Tweedy To Produce Mavis Staples Record

[Analogman]

They don't want to talk about Jesus, they just want to see Jeff's face.

[LouieB]

They don't want to talk about Jesus, they just want to see Jeff's face.

How about Jeff singing about Jesus...I guess that doesn't hold that much appeal either.

 

This is a very good album though. I like the bulk of the songs (although the jazzy ballad falls a bit flat) Someday I will chime in on each song, just for the hell of it (or the Jesus of it....happy Yom Kippur everyone....)

 

LouieB

[Analogman]

I wonder if Ms. Staples has ever covered the song I Just Want To See His Face.

[H.Stone]

This thing seems to have landed on Wilcoland with a thud. Very few people have come on here to say they actually bought it and express any opinions. Maybe streaming it on NPR wasn't such a good idea.

 

LouieB

 

I bought it, and I love it. The stand-outs for me are Creep Along Moses, Only The Lord Knows, Wonderful Savior, and You're Not Alone, but I think the entire album is excellent. Seeing Mavis live at Solid Sound is a huge part of why I'm enjoying it so much--her set there was powerful.

 

As for not coming on here to express opinions on the album, sometimes I just want to enjoy something that I know I like. I know others are interested in critiquing the mixing or the production or whatnot, but I'm not. I'm just happily enjoying the music on my own.

[Beltmann]

I bought it, and I love it... As for not coming on here to express opinions on the album, sometimes I just want to enjoy something that I know I like. I know others are interested in critiquing the mixing or the production or whatnot, but I'm not. I'm just happily enjoying the music on my own.

Ditto. I've been listening all week, mostly because I can't stop. Right now I'd say it ranks among my favorites of the year.

 

Side comment 1: Would I have purchased You Are Not Alone if Tweedy was not the producer? I dunno, but I'd like to think that if I heard those snippets and read those reviews, my ears would have been interested, Jeff or no Jeff.

 

Side comment 2: One sign that I'm getting older might be that I bought six albums this week--including Weezer, Of Montreal, James, and Florence + The Machine--but my two favorites (by a wide margin) are Mavis Staples and Robert Plant.

[H.Stone]

my two favorites (by a wide margin) are Mavis Staples and Robert Plant.

 

I've heard the new Plant is outstanding. I'll have to check it out.

[GtrPlyr]

Back to the album for a minute....

 

This thing seems to have landed on Wilcoland with a thud. Very few people have come on here to say they actually bought it and express any opinions. Maybe streaming it on NPR wasn't such a good idea.

 

LouieB

I bought it yesterday and played it in the car on the drive home. Mavis still sounds good, too soon for me to comment on the production though. I'll have to give this a few more spins this week and let the songs sink in a bit more.

[LouieB]

I think the production is fantastic actually (in case anyone was wondering...) Another long term member of the Chicago music scene involved in this recording is Mark Greenberg of The Coctails who was also the assistant engineer.

 

LouieB

[Kalle]

I think it's a really solid record. Great song choices, good sounds, and great production by Jeff. I'll be honest that I would have never bought the album if Jeff wasn't involved, but I am really glad I did, it's got some great playing and I think we'll see it pop up in a lot of best of lists at the end of the year.

[LouieB]

Here is a really super good article from this morning's NY Times.

 

LouieB

 

A Little Nudge, and a Soul Singer Is Back to Her Roots

By LARRY ROHTER

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.

 

MAVIS STAPLES and Jeff Tweedy have long lived in the same city, Chicago. But until recently they occupied different musical universes: she a doyenne of American soul singers, with a recording career that began 58 years ago as a member of the Staple Singers, he the leader of the alternative rock band Wilco, formed in the mid-1990s.

 

In 2009, though, Mr. Tweedy and Ms. Staples decided to collaborate, and for nearly a month last winter she commuted to the Wilco loft on the North Side from her home on the South Side. The result is “You Are Not Alone” (Anti), a new CD, produced by Mr. Tweedy and released last week, that reflects both her gospel-soul sensibility and his love for all genres of American roots music.

 

“I come from the 1950s, so this isn’t supposed to be happening, Jeff Tweedy producing me,” an ebullient Ms. Staples, 71, said in an interview here last month, where she performed at the Solid Sound Festival, organized by Wilco, with Mr. Tweedy joining her for a couple of numbers. “But after our first meeting I felt like I knew him and was at ease and ready to go into the studio and make a good record. He looked out for me and kept me in my comfort zone. So all of these songs are still Mavis, and fit me like a glove.”

 

“You Are Not Alone” is the first major recording that Mr. Tweedy, 43, has produced outside Wilco, and he undertook the project with a very clear notion of how it should sound. He wanted it to evoke the deliberately spare style of classic Staple Singers tracks, in which the emphasis was on the vocals, sometimes with just a chorus, snare drum and the tremolo- and reverb-laden guitar of Roebuck (Pops) Staples, the group’s patriarch, as accompaniment to the husky, sensual contralto of Mavis, his youngest daughter.

 

“With Mavis, you don’t want to put anything in the same space,” Mr. Tweedy explained, sitting at her side. “Records just sound better to me where they are arranged properly, where there aren’t a lot of instruments competing. Rock records are almost impossible to make sound like that, because there are guitars and keyboards and all that stuff that always end in the middle, and you have to fight for space. Pops was the architect of a really great thing, and I decided to use that, not as a crutch, but as a template.”

