Al Green – Biography

It’s only half over, but 2008 has been a whirlwind year for legendary soul and R&B icon, Al Green. With his new album, Lay It Down, released May 27 on Blue Note Records, Green delivers the highest debuting record of his career, charting at #9 on the Billboard Top 200 chart and at #4 on the R&B/ Hip-Hop chart this week. It’s Green’s highest chart position since his classic I’m Still In Love With You peaked at #4 in 1972.

The title of Al Green’s Lay It Down truly tells it like it is. Conceived as a collaboration between the soul legend and a handful of gifted young admirers from the worlds of contemporary R&B and hip hop, the album is drawn from a series of inspired sessions that yielded the most high-spirited, funky and often lushly romantic songs of Green’s latter-day career. The album is a refreshingly old school jam, with everyone laying down the music together, face to face, heart to heart, soul to soul.

The project features the sophisticated R&B voices of singer-songwriters John Legend, Anthony Hamilton and Corinne Bailey Rae, and it was co-produced with Green by two of hip-hop’s most innovative players, drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson from the Roots and keyboardist James Poyser, the go-to guy for high-profile artists ranging from Erykah Badu to Common. Add in Brooklyn’s celebrated Dap-King Horns (Sharon Jones, Amy Winehouse), guitarist Chalmers “Spanky” Alford (Mighty Clouds of Joy, Joss Stone) and bassist Adam Blackstone (Jill Scott, DJ Jazzy Jeff), among others, and you’ve got a modern soul-music dream team, fronted by the most expressive voice in the business.

Green himself envisioned this project as a way to reach out to younger artists, particularly in the hip hop community, to find common musical ground and help spread his healing message of, as he likes to put it, “L-O-V-E.” He gamely plunged into the world of the Roots and their posse, cutting tracks with them in New York City. His youthful collaborators took this as an opportunity to get right into Al’s head, turning the sessions into a master class about how to create that sublime Al Green sound and keep it relevant for today.

As Green explains:”They didn’t want to get too far out from the foundation that [Hi Records producer] Willie Mitchell and I built—‘Call Me,’ ‘I’m Still In Love With You,’ ‘Let’s Stay Together.” That’s all good, they said, but we want to play what we hear you being about in 2008. We want to keep all of the aura, but we would like to have freedom enough to spread our wings and express ourselves. The Roots, all the guys from Philly who came up to do this stuff with us—they were incredible. I could relax because I knew the people were capable. Everyone was coming up with ideas, everybody was pitching in, everybody was helping.”

It all began in 2006. ?uestlove and Poyser arranged for a get-acquainted session at Electric Lady Studio in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. As Green recalls, “That was such a session. We sketched out eight songs and really started the project. We were just spitting out songs right and left; there’s no possible way I could write them all out. I was writing the verses to this one, the bridge to that one. Everybody contributed and that’s why it feels so good.”

That date provided basic tracks for nine out of eleven tunes. Subsequent recording took place over the next two years to accommodate the artists with whom Al wanted to work. Each session replicated the feel of that first one, with the players swapping ideas, grabbing pads and pencils to furiously scribble lyrics, singing out snatches of melodies, passing along riffs. Green himself vocalized many of the parts that the strings and horns would later play. He admits, “That’s the only way I know how to work, that’s what I’ve done all my life. You just write it from here.” He taps his heart. “That’s what we do every Sunday. We never write a sermon now. If you can’t preach out of here”—tapping his chest again—“you have nothing to say anyway. It’s all from the heart, this whole album, from start to finish.”
“It’s an honor to be able to work with Al Green, who I have always loved and respected,” says John Legend. “He has been an important part of black music history, and pop music history for that matter. Al really is a magical singer.”

Legend had come in to sing on one track the band had worked up, but then heard an unfinished version of “Stay With Me (By The Sea),” a song Green had been developing with Bailey Rae. Legend immediately knew that one was meant for him. That song illustrates the cooperative spirit that distinguishes Lay It Down. ”John is singing it, I’m singing it, Corinne and I are singing the background,” Green explains. “We’re all included. It’s personal, about my own life, but still everyone can feel what I’m talking about.”

Green was especially impressed that Bailey Rae flew all the way from London to sing with him. She was just honored to be there: “I was really drawn in by Al's voice; it’s so distinct, and so fluid.” After she arrived, Green recalls, Corinne went straight to work: “She’s a tiny little thing with a big guitar. She’s just playing and singing and the musicians went to sit in, the drummer, the bassist. She wrote a verse, then I wrote a verse and we both worked on the bridge.” In fact, Green insisted that Bailey Rae start it off, performing in her warm, intimate style the verse she’d just written.

Hamilton and Green perform gospel-style testifying over the slow-burning groove of the title track, and the pair engages in fierce call and response on the funky chorus to “You’ve Got the Love I Need.” “It feels good when you listen to him,” Hamilton says of Green, and Green returns the compliment: “On his records, Anthony is always singing about pleasing and satisfying his lady—I want you to be happy, I want us to be together. I’ve been preaching for 30 years and I said, that’s right, the more we need each other, the less difference we see between us. You have to take a chance on love. I know there are some hateful people in the world that would break your heart in an instant. But the big man upstairs is saying you’ve got to take a chance. It’s better to love and be heartbroken than never to have loved at all.”

