SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

We hereby declare self-described "jookhouse-funk, front-porch-soul" outfit Mofro the unofficial mascot of the Langerado Music Festival. Why not? Mofro is the only group to appear at every Langerado so far.

"That's what they told me, which I guess is cool," singer JJ Grey says. "I ran into Ethan [Schwartz, promoter of Langerado] on the Dave Matthews cruise I was playing on. He and Mark Brown were the promoters for it, and he was talking to me about that. � South Florida's been real good to us. But Ethan and Mark have worked hard and I wouldn't say it was small when it started, but compared to now � " Grey doesn't finish the sentence, but he doesn't need to. The festival has grown by leaps and bounds.

Besides Mofro's annual appearance at the festival, there are other reasons to regard it as the quintessential Langerado act. Both musically and lyrically, Mofro adds a distinctly Floridian bent to the funky, jam-band genre. The band's first two albums, Blackwater and Lochloosa, share an appreciation for Southern food and culture and an antipathy -- sometimes just annoyance, sometimes downright hatred -- for the urban sprawl that has paved over the wild lands Grey identifies as inherently Floridian. The band's upcoming third album will likely continue these trends.

"I think it's going to be called Country Ghetto," Grey says, his Southern accent dropping the g from every -ing and dragging vowels out for marathon distances. "It'll be a title track, kind of like the other records. � I think this record has a touch more angst than the other two."

While Mofro's bubbling broil of soulful funk-rock hardly seems to lend itself to the word angst, Grey's lyrics often return to the same theme -- worrying over the destruction of the world around him. But Grey worries about other things on the upcoming album. "Einstein's got his theory of relativity, and I got my own theory of relativity," Grey explains. "You don't have to be in an inner city to be in a ghetto. There's all kinds of ghettos, all degrees of ghettos. That's sort of what this is about -- at least the title song, anyway."

Grey and Dan Prothero, who produced all three of the band's albums, are nearing completion on Country Ghetto through a give-and-take process that has continued since November, when the band ended its most recent tour.

"Me and Dan, that's how we've done all three of the records," Grey says. "Once we get everything compiled and compare notes, he starts mixing, shoots me a mix, sends it to me. I say, 'We should do this or that,' then he tweaks it, sends it back my way and like that. Or he says, 'No, we shouldn't do that, and here's why.' "

Along with mixing the upcoming album, Grey has spent the past several months retraining his voice after shredding it through four years of constant touring. "Toots Hibbert from Toots and the Maytals, he's about my favorite singer alive -- him and Otis [Redding] are my two favorite soul singers of all time. I went and saw him sing, and you'd think he was screaming like a megaphone and pushing out all this air, just screaming his guts out. And he's not at all," Grey says. "That's what my vocal coach has been teaching me. He told me, 'You can do twice the volume with half the energy you're putting out now.' "

Expect Mofro to toss out a few new numbers, along with a heaping helping of old favorites, at Langerado. "I'm looking forward to it," Grey says. "Hopefully, we'll bring a little bit of a different thing down there this time."

Mofro will perform 2 p.m. Sunday at the Langerado Music Festival. See the full schedule.