The Star Online: Entertainment: Music
The Star Online: Entertainment: Music |
| Posted: The singer refreshes 'soul' on his new album. There's one second of sound on John Legend's new album, Love In The Future, that sums up his current artistic mission. It's on the delicate, gloomy track Asylum, and the sound is a snare drum. Or rather a blast of raw, percussive white noise that punctuates his future-soul tale of a love "where we both go crazy." "We were leaning toward progressive, cool samples with space and minimalism," Legend said. "How do you refresh a genre that's so traditional and classic?" Although he is indebted to Sam Cooke's pristine phrasing and piano ballads, his Love In The Future sounds remarkably modern. Almost a decade after his 2004 debut, Get Lifted, made him a pop star and put him at the vanguard of adult R&B, Legend (born John Roger Stephens) is figuring out how an old genre relates to new ideas about love. Five years after his last album of original material (his 2010 collaboration with the Roots, Wake Up!, was a collection of '60s and '70s covers), Legend is asking what constitutes soul music in a time when technology can connect us in undreamed of ways but also distract us from real emotion. "That's part of what we were trying to answer with this album," he said of his fourth solo album. "What's the place for soul in 2013? This album is our answer." From the back porch of his Hollywood Hills home, Legend has a wide view of Cahuenga Pass. His bulldog Puddy scampers around his feet as Legend talks about his new album. He looks relaxed, because he took his time making this one. Love In The Future was supposed to come sooner. After a successful run with the UK combo Sade, Legend had booked a high-profile fall 2012 arena tour, tied to his long-expected follow-up to 2008's Evolver. But he scrapped it to finish work on the record, which tacked on an additional year's wait for a new album of original material. It was a rare crack in the armour for the consummately professional 34-year-old singer (and former management consultant). "I had to choose the lesser of two evils," he said. "I hated the idea of letting fans down. But I'm defined by the quality of the experience, on record and in performances. I wanted to go out with new music, but I couldn't go out without my best." But if it took an extra year to get right, it shows in the record. Love In The Future can be read as a kind of distant cousin of Kanye West's Yeezus, and not only because West (a longtime Legend collaborator) co-executive produced the album with fellow Legend-vet Dave Tozer. If the wildly experimental, angry Yeezus is pure id and ego, Love In The Future is the grown-up superego tamping that raw emotion down while trying to make sense of it. Who Do We Think We Are has some of '70s soul staple Donny Hathaway's incandescent glow, but it's ringed in a psychedelic digital fog, and it wraps up with a cameo from rapper Rick Ross. Lead single Made To Love is built on crunchy distorted drums and scattered vocal echoes (courtesy of New Zealand's Kimbra) evoking classic house music. Legend's voice is as un-robotic as ever, though, and his well-seasoned vocals and songwriting fully inhabit and cut through the sometimes alien arrangements. Love In The Future's 16 songs are investigations into the pleasures, pains and transformations of a long-term relationship – a purposeful counterpoint to the rallying-cry political overtones of Wake Up! For Legend, who recently announced his engagement to model Chrissy Teigen, the album is unflinching in its look at intimacy in general and his own romantic life in specific. "This long-term relationship changed me," he said. "I hadn't been with anyone for a long time, and I'd definitely enjoyed my bachelor status. This is my first album with the benefit of that relationship. I'm much more emotional and passionate in my musical life than my personal life, and these songs are a self-examination and a way for me to get there." It also assesses how modern American life has changed what intimacy looks and feels like. Love In The Future continues from a long R&B legacy of album-length investigations into affection – Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear and Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key of Life, among them. But the mix of soulful performances and digital, detached productions (courtesy of West, Tozer and younger hip-hop producers such as Hit-Boy and Da Internz) is a new setting for Legend. It places his traditional soul influences in a fractured, sometimes chilly setting. The sonic effect evokes a gulf between our old-fashioned need for love and the ways contemporary society seems tilted toward isolation and ephemerality. For Legend, there's something political in that. Where Wake Up! used civil rights-era soul's potency as a call to political action, Love In The Future uses the universal experience of relationship struggles to figure out our deeper motivations. The singer believes songs about the travails of love can be a starting point for empathy. After several recent high-profile incidents of racially charged violence, that's something America is desperately in need of today. "Have you seen that film Fruitvale Station? The film is beautiful because its shows Oscar Grant as a human who didn't deserve to die," Legend said. "Part of the problem is we attach stereotypes to young black men walking in the dark. You don't see him as human, you don't know his hopes and fears. Art has a way of making you see other people's humanity." – Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
| Listen to Arctic Monkeys' new album Posted: The British band's latest offering, AM, is now streaming for free online. The latest album from the Arctic Monkeys is now available to stream for free on iTunes. Titled AM, the album is the fifth studio LP from the Sheffield, Britain group and includes the already released singles R U Mine and You Only Call Me When You're High. The LP is due to be released this weekend in the United States and Britain. Find out how to steam the album on the band's website (www.arcticmonkeys.com/). — AFP Relaxnews |
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