As far back as he can remember, Capricorn Studios in Macon, GA, was calling Eddie 9V. Eddie spent his first quarter-century admiring the studio and the bands that blew through it from afar. But in December 2021, the 26-year-old finally put his thumbprint on the studio's mythology, corralling an eleven-strong group of the American South's best roots musicians to track his third album.

Born Brooks Mason in June 1996, he acquired his first guitar aged six. He ignored the prevailing pop scene at Oak Grove High School in Atlanta, GA, in favor of local heroes like Sean Costello and studied "older cats" like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Freddie King, and Rory Gallagher "to see what made them groove and tick." His shoot-from-the-lip lyrics, added Eddie, came from family fish fries, where his Uncle Brian "taught me to make people laugh, how to hold an audience's attention."

But in his new effort, the aptly titled Capricorn, Eddie fused the nervous energy into his best songs. "Coming off a straight blues record, I wanted to show people we're more than that," he reflects. "I was listening to Muscle Shoals and soul, a lot of music recorded at Capricorn in the late '60s too. So we spent way more time crafting the new tunes. Each song took a week to write, instead of five in one night like Little Black Flies."

Never meet your heroes, they say, and many young artists have been overwhelmed by walking the holy ground of their dream studios. At Capricorn, Eddie 9V breathed in the history – but the album he spat out is worthy of sharing the name, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the studio's greatest hits and taking music back to the golden age. "We made this record," he considers, "the way they would have done in 1969…."