There's a version of this story that gets filed under "curiosity" — a legendary artist dusts off old session tapes, slaps a famous name on the cover, and calls it a legacy project. "Time," the new album from Taj Mahal, is not that story. Released May 1 via his own Resonatin' Records imprint with Thirty Tigers, it is a fully alive, deeply felt record that just happens to have been sitting in a drawer since 2010. The sixteen-year gap between the sessions and the release is the least interesting thing about it.
The most interesting thing is the title track. "Time" is a song written by Bill Withers that, until now, existed only as an unreleased demo — never recorded by Withers, never heard by the public. The connection between the two men was personal: their wives had attended Claremont College together, and Mahal came away from their few meetings with deep admiration. After Withers passed in 2020, Taj made sure his widow Marcia gave her blessing before the track moved forward. Producer Steve Berkowitz — who had worked with Withers and later ran Sony Legacy — was the one who surfaced the demo and brought it to Taj's camp around 2010, just as these sessions were getting underway. It sat, waiting, until the album was finally ready to exist.
The band behind "Time" is the Phantom Blues Band, and it's worth being precise about who's in the room: Johnny Lee Schell on electric guitar (who also co-produced alongside Braunagel, Fulcher, and Berkowitz), Tony Braunagel on drums and percussion, Larry Fulcher on bass, Jon Cleary on keyboards, Mick Weaver on organ, Joe Sublett on tenor saxophone, and Les Lovitt on trumpet. These are not Taj's touring musicians filling in — this is a working unit with thirty years of shared vocabulary. The whole thing was cut at Ultratone Studio in Studio City, California, and it sounds like it: warm, unhurried, and real. Ziggy Marley shows up on "Talkin' Blues," a Bob Marley cover that lands somewhere between Western swing and Afro-Cuban groove, and it works precisely because nobody is trying to make it work.
The album opens with "Life of Love," a rhythmic celebration that sets the tone without announcing itself, and closes with "Rowdy Blues," a barrelhouse number drawn from one of only two surviving recordings by the obscure Delta bluesman Kid Bailey — Jon Cleary's piano driving hard underneath Mahal's gritty vocal. In between, "Sweet Lorene" unearths a rare co-write by Isaac Hayes and Otis Redding, and "Ask Me 'Bout Nothing (But the Blues)" draws on Bobby "Blue" Bland with the kind of testifying soul that makes you wish the track was twice as long. Ruthie Foster, who wrote the liner notes, puts it plainly: "deep-groove, grown-folks music from a band that still plays like the night is young."
Taj Mahal is 84 years old. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025 — and then, almost simultaneously, won a competitive Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album for "Swingin' Live at the Church in Tulsa," his celebrated live record with Keb' Mo'. The industry gave him his flowers and he just kept going. "It's an ongoing freight train, my career," he told Variety. That is not a boast. It is simply an accurate description of a man who has been playing music for nearly eight decades and shows no sign of stopping.
What "Time" ultimately argues — quietly, without making a speech about it — is that good music doesn't expire. These recordings are sixteen years old. The Bill Withers demo is older still. None of that matters when Mahal's voice wraps around a melody, when Braunagel's drums find that particular pocket, when Schell's guitar tone fills the room like afternoon light. The album is called "Time" for reasons that keep multiplying the longer you sit with it.
