Warren Haynes may be Marcus King’s mentor but that doesn’t mean he gets tired of talking him up. In an interview with Music-News.com, Haynes says:

“Marcus is quite a phenomenon, and I think he’s gonna take the world by storm. You know because there are a lot of great guitar players, even young great guitar players. He was 17 when I first heard him and then when you hear his voice, his voice is beautiful. And then you find out he writes these really soulful deep songs. So he’s like a triple threat. You know there are very few people like that that come about that young.”

Haynes is also encouraged by the wider number of younger guitar players he now hears. “There’s a lot of up-and-coming young musicians especially in the jam band scene right now,” he says. “There’s more promising new talent right now than there was the past 10 years or so... I was getting a bit worried because a lot of the young musicians and singers seem to only be influenced by the previous five or ten years as opposed to 20, 30, 40, 50 years of great music that they should be listening to. Now I think we’re getting a lot of young kids that are going all the way back and listening to everything. You know, when you talk to Marcus King, you can talk about Otis Redding or Ray Charles or John Coltrane and you know he’s aware of all of them.”

The Marcus King Band have just released the Due North EP. They and Gov’t Mule are both currently on tour. Separately!