“Stop thinking,” he said. “For the longest time I was caught up in my head and I was always thinking about what I was going to do next. It was kind of a shallow way to be.”
Over the course of six albums, the musician has learned to live in the moment.
“There’s an old Indian saying I heard growing up, but I never really knew what it meant until I slowed down and stopped over-thinking about everything,” he said. “It’s that Western people think like lightning and move like molasses, but we should be more like a horse, which is to think slow and easy and then move like lightning.”
Grey’s introspective nature can’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with the roots rocker’s poetic lyrics and soulful singing.
“I’ve done my share of self-reflection,” he said. “It’s a process that will be happening as long as I’m alive, and it’s going to affect the songs that I write.”
Grey grew up in northern Florida, 25 miles from the Georgia border near Jacksonville, a melting pot of Southern culture far different from the stereotypical vision of Florida colored with tourist areas of sandy beaches and theme parks.
Grey’s Florida is populated with working-class heroes, beautiful losers and the kind of larger-than-life characters found in the best of the Southern Gothic tradition.
From his early days performing behind chicken wire at a Jacksonville juke joint, Grey and his band Mofro, which play The NorVa in Norfolk on Saturday, have developed a sound that mixes soul, blues, rock ’n’ roll and funk into a musical stew often described as “Swamp Rock.” The act’s ever-expanding following has been cultivated on the road, sharing stages with the likes of blues lion B.B. King and Southern rock giant the Allman Brothers, which formed in Jacksonville. After a decade of touring, Grey still plays more than 125 shows a year, both with his band and as a solo artist.
“One thing I do know is that life does not reward things that are stagnant,” he said. “If it stands still too long it doesn’t remain dynamic. I don’t care what it is. Take a car, for instance; if you leave your car in the garage too long, chances are it will drive worse when you finally get it back on the road.”
That principle extends to Grey’s work in the recording studio.
Since his 2001 debut, the musician has steadily released a string of critically praised albums. On their newest record, “This River,” JJ Grey & Mofro veer from “Sticky Fingers”-era Rolling Stones rock ’n’ roll on “99 Shades of Crazy” to the sweaty backwoods funk of “Florabama.”
The album’s title track finds Grey ruminating on the process of letting go.
“The song ‘This River’ goes back to that topic of thinking too much. There’s a line in there about ‘all of the nonsense that I called my life.’ We think those moments when you’re in your head is reality, but it’s not.”
For Grey, the metaphor of meditating on the banks of a river is where real life resides.
“You’ve lost your sense of time and space, and you’re just in the moment,” he said.
It’s a lesson that also applies in his role as a performer.
“When I was younger I thought that when I went to a show, I was going there to have fun and escape reality,” Grey said. “Over the years I’ve realized that it’s actually the exact opposite. You go to a show and get reality by sharing an honest moment and making a connection. When I look out to the audience and I see people smiling, I see something real happening. There’s no word that can describe it. It can’t be reduced to a fact or a piece of data. It’s energy, and I guess I’m just trying to live in its power.”
