More than a month before its Jan. 12 release, some are calling the Black Crowes new album, By Your Side the band's finest work since 1992's The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion. At least part of the credits is due to the production prowess of Kevin Shirley, who also manned the controls on Aerosmith's Nine Lives.

Shirley takes a simple approach to his role as a producer: he just motivates
the band to do the best work they can do without interfering too much. This
Crowes album was no exception. "Three or four times, Chris Robinson
came to me with some lyrics he'd written and say, 'Look here, I've got
these new lyrics for you,' and I'd look at them and go, 'You know, I don't
think you're there yet.' And he'd go, 'F--k you' or whatever. But he'd come
back the next day with rewrites and he'd say, 'Check these out, I'm really
happy with these.' And at the end of it all, he was very happy with the
development that his songwriting took. And so that's how I take my role as
producer--it's not a matter of me saying, look, this needs to be your
lyric, or this needs to be the part, or this needs to be the funky sound.
It was about putting the onus on them to be the Black Crowes."

Shirley adds that Robinson's vocals also improved. "You know why?
Because he was basically sober through the whole thing," Shirley laughs.

The first single from the album, "Kickin' My Heart Around," may not sound
like it, but it was written in about five minutes. According to Shirley,
the band wrote it in the studio while he was meeting with them for the first
time. "I went down to the studio and everyone's late and hungover. There's
incense burning in the rooms, carpets and rugs everywhere, and they
started playing me some of their new songs. They start off, and it's the
same old jammy, shuffle feel of the last two records. I stopped them then
and I said to them, 'You know guys, you've got to get back to being 17.
You've got to feel like you're teenagers again. You need a song like that.'
So I said to the drummer, 'Hey Steve [Gorman], pick something up like
that and play like that, you get something going.' Then Rich [Robinson]
started playing guitar parts over the drum beat. Then I said to Chris, 'Now
just put a vocal melody on that guitar line.' And that song was written in
about five minutes from the first minute I got down there, before I was
even signed on the project officially."

The Black Crowes start a club tour on Dec. 1 in Seattle, Wash.