If you want to make the argument that soul music transcends time and genre, play this. He’s singing from deep within lingering emotions, yet somehow avoids sounding nostalgic - he gives each phrase, each new iteration of the “going through changes” testimony, a bracing resonance. Bradley sings about unexpected twists in the road as though re-experiencing them as hyper-real and possibly haunting memories. The title track, a cover of the Black Sabbath tune Daptone offered as a Record Store Day trinket a few years ago, aligns well with Bradley’s hard-knock narrative, and it’s stunning. The lyrics are a touch more upbeat - there are songs celebrating the redeeming power of love alongside ones that chronicle devastation. The rhythms inch closer to modernity, and the material suggests Bradley and his songwriting partners in the Menahan Street Band recognize there’s a limit to how many visits he can make to the well of autobiographical woe. It was a pitch-perfect period piece, and it raised questions about how restrictive these revivalist endeavors can ever be: If you’re a great singer, and make no mistake Bradley is that, at what point are you limited by genre, the fastidious re-creation of a quaint classic style?īradley’s third album, Changes, continues in the general path of his previous work, with some key alterations. It celebrated soul-revue generica in all its forms - at times, it was redeemed only by Bradley’s instant-on vocal drama and the buttoned-up arrangements of the Daptone crew. The 67-year-old singer’s last album, 2013’s Victim of Love, was a tad too reverent in its deployment of mid-’60s Stax/Volt tropes. This turns out to be a significant challenge. Two albums into the most unlikely soul career of the millennium, Charles Bradley has neatly pivoted away from the hard-luck life story told in the documentary Soul of America, and toward a comparatively ordinary task: Creating a book of believable songs that showcase his unique vocal style. However, you can still listen with the Spotify playlist at the bottom of the page. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes,’ which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before.Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. “We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else.
In his 2010 autobiography I Am Ozzy, Osbourne explained how a guy who later became known for biting the heads off of flying animals came up with a heartfelt song like this one. Appropriately credited to all four Black Sabbath members – vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward – the song dealt with emotional changes, not the hormonal ones that Big Mouth centers around. It’s likely that most younger viewers, while they may think the melody sounds familiar, don’t realize that this song was originally a slow, piano-based piece about the pain of marital breakup.
For several years, the chorus from “Changes,” performed by the late soul artist Charles Bradley, has been the intro music to the Netflix animated comedy Big Mouth, about a group of tweens dealing with puberty.
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