Eddie 9V

A name taken off the pedalboard

Brooks Mason was born near Atlanta in June 1996 and had a guitar in his hands at six — an open-tuned instrument his father set up for him — but by his own account did not take it seriously until he was thirteen. The first gig that mattered was opening for a friend's father's band at a Georgia diner, which settled the question of what he wanted to do.

The apprenticeship ran through a covers outfit called The Smokin' Frogs, then the blues-rock band The Georgia Flood, and a stint in PREACHERVAN, an indie-alternative group that toured nationally. In 2013 he represented the Atlanta Blues Society at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis. Sean Costello, the Atlanta guitarist, was the local model; Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Freddie King and Rory Gallagher were the records.

The blues side project, billed as the Brooks Mason Blues Band, began drawing better rooms than the indie band, and when he made it the main concern he wanted a clean slate rather than his own name on the poster. The band had taken to calling him Eddie; the rest came off the floor, from the nine-volt batteries that go into guitar pedals. "I wanted to start from scratch – and I ain't never heard of no bluesman named Eddie 9V," he has said. It is pronounced Eddie Nine Volt.

Handwritten letters, and a German label in an Atlanta club

In 2019 Mason wrote letters by hand to the labels he wanted to be on, Alligator and Ruf among them. Bruce Iglauer at Alligator turned down the self-released debut, Left My Soul In Memphis, on the grounds that it sounded too dirty. Thomas Ruf took a different view, came to see him play at Blind Willie's Blues Club in Atlanta, and offered a deal.

What followed was Little Black Flies in 2021, which reached No. 5 on the Billboard blues chart and brought a 2021 Blues Blast Rising Star nomination and a 2022 Blues Music Award nomination. The records were built at Echo Deco Studio in Atlanta with his brother Lane Kelly, a Southern player and producer who has since become the band's bassist and co-writer — the two of them had also moonlighted in PREACHERVAN together.

Macon, then a deliberate turn away from the solo

Capricorn, released on 27 January 2023, was the record that moved him off straight blues. He tracked it in December 2021 at Capricorn Studios in Macon, Georgia, with an eleven-strong cast of Southern roots players, chasing late-1960s Muscle Shoals and Memphis soul rather than twelve-bar form. "Coming off a straight blues record, I wanted to show people we're more than that," he told Guitar Player, adding that he was after the sound of a room rather than a mix: if a drum pedal squeaked or somebody laughed in a take, he left it in.

Saratoga, out on Ruf on 22 November 2024, pushed further again. Twelve songs, eleven of them originals co-written with Lane Kelly, with the guitar heroics pulled back in favour of the writing and the singing — reviewers in Britain filed it under Americana as much as blues and several scored it nine out of ten. It has since become his most-streamed record, with close to 30 million Spotify plays by autumn 2026.

Twelve songs, under a week, Nashville

Down Here, out on 6 November 2026, is his fifth studio album and his first for Easy Eye Sound, Dan Auerbach's label, produced by Auerbach at the Easy Eye studio in Nashville. Twelve tracks were finished in less than a week. Auerbach's explanation for the speed is that the writing came first: "We spent more time writing than we did recording, which meant we could focus on getting a good take." Mason says they rarely went past two or three takes a song, and that demos were captured on an iPhone.

The writing sessions brought in Marcus King, Pat McLaughlin and Daniel Tashian; Chris St. Hilaire of the London Souls played drums on the sessions. For the first time Mason was not also producing, which he has framed as the point of the exercise: "Making this record has taught me how to put my guard down and just have fun." Asked to sum the album up in a word, he went with "comfort food".

The one cover is the least likely thing on it. "Dan has a million 45's in the studio. He just comes up to me and puts on 'Rock Your Baby,'" Mason told the Charleston City Paper. "I'd obviously heard the song before, and I said, 'I really like this one.' So Dan said, 'Let's go cut it.'" George McCrae's 1974 disco single went out as a single in September 2026.

Where he stands in late 2026

"Blowin' Up", written with Marcus King and Auerbach, arrived with a video on 17 July 2026 and became the first Eddie 9V record to make real radio inroads: No. 22 on the Billboard Triple A chart, No. 6 on the Americana singles chart, SiriusXM rotation and an Editor's Pick at Guitar World. "Whole Lot Coming For You" followed in August, "Rock Your Baby" in September, and "Satisfy The Way I Do" on 8 October — the last of which began as a home demo that Auerbach rebuilt around a new hook. "Working with Dan was key," Mason says. "He smoothly came up with the hook I needed."

The exposure came from the stage as much as the radio. He opened for The Black Keys on the 2026 Peaches 'n Kream world tour, starting in Chicago on 16 July and running through August — a bill Auerbach and Patrick Carney stocked largely from the Easy Eye roster — and played The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2026. He has also moved house, out of Atlanta and down to Greenville, South Carolina.

The headline run is the next step, and it is a bigger one than he has attempted before. The 2027 American tour opens on 15 January at the Radio Room in Greenville, his new home town, and closes on 27 February at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, taking in the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Tipitina's in New Orleans, Antone's in Austin, the Granada in Dallas, the Troubadour in West Hollywood, Mississippi Studios in Portland and the Tractor Tavern in Seattle across 27 dates. Britain follows in March: Thekla in Bristol on the 17th, the Garage in London on the 18th, then Manchester, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Faversham and Southampton to the 24th. "European audiences have always treated me with so much respect," he said of the booking. "It's been too long since we've played over there."