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It sucks when your so-called friends don't want to be turned on to something really new and instead find solace in perusing your CD collection, inquiring about the BuenaVista Social Club disc.
It's like trying to introduce them to Jesus while they're rubbernecking Billy Graham.
So was the scene at my place the night of the Erykah Badu show.
I put on Lewis Taylor, expecting to wow 'em and instead got dead silence.
No matter. Sometimes you gotta groove alone. I've not taken this disc out of my player since I snagged it in the import room of the Virgin Megastore in Chicago some weeks ago.
I'm sick with it.
Taylor is a British singer/songwriter imbued with so much soul I keep looking at the cover photo checking for signs of blackness.
That Taylor is white would mean little in the "we are the world" musical scheme of things if the UK weren't so out and out anxious about its soul and lack thereof.
But Taylor is the real thing and Lewis II—so trickily named because it's his sophomore effort and the title track promises "all this and Lewis, too" — is at once lush and sparse, crunchy and smooth.
Taken as a whole, it harks back to the late 1980s when Grayson Hugh, Paul Young, Roachford and Terrence Trent D'arby were all dropping soul-soaked bombs over London that were seldom heard on these airwaves. With them, your best shot at hearing their music came with a chance video sighting on MTV.
But what sets Taylor apart from his predecessors is that he doesn't try so hard and his musical assuredness is apparent in the ease with which he hits individual grooves on each of the 11 cuts.
His is some real Prince-don't-try-this-at-home funk.
With titles like "You Make Me Wanna," "Never Be My Woman," "Satisfied" and "I'm on the Floor," the more obvious comparison to Taylor's style and approach is New-Jack romancer Maxwell or his nasty cousin D'Angelo.
However, the lush and clever production of "Never Be My Woman," "I'm on the Floor" and especially "Blue Eyes" and "Satisfied" are more reminiscent of Gary Clark and Danny Wilson who hit years ago with "Mary's Prayer."
Lyrically, there's nothing new with Taylor. His songs are mostly about getting some woman's sex, regretting getting some woman's sex, yearning for some woman's sex or needing to leave immediately after getting some woman's sex.
Yeah, and he's full of himself about his own sex. Like on "Lewis II:" "Baby, don't you know without me you just can't get off too good/Baby, I'm the only man who can treat you like he should/Is it any wonder that a boy could lose his mind all over you?/I want to get it right and do what I promised you/All of this and Lewis, too."
Then he coats it with a doo-wop style vocal break and returns with, "I just wanna make you feel good, strange, different, baby."
Never mind the braggadocio about the sexual prowess.
It's his voice. It is sincerely soulful and lustful without that postmodern whine that seems to afflict most black soul singers with releases in the past 15 years.
And he's as good a producer as he is a singer. His vocal arrangements owe as much to Motown as they do the Beatles.
Taylor's falsetto falls somewhere between Marvin Gaye's on "Trouble Man" and Prince's on "Scandalous"—only with a pleasantly skewed range and surprising depth of emotion.
In fact judging from Taylor's phrasing it is obvious he's spent some time listening to Gaye, Prince and probably Curtis Mayfield. It's old-school without being derivative and reminiscent of something previous without aping.
"The Way You Done Me" is so deceptively a simple and pleasant tale about never feeling this way before it sounds like some 1970s AM radio saccharine. However, it is refreshing to hear a man say, "I don't really blame you for leaving me this way/I think I better quit it before I start begging you to stay." After a lyric like that delivered the way it is, that AM-radio fluff suddenly turns on a Sam and Dave/Otis Redding dime.
There are no standouts here. It is as if each song were crafted—yes, crafted—with each song in mind. In other words, no song's a throwaway; yet, each song melds and relies nicely with and on the song before and after it.
Lewis II is a bright, shining, crisp record. It is equally suitable for dipping across the river to get that bottle for the weekend, as the soundtrack to your sexcapades or for your unadulterated listening pleasure.
The music is as strong as Taylor's voice. There are crunching, stadium-worthy guitar solos, '70s-era wah-wah, Stevie Wonder-esque clavinet bouquets and some lovely George Duke-sounding piano flourishes.
If you can find this one, grab it and play it over and over and over.
It's that good.
