ASK the Rev. Al Green about his gallant, groove-laden new album, “Lay It Down” (Blue Note), and you’re likely to hear a familiar phrase. “Love and Happiness,” Mr. Green said recently by phone from Memphis, where he has been the pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle for more than 30 years. “That’s the story that we are carrying. This whole theme is in the love zone, and in the happiness zone.”
For his new album, “Lay It Down,” a throwback to old-school soul, Al Green collaborated with young hip-hop and R&B producers.
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Al Green performing in the early 1970s.
The throwback allusion makes sense, and not just because “Love and Happiness,” a simmering anthem from Mr. Green’s 1972 album, “I’m Still in Love With You,” has so hardily endured. (This year it cracked the Top 40 on Billboard’s Hot Ringtones chart.) The song sums up his mission as an artist, deftly balancing the sensual and the spiritual. And “Lay It Down,” due out on Tuesday, is a throwback itself: an uncannily faithful evocation of the vintage Al Green sound. “They said, ‘I don’t see nothing that we ought to change,’ ” Mr. Green, 62, said, referring to his chief collaborators on the album.
That would be the drummer Ahmir Thompson, known as ?uestlove, from the hip-hop group the Roots, and the keyboardist James Poyser, a behind-the-scenes force in contemporary R&B. Producing “Lay It Down,” along with Mr. Green, they brought in musicians from their own sphere, including several contemporary heirs to his legacy of suavely uplifting soul: John Legend, Anthony Hamilton and Corinne Bailey Rae. The result feels pointedly timeless, even as it reflects modern motivations.
“We wanted to work with Al,” Mr. Thompson said recently, “because I couldn’t sit at the Grammys no more watching a soul legend singing Gershwin songs, or doing the duet record.” He kept in mind the success of some other producers who have revitalized older stars, like Rick Rubin with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, or Jack White with Loretta Lynn. But in this case Mr. Thompson wasn’t after a reinvention so much as a reassertion.
“Because Ahmir was involved, I knew I was in good hands when it came to taste and production quality,” Mr. Legend said. “So I came in there with that faith, and also just in awe of Al Green, knowing how important he’s been and how magical his voice is.”
From the start the idea was to channel a classic vibe. “This is going to be the follow-up to ‘The Belle Album,’ ” Mr. Thompson recalled saying, in reference to the 1977 release considered by some connoisseurs to be the last great Al Green record, made a few years after the tragedy that jolted him back to his faith and toward a strict embrace of gospel music. (The story lives in pop-music infamy: he was burned with a pot of boiling grits by a female friend, who then shot herself dead.)
Yet “Lay It Down” isn’t the first secular release in Mr. Green’s recent history. Nor is it the first backward-glancing one. For his previous two Blue Note albums, “I Can’t Stop” in 2003 and “Everything’s OK” in 2005, Mr. Green reunited with Willie Mitchell, the producer behind his chart-conquering heyday. Working once again at Mr. Mitchell’s Royal Studios, they enlisted some of the same musicians who had worked on the original sessions.
Hailed as a return to form, the albums found an audience. According to Nielsen SoundScan, “I Can’t Stop” sold 278,000 copies and “Everything’s OK” sold 114,000.
The diminishing trend of those sales figures may help explain the shift to a new production team, though Mr. Green puts the decision in different terms. “I’m not taking anything away from Mr. Mitchell, because his track record speaks for itself,” he said before adding, in a testifying tone, “We wanted to get that other element, that other footage, that other link to the chain, the other height, the other dimension.”
He got what he bargained for in Mr. Thompson and Mr. Poyser, key participants in the alternative hip-hop scene that flourished around the turn of the millennium under the label of neo-soul. As founding members of a collective called the Soulquarians, they worked together on “Voodoo” (Virgin), a landmark album by the R&B singer D’Angelo. Released in 2000, it was recorded in an improvisational haze during marathon sessions at Electric Lady Studios, the West Village recording hub built by Jimi Hendrix. So were a handful of other neo-soul albums, by artists like the rapper Common and the singer Erykah Badu.
The neo-soul bubble burst about five years ago, a victim of inflated expectations and complicated egos. But the unconventional method that the bubble fostered — a collision of decidedly old-school values with demonstrably cutting-edge techniques — hasn’t been forgotten. When Mr. Thompson and Mr. Poyser considered how to make a new Al Green record, they instinctively had their plan.
“We wanted him to come into Electric Lady,” Mr. Thompson said, “so we could bring him into the same environment that we used for all those records between 1997 and 2002.” He said “Lay It Down” was written the same way: “We jam, something feels good, there’s a secret mike, roll the tape, we listen to it, and then we hear parts that we like and work with them.”
