additional guitars landed at Spitfire Studio in Los Angeles with Sam Martin. Huart and Martin mixed it at Spitfire. Adam Ayan mastered it at Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine. Every song on the record is credited to Robert Jon & The Wreck. Album art came from lead guitarist Kristopher Butcher. Layout and design came from keyboard man Steve Maggiora. The lineup in the room was Burrison on lead vocal and guitar, Butcher on lead guitar and vocals, Maggiora on keys and vocals, Andrew Espantman on drums, and Dave Pelusi on bass and vocals. Eleven tracks, a little over fifty-two minutes, no filler dressed up as a concept.

Sit with the sequence for a minute, because this is how a real album works. “Rollin’” opens the door like a first single should, a fun Southern rocker with extra vocals from Anesha Rose. “Bad For You” and “Good Lovin’” keep the floor moving. The title cut is the feel-good sermon about taking the slice you are given. “The Death of Me” drops the temperature. “Hit Me Like You Mean It” brings the hook and Butcher’s slide. “Home” and “What Do You Say” hold the middle. Then “Hey Hey Mama” arrives, mid-tempo, organ pushing the pocket, guitars answering each other like they have been arguing since soundcheck. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic heard the Black Crowes in the swing and a streak of Led Zeppelin in the attitude — not the voice, the stance. A Dutch write-up called out the beat and the organ for the wow, and the way the track signs off with guitars that scream instead of apologize. A German review parked it in the same neighborhood as the title cut, “The Death of Me,” and “Rollin’” when it came time to name the songs you play for a skeptic. Blues Rock Review had already put Glory Bound at number three on its 2015 year-end list and came back calling Good Life Pie a good-time record from a band still underrated. That is the frame. This is not nostalgia karaoke. This is a working band writing its own book in the language those older records taught them.

The song itself is built for a live room. Burrison has said it straight: “Hey Hey Mama” started on Good Life Pie with Butcher on guitar and Pelusi on bass, and it became a regular in the set because the chorus carries vocal harmonies and the arrangement leaves room to trade licks. When Henry James Schneekluth and Warren Murrel joined in 2017, the tune grew a second life. The proof sits on Live at the Ancienne Belgique, the band’s first official live film, out in 2023 through Joe Bonamassa’s Journeyman Records. They cut it at a sold-out show at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on June 29, 2022, in the middle of a 67-show run across nine countries in 75 days. The live take opens on a fuzzy guitar solo and rides an extended, psychedelic outro instead of the studio fade. Same song. Bigger weather. That is what a setlist staple is supposed to do when the players change and the miles add up.

The current road lineup still has Burrison out front and Espantman behind the kit, with Schneekluth on lead guitar, Murrel on bass, and Jake Abernathie on keys. The catalog kept coming after Good Life Pie: a self-titled record in 2018, Take Me Higher in 2019, Last Light on the Highway in 2020, Shine a Light on Me Brother in 2021, Ride Into the Light in 2023 with producers Don Was, Kevin Shirley, and Dave Cobb in the credits and guests including Bonamassa and Josh Smith, Red Moon Rising in 2024 with Shirley again, and Heartbreaks & Last Goodbyes with Dave Cobb. The Brussels film drew the kind of notice live albums rarely get anymore. None of that erases the 2016 cut. “Hey Hey Mama” is the groove that taught rooms what this band sounds like when the organ locks with the drums and the guitars stop being polite.

If you want the whole story, the records, and the tour board, the band keeps the lights on at robertjonandthewreck.com. The verified page is Facebook, the photo trail is Instagram, and the short-form dispatches live on X. The faithful gather in the fan group Highly Wreck-a-mended, Fans of Robert Jon & The Wreck, over on Facebook — setlist talk, ticket swaps, and the kind of devotion a band earns by showing up. And you are hearing it where album rock still gets the long version: The Zoo, listener-supported, commercial-free, built for the deep cut and the backstory. Turn it up. “Hey Hey Mama” does not ask twice.