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When you hear artists such as Joss Stone, Sharon Jones or Ryan Shaw sing a love song on a retro-soul album (or, for that matter, Dale Watson on a retro-country album), they often sound as if they're professing their feelings not for an actual human being but for a favorite old record. They may reproduce the sound of that treasured 45 perfectly, but they sing with the geeky enthusiasm of a collector, not with the troubled compulsion of a lover. By contrast, when Raphael Saadiq sings the lead-off track on his new retro-soul album, The Way I See It, he sounds as if the woman who just confessed her love is standing right in front of him as he stammers, semi-stunned, "Sure Hope You Mean It."
Yes, Saadiq's song contains a definite echo of the Miracles' "The Way You Do the Things You Do" in the doo-wop harmonies, the off-beat snare accent, the vibrato guitar fills, the rising/falling verse melody and the punchy chorus. But Saadiq sings past the influence to connect with a real feeling, the giddy, bewildered uncertainty when a relationship unexpectedly blossoms. And because he's such a terrific craftsman--tucking the words inside the melody inside the rhythm so they are perfectly aligned--there are no clumsy elements to trip up the clear transmission of that emotion.
It's not all that hard to recreate the sound of ‘60s and ‘70s soul music. There are thousands of baby boomers--and baby boomers' kids--who still play those old Motown, Stax and Curtom singles at parties with remarkable fidelity. Drag them into a studio and find a striking young woman with a big voice such as Stone, Jones, Duffy or Amy Winehouse, and you might even get a hit.
The real challenge in reaching back to that classic era lies in the songwriting. It's one thing to come up with an arrangement that echoes those old records; it's quite another to come up with a new song that can hold its own against the work of Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, David Porter and Norman Whitfield. Yet that is just what Saadiq has done on his new disc.
This shouldn't be such a surprise. Back when he was still known as Raphael Wiggins, Saadiq led Oakland's Tony Toni Tone, one of the best R&B acts of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Because they didn't cross over as completely as they should have, the trio is often forgotten by the broad pop audience, but their records hold up better than anything else from the New Jack era that sprang up in the wake of Prince and Michael Jackson. Since Tony Toni Tone suspended operations in 1996, Saadiq has gone on to write and/or produce for the likes of D'Angelo, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, Earth Wind & Fire, the Roots, Whitney Houston and Joss Stone.
But The Way I See It is Saadiq's best solo album. The decision to revisit the sound of Robinson and Mayfield did not lead to a studied impersonation of their romanticism, as it might have, but instead liberated Saadiq from his generation's macho posturing and opened the spigot on his own tender feelings. For there's something very personal about these songs, not so much in the lyrics as in the optimism of the giddy melodies and ready-to-go rhythms.
When he sings about running after his baby like it's the "100 Yard Dash," for example, his straining-at-the-reins high tenor vocal pushes the momentum forward as much as the snare shots and the descending guitar/bass figure (which quotes Mayfield's "Superfly"). A similar impetus pushes the unstoppable hopes of "Keep Marchin'," an update of the Impressions' "Keep on Pushing." When he goes looking for his missing lover in post-Katrina New Orleans on "Big Easy," the same restless motion is reinforced by the ReBirth Brass Band.
Saadiq's duet with Joss Stone on "Just One Kiss" borrows the dizzying string arrangement from the Temptations' "Just My Imagination," but this time the vertigo is triggered not by a shattered fantasy but by a surprise first kiss--and by the way the vocal line spirals upward. A duet with the young singer CJ Hilton, "Never Give You Up," is an agitated pledge of love topped off with a harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder.
The album's bonus track is a reprise of another love song, "Oh Girl," with another guest singer. Jay-Z, though, is no retro-soul figure, and his gruff rap is initially delivered over a lean drums-and-bass track. But even Jay-Z gets caught up in Saadiq's romanticism; he starts rapping about weddings and even adds a lilting melodicism to his vocal; the strings come in and the rapper is transported to Saadiq's world.
If you go back to the rest of the album after hearing the Jay-Z cameo, you realize that The Way I See It isn't quite as retro as it first appeared. The tip-off is the drum tracks, which have replaced the clatter and clutter of ‘60s soul with the clean precision of the microchip era. Most of the drum tracks are played live by Bobby Ozuna but with the gated effects and controlled minimalism that reflect the influence of the drum machine. Thus you get the best of both worlds--the personality of early soul and the accuracy of the hip-hop era. The sharp focus of the modern drum sound opens up a lot of sonic space and allows the music to breathe in a way it couldn't in the ‘60s.
You can hear the difference on the album's best song, "Staying in Love." It's blown in by a synthesizer wind, followed by a Motown drum pattern. But this pattern is so clean that there is plenty of room to hear each of the song's elements sharply and clearly: the catchy guitar riff, the melodic bass line, the gospel call-and-response between Saadiq's lead vocal and the answering harmony. The verses are agitated, at first by the disruption of tumbling for a woman and moving in with her, and then by the disruption of arguing and separating from her.
With the harmonic tension of vintage soul married to the rhythmic tension of modern hip-hop, the song becomes excruciating until Saadiq releases all those knots with the surrendering chorus confession, "Falling in love can be easy, but staying in love is too tricky." Truer words were never sung, and it's that bewildering conundrum that stays with the listener. For, ultimately, this is an album not about historical influences but about the mystery of relationships.