Al Green Pays Tribute to the Old Al Green
Published: May 25, 2008
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In other words, “Lay It Down” was made like a Soulquarians project. And it bears a subtle kinship to “Voodoo,” at least with regard to its gleaming harmonies, rich falsetto crooning and warm production.
Al Green at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival last month. His song “Love and Happiness” sums up his mission as an artist, balancing the sensual and the spiritual.
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Stay With Me | Take Your Time
“It’s sort of like we came full circle,” Mr. Poyser said. “This is one of the pre-eminent voices of soul music throughout the years. And for us to get a chance to do our thing, giving tribute to his original thing, is a blessing.”
But if Mr. Green’s new album benefits from some of the lessons of neo-soul, its chief impulse is much more suggestive of retro-soul, another recent movement that glances backward with something more determined than fondness. Best known to mainstream audiences by way of the British siren Amy Winehouse, retro-soul enacts a time warp, creating the sensation that the music springs directly from the vintage era that inspired it. “Lay It Down” pursues a strikingly similar ideal. It even features the Dap-Kings’ horns, familiar from their work with Ms. Winehouse and Sharon Jones.
“In essence it’s a retro-soul album by someone who inspired the whole point of retro-soul to begin with,” said Oliver Wang, a scholar and D.J. who runs the blog Soul-Sides.com. “Had this been produced by Willie Mitchell again, I don’t think they would have gone there. I think they probably would have continued to try to move ‘forward.’ ”
The album’s retro-soul mission expresses itself in the details: the thump of Mr. Thompson’s kick drum, the soft whine of Mr. Poyser’s Hammond organ, the way the horns annotate the songs. The bassist on the album, Adam Blackstone, creates a deep undercurrent, especially on midtempo fare like “No One Like You.” The gospel guitarist Chalmers (Spanky) Alford, who toured with D’Angelo in support of “Voodoo,” contributes just as much with his tasteful arpeggios. (He died in March; “Lay It Down” is dedicated to his memory.)
On the first day Mr. Green joined the band in the studio, their loose collaboration yielded the core substance of eight new songs. “I walked in, I asked them what they was playing,” Mr. Green said. “They didn’t know. So I had a pencil and a pad in my hand, and they said, ‘Write something to it.’ I wrote, ‘Lay it down. Let it go. Fall in love.’ ”
Those words bring in the chorus of the album’s title track, which set the mood for the session. During one verse, Mr. Green laughs to himself in response to a felicitous rhyme.
“It was kind of like a miracle,” he said of the session, “because I don’tknow how we got anything together, with everybody trying to write everything at once.” He told the musicians he had never worked this way before, though the method, unfamiliar in one sense, was close to home in another.
“It was very reminiscent of playing in church,” Mr. Poyser said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen at any moment, but you’re prepared. Your mental quick-twitch muscle goes into action.”
The process, not exactly a model of efficiency, yielded some frankly forgettable songs. “All I Need” is a boilerplate soul entreaty, and “Just for Me” conveys a distinct sense of wheels spinning in the air. But the successes are strong. “You’ve Got the Love I Need,” written and recorded with Mr. Hamilton, makes a virtue of the simple and even the predictable — Mr. Green rhymes “life,” inexorably, with “wife” — on its way to a likable disco chorus. The title track, also with Mr. Hamilton, revels in cozy insinuation. And “What More Do You Want From Me” manages to combine a reassurance with a plea.
Mr. Legend makes his guest appearance on “Stay With Me (by the Sea),” a dreamy tune that fits him like a glove, though it was largely written by Ms. Rae. Julie Gustines, the music director at WRKS-FM (98.7) in New York, said the song was in nighttime rotation there; it recently placed in the Top 100 on Billboard’s R&B chart. It’s possible that a similar fate awaits “Take Your Time,” a languid ballad that marks Ms. Rae’s lone vocal performance on the album.
Blue Note has especially high hopes for “Lay It Down,” as Zach Hochkeppel, the label’s general manager, confirmed: “We’ve been getting great response from hipsters and old-school folks and everybody in between.” The difference between this album and the previous two, he said, had to do with the younger collaborators. Presumably the current boomlet in retro-soul can only help.
Of course it’s Al Green, seemingly unchanged by any trend, who owns this moment; he remains the beacon to which everyone else on “Lay It Down” genuflects. “I think for Blue Note’s sake,” Mr. Thompson said, “that if we just present Al Green in a way that’s natural, the Starbucks generation will get it, and people will feel it.”
Mr. Green would be inclined to agree. “Al’s head of thinking is, I really don’t have anything to lose,” he said. “I’m talking to the people.” Looking ahead, he said he was proud of the fact that he will play Carnegie Hall for the first time in June. “We ordered tuxedos,” he said.
It’s almost certain that “Love and Happiness” will find a way into his set, at Carnegie as elsewhere. “We’re going to try to do our best to do a good job,” he said. “We’re going to lay it down.”
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