image courtesy of project8256 for sale here on etsy
Sometime round about 1984 my dad bought my brother and i a walkman & two sets of headphones to share on a long car journey round europe. He got two cassettes for free too. Some early pre-Now That’s What I Call… compilation and a tape called Motown Chartbusters, I don’t think I’d really heard soul music before.
Hell, I grew up in Warwickshire, my parents listened to Radio 4, Yehudi Menuhin and James Taylor. So it was then I heard Al Green and somehow identified that kind of noise with being grown up.
A slow, longing groove which was utterly alien to me aged 7 but somehow intangibly desirable and sophisticated.
As I grew up, and bought more records, that rack reserved for proper old-school soul singers still managed to illicit the same little girl lost feelings in me.
Like, if I were a proper adult, I’d have a beat-up leather sofa, a taste for good whiskey and this is how I’d feel on a saturday night.
And in the 25-odd years since I first heard the Reverend I might have developed a taste for a nice drop of scotch and even have my own turntable to lower a stylus onto but I still don’t feel I’ve ever achieved that real, lonely, headstrong and heartsick independence which resounds in Al Greens breathy sighs.
Even now, in this, his newest recording, featuring the prodigious drumming and silkily respectful production of ?uestlove, the man still knows more than I ever will.
Lay It Down is out on Blue Note in May (thanks to Sit Down Stand Up for the mp3 too)
removed at the request of BlueNote