![]() I heard that he was on tour singing backgrounds for Roberta Flack. But digging into this full album – especially during the pandemic, when I would play it nearly every day – I really learned a lot from Luther Vandross about singing with nuance and power. This is one record that he would play over and over on the weekends, mainly “A House Is Not A Home” and “Never Too Much”. Luther was the voice of my dad’s generation. Who else can pull that off? “Happy Birthday” was a huge reason why Martin Luther King has a holiday here in the United States, which I think is the ultimate form of making your music political, in the best way possible. And then he ends it with “Happy Birthday”. He has “Lately”, which I think is one of the most beautiful ballads he’s ever written. He has a country song on there, some reggae. Then he moves into some R&B, some dance stuff. Hotter Than July is an incredible record, because he starts with a tune that’s inspired by rock’n’roll. I was going through a time in my life where I wanted to listen to the entire Stevie Wonder discography from the top down. It’s so cool to me and absolutely wild at the same time how my generation – and younger – are being introduced to some of these really wonderful tracks from decades ago. The tune is called “Stormy”, by Gábor Szabó. ![]() I did not know that “Save Room” was a sample for the longest time until I heard the original several years later and was absolutely blown away. It allows your imagination to run wild and also to get clues from the mood of the music or the different sounds, and I just thought John Legend really did a good job with that record. I love storytelling, especially in art where a lot is left up to the patron. Through this record, John Legend taught me how to tell a story. It was just a masterful display of artistry that I’m still enamoured by to this day. It was a record that taught me peaks and valleys and different shades and colours and tones. The climax on the title track with the choir and the beautiful strings, it was incredible, man. When I drove home, the record was still going in the car, but I could not get out of my seat – I had to hear the whole thing. I remember waiting in line to get the CD of it at the local music store near my hometown. I’ll never forget the first record, but I was a little bit older when Demon Days came out. As his grandmother tells the history, the first thing the founders did was build a school - since reading had been illegal for Black people - followed by churches, restaurants, a general store and hotels, to create a self-sustaining community that didn’t discriminate based on a person’s skin color.Gorillaz were such a huge influence on me at a very young age. Hillaryville, La., was something out of a historical fiction novel - a town built by and for the Black community, where folks like Jones’ grandmother didn’t have to enter back doors or sit in separate sections of restaurants. “I wanted it to envelop all of those things and show that everything I learned musically and everything that I experienced after leaving Hillaryville lead me to this record,” he tells Billboard. Tied together by Jones’ stirring vocals, the genre-eclectic album sprouted from penultimate track “Letter to My 17 Year Old Self” - a jazz trip that contemplates “this thing called life.” At 17, Jones was playing in a punk rock band, singing gospel in church on Sundays and performing classic and jazz pieces in the school marching band, all while growing up in a rural Southern town founded with reparations paid out to eight former slaves. Instead of forcing the track to be a holiday tune, Jones harvested it as one of 10 tracks on his highly personal new album.
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