Looking back on these collaborations, Green says, “I couldn’t ask for any more than what Corinne, Anthony and John put into the album, because they came and they sung their heart. And when a person does that, I’m going to give you the best I feel too.” But he offers us even more on the final track, “Standing In the Rain.” The arrangement is an ebullient update of classic Memphis soul and the words convey the sort of message that the

Reverend Al would like to leave all of us with, from the young listeners about to discover him to the loyal fans who’ve followed him all these years.

Gabrielle - Biography

It’s not often you can truthfully say this of a singer, but here it is:
Gabrielle is unique. She’s unique as an artist, with that instantly familiar shimmery voice and those tender-tough lyrics and way of phrasing that makes every song feel deeply intimate. And she’s unique as a “star,” in the sense of having achieved a great deal without becoming an in-your-face, look-at-me “celebrity.” (If anything, she’s an anti-celebrity, with a finely-honed aversion to red carpets and bling.) All told, she’s the antithesis of a 2007 pop star – so what better time to release an album she considers her finest to date?

“Always” is her fifth studio LP, and her first since 2004 (prolific she’s
not: “I’m renowned for not releasing albums very often, so I’m due now”).
Like every album she’s made since her 1993 debut, “Find Your Way,” it’s completely Gabrielle: soulful and passionate, but with an ungraspable quality that doesn’t really equate with British soul music. There’s always a sense of things left unsaid, even in a song as deceptively straightforward as the title track, and its tale of a shattered relationship. There’s a rare self-containment; the words are indirect and nuanced. Not the kind of thing you expect from a woman who admits to initially fitting recording sessions around school runs.

It’s relevant to mention, by the way, that as a single mum, Gabrielle has been juggling family and career almost since the very start, and she’s had her share of pain. She prefers not to reveal much about her private life. She admits that singing is the safety-valve she turns to when it all becomes too much: “Music is my way of escaping everything from the drama to the more mundane things that you have to do every day, and if I didn’t have music…” she shakes her head, imagining the alternative.

Gabrielle’s career got off to an incredible start in 1993 when she broke the record for the highest chart debut by a female with the single ‘Dreams’ (it went in at 2, before rising to Number 1). A 23-year-old club singer from Brockley, South London, she was the archetypal outsider: she didn’t possess the sort of belting voice you’d expect of an R&B vocalist, and she was self-conscious about a childhood injury that left her with a drooping eyelid. “There were so many other girls with better voices and a hell of a lot skinnier than me that I thought I had no chance,” she says now. Turning flaws into virtues was the trick. An eye patch made her visually striking and the voice made her distinctive – and her differences contributed to her becoming Britain’s most successful soul singer. It’s why the likes of musicians like Daft Punk and Talvin Singh have chosen to remix her work.

Despite taking a few years off in between albums, Gabrielle has incredibly returned to greater success. In an industry where longevity is becoming increasingly rare, the hits have been unstoppable: ‘Give Me A Little More Time’, ‘If You Ever’, ‘When A Woman’, ‘Out Of Reach’. And then there are the albums; the triple platinum ‘Gabrielle’ and the quadruple platinum ‘Rise’ and ‘Dreams Can Come True’.  It’s no surprise this success has seen Gabrielle pick up a few awards over the years. Brit Awards for Best Newcomer and Best Female Vocalist, MOBOs for Best Single and Best Album and a nomination for the Ivor Novellos.

After her last album, “Play to Win” (2004), Gabrielle took a three-year break that she describes as “pretty placid – I had toured so much over the years that I needed to take a break from it all. I spent time with my family, got new management and stopped being mollycoddled by my mum [who doubled as babysitter], because she was spending a lot of time in the Caribbean.”  When she began to write the songs for “Always,” things went slowly at first “After the last album I felt written-out. It’s probably why it takes me so long to release an album. If I just had to go in and sing songs it would be so much easier.” Once she got over her initial fears she realised she had quite a bit to say.

“This album is about break-ups. I drew from a lot of experiences, some twisted,” she explains. The classic ballad ‘Wiser,’ for instance, is about betrayal by a close friend who “changed their life to suit them, but it didn’t suit me,” while the stately ‘Closure’ addresses her feelings about “waiting for the other person to end a relationship because you don’t want to be the bad guy.” And The Persuaders-sampling ‘When We Were One’ is a powerful meditation on loss and regret. “How am I supposed to feel, now I’ve no longer got you?” demands the lyric which Gabrielle delivers with urgency that reveals just how much this person meant to her.

For “Always” Gabrielle decided to go back to her roots and teamed up with producers she had worked with in the past. Julian Gallagher [“Rise”] and The Boilherhouse Boys [“Gabrielle”] It was the Boilerhouse Boys who came up with the idea for ‘Why’.  ‘Why’ samples Paul Weller’s ‘Wild Wood,’ and Weller himself came to the studio to add backing vocals and play guitar. “He’s an icon, but he was so nice. He even turned up early!” A rock fan, she decided to do a homage to Primal Scream’s ‘Rocks,’ which she’s titled ‘Heartbreaker,’ and even invited the Scream to play on it. “But when they heard what we’d done, they said they couldn’t better it,” she proudly recounts. Were any songs inspired by her kids? She shakes her head, no: “I went through a phase of writing about them, but this album is about me.” Intensely private as she is, she’s opened herself up on the record, and doesn’t regret it. .

It’s fourteen years since ‘Dreams,’ a span that has seen Gabrielle outlive dozens of pretenders to her soul-queen throne. The reason she’s still at the top of her game, she believes, is that she’s still an unknown quantity. “I’m not in people’s faces. I don’t like being seen – it’s not me. Even when I tour, you have to push me onstage. But I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”