You guys all have such amazing backgrounds, and so much success behind you. How did such an impressive group of people get together? Did you pull everyone together?

No, Bobby Keyes did…our guitar player. I went to Bobby for songwriting lessons. I was writing, and I had about six chords I was working with. Bobby’s the chord meister, and he’s an old friend, so I told him to come over to my house and give me some lessons. We started playing my songs, and he liked them. He had a trio, and I started popping in with the trio and playing a couple of my tunes. He looked at me and said, “Man, I think we should get a real rhythm section and make an album.” So he got the two Marty’s, because they know him and respect his work. Then we were together for about five hours of rehearsal, and we cut the first album [laughs]. Then we had about a year gigging, and we cut the second album. And now, we’re just next week starting on our third album.

The last album hasn’t been out very long, has it?

It hasn’t, but it takes a while to do these things. We do them very home grown. We cut them in Bobby’s house on tape machines. We’re all dinosaurs, man. We like using 2-inch tape. We know we have to transfer to digital, but I still think you get an added warmth and punch from the old audio. So that’s what we do – we record in the house, and it’s been a bit under construction. He added a room for the drums, and we’ve got one guy in the kitchen, and one guy in the living room, and one guy and an amplifier in the bathtub, and that’s how we record [laughs].

You mentioned that you made the second album after a year or so of gigging. Was there anything different that you were going for in the sound of that album versus Satisfy You [debut]? Was there an evolution there?

There was an evolution that came naturally as a result of playing the clubs/bars/theaters, and we got a little more edge to the band being out and about. All these guys work all the time, but when you work together as a band for a while, it makes a difference in how you approach things, and that’s been an evolution – the second album was. The third album I believe will be more towards the roots direction than either of the first two.

Why is that?

Because I got on a kick, and I’ve been listening to a lot of old roots stuff. I got this box set from an engineer in New York called Goodbye, Babylon, and it’s got a lot of great older roots music on it. I got buried in it this winter, and listened to it all, then decided to take a rootsier direction with my writing, and my singing, and my approach.

Do you handle most of the songwriting?

Bobby and I do it together. I usually bring in the idea first, and we work together. I try to come up with an idea, or a concept, or a set of chords and a melody, and then Bobby will enhance it. Some of the stuff I write myself, and some of the stuff we write together.

When I see your name – The Mystix – it doesn’t conjure up the swamp boogie sound you have. Where did the band name come from?

We thought we’d be a Boston band, and we thought of the Mystic River, so we went with the Mystics. Then we switched to an “x”, because there was a band called the Mystics that did “Hushabye.” So if you Googled “The Mystics,” you got about 14 pages of Nostradamus, then you got a doo-wop band. So we put the “x” on, and got our own domain. So that’s where it came from. It’s a Boston thing. We want to be like the Subdudes used to be in New Orleans. Like when you used to go to New Orleans, you’d try to find the Subdudes and see them. We want to be a Boston band.

Once you pulled everyone together, how easy was it to find your sound as a band? Was it a sound that you’d always aimed for, and everyone fit in naturally, or was it more a combination of things?

I think the sound came right in the studio from the magic of whatever we brought in with the tunes and all the experience we’ve had through the years. For that first album, we really hadn’t played those songs more than four or five times. So we just kind of went for the moment. The second album was probably a little more thought out, because we gigged the material so much. We try to be as spontaneous as we can in the studio. You can’t really plan it – it just goes where it goes.

Back to your latest album, Blue Morning – it’s been getting a lot of great press. Tell me a little about that album and how you think it turned out versus the debut.

We’re much happier with it. It’s done very well. It’s #18 right now on the Roots Chart nationally, which is right up there with some of the big dogs. Believe it or not, we’ve gotten better response in Europe than in the US. We get a fair amount of airplay in Europe, and we get more downloads and album orders from Europe than we do from America.

Are you planning to tour there?

Not really. We’d have to figure that one out. I’m not sure why they’re buying our record or downloading it from Italy, but someone’s playing it over there. We’ve got a good following here. It’s a music crowd that crosses all genres. We see a lot of people our age, and we see a lot of people not our age. We see a lot of kids, middle aged people – 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. We see it all, which is kind of fun.

Are you pretty true to your songs in a live setting, or do you improv?

We expand upon them, usually, a little bit. Because we’re just starting a new album, we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline that hasn’t been heard before that we’re just starting to perform. We really prefer to gig a song a few times before we cut it in the studio.

Do you do a lot of cover songs in your live sets?

Yes, we do more than we used to. It’s something like 30-40 percent, but it’s still mostly original. We’re doing covers, but they’re reasonably obscure.

Do you have any favorite songs to play that bring the house down?

The tune “Yolanda” from our last album is still one that we like to gig because we wrote it, and it seems to kick pretty good. We have a lot of fun with that tune.

Have you found a lot of bands in New England that play your same style of music?

They’re out there, but mostly in Boston. We have a pretty strong country flavor, too, and I’ve heard more of a bluesy flavor to the other bands. We do blues, too – no mistake about it – but we bring a little more country to the table than most bands that are doing what we do.

How difficult is it to find places to play live?

We have plenty of bars to play, but we are really trying to garner a listening audience like Tupelo Music Hall. We’re starting to move into that category, and we very much want to be in that category. We’ve cut back on our bar work. We’ve all done it for so many years, and there’s a point in the night where you could be playing Allman Brothers tunes, and it wouldn’t matter. We don’t want to take this band there. You can lose yourself out there. You can lose your soul.

Tell me a little about a typical Mystix live show. What should people at the Tupelo next weekend expect?

I think they can expect a lot of variation. There’ll be some grit – it’ll be beauty and the beast. There’ll be some sweet stuff to it. We do a lot of swing, we do some bluesy swing, and we do some country and we’ll do some gritty stuff to – roots, bluesy. It’s acoustic and electric. They can expect some superb musicianship. When it comes to soloing around the band, it’s hard to beat us.

What else is coming up over the next few months?

We’re going to start our album, we’re working at Newburyport Firehouse, Salem Jazz and Blues Festival. There’s a theater in Worcester that they’ve just started doing shows at. We’re playing the Lowell Summer Music Series, opening for Robert Cray on August 30. We don’t work as much in the summer, but we take the plumbs.