 

Initially Mr. Tweedy also toyed with the idea of having Wilco play on the record as Ms. Staples’s backing group. But after he and his band mates saw one of her live shows and realized how tightly her singing meshed with the playing of her own band, they thought better; the keyboardist Pat Sansone was the only other member of Wilco to join Ms. Staples’s touring band on “You Are Not Alone,” providing occasional organ, piano and celeste flourishes.

 

In recent years some of Ms. Staples’s contemporaries from the golden era of soul music, most notably Solomon Burke and Bettye LaVette, have had their careers revived by CDs that reconfigure their style. Producers like Joe Henry and Don Was have matched such singers with a new repertory, drawn largely from the 1960s classic-rock songbook and played by much younger pop-oriented musicians.

 

On “You Are Not Alone” Mr. Tweedy opted for a different approach. Though the 13 tracks on the CD include a soulful take on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Wrote a Song for Everyone” as well as songs by Randy Newman and Allen Toussaint, much of the material is associated either with the Staple Singers or even earlier gospel groups, like the Dixie Hummingbirds or the Swan Silvertones.

 

“Don’t Knock” and “Downward Road,” for example, were written by Pops Staples, while “Creep Along Moses” and “Wonderful Savior” are gospel standards. Instead of asking Ms. Staples to move in his direction, Mr. Tweedy headed her way, asking her to listen to his iPod loaded with classic gospel compositions that he thought might suit her.

 

“I hadn’t heard some of those songs since I was a little girl,” she said. “I said to Tweedy, ‘Where did you get these?’ He took me back to my childhood with those songs, and I would think back to when I was walking around the house with Mom and Pops playing them. I told him, ‘Tweedy, I love those songs, but I never thought I’d be singing them again.’ ”

 

“Wonderful Savior” was recorded under especially unusual circumstances and is the first time in Ms. Staples’s career, she said, that she has ever sung a cappella on a record. Mr. Tweedy decided that he liked the echo on the stairwell at the Wilco loft, and even though it was January, he managed to cajole Ms. Staples and two backing vocalists into doing what he wanted.

 

“This was the coldest winter in Chicago in years,” she recalled. “It was cruel. I said, ‘Unh, unh, I’m not going out there,’ and he said, ‘Somebody get Mavis a coat and a hat and a scarf and some gloves.’ Then he told me, ‘Mavis, go on and sing.’ It was one take, and we stood there around that one microphone, vapor coming out of our mouths. It sounded so good to me that I wanted to do it again. But he said, ‘No, we don’t need to do it again.’ ”

 

To round things out, Mr. Tweedy wrote a pair of new songs, including the title track. He also devised a new arrangement and provided additional lyrics for “In Christ There Is No East or West,” inspired, he acknowledged, by John Fahey’s fingerpicking guitar version of that traditional hymn.

 

As Ms. Staples and Mr. Tweedy see it, there is a logic to their seemingly unlikely collaboration. Each was aware of the other long before they first met, when he went to see her perform in Chicago in 2007 and then visited her backstage afterward.

 

“I worked in record stores growing up” in southern Illinois, he recalled, “and we had Staple Singers records and were Staple Singers fans. We’d play their music in the store, which was a collector’s vinyl shop with mostly alternative music and vintage vinyl, and I got the records that I could afford. As I got older, I absorbed more of it here and there.”

 

In Ms. Staples’s case the process was somewhat different. Unlike many artists her age she continues to pay close attention to new developments in popular music, and not just the recent crop of female singers who in one way or another have absorbed her influence, like Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, Sharon Jones and even Lady Gaga.

 

“For some reason with the black stations I don’t hear what I want to hear,” she said. “It’s the same kids’ stuff over and over. So I switched to WXRT,” the Chicago alternative rock station. “They play a lot of Wilco, and I liked what I heard, but I still hadn’t seen them play. But then I happened to see them live on ‘Austin City Limits,’ and I tell you, it blew my mind.”

 

Ms. Staples is part of a generation of female soul singers, also including Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, who started their careers with gospel music in church and later shifted to secular material. But it’s not just Ms. Staples’s rough, smoky voice and sense of phrasing that make her music so distinctive. Her choice of uplifting material also plays an important part in defining her style.

 

“What separates Mavis from everyone else is that she sticks to more spiritual, positive music,” said Ms. Jones, the soul singer, a longtime admirer of Ms. Staples. “Others may sing about how their man left them, but with Mavis it’s still that gospel feel. Even when people are dancing to her music in a club, she’s singing about things that are going on, about world peace and God and loving your brother.”

 

And partly for that reason producers and radio programmers often have had difficulty trying to package her when she records as a solo artist, away from the family setting in which she is most comfortable. Ms. Staples winced at the mention of a disco album she did in the 1970s, but she is fond of records she made with Jerry Wexler, Curtis Mayfield, Prince and Motown’s Holland Brothers. By the early 1990s, though, with hip-hop ascendant, she was deemed simply too old-school to get much airplay.

 

From 1993 to 2004 her only solo recording was a tribute to the gospel great Mahalia Jackson that she made with the organist Lucky Peterson. The death of her father just before Christmas in 2000, a year after the Staple Singers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, also set her back for several years.

 

“Pops’ death was such a turning point for her,” said Bruce Iglauer, the founder of the independent blues label Alligator Records in Chicago. “To her he was such a model of everything a man should be that she didn’t see herself moving forward by herself and felt that her career as a performing artist had ended.”

 

But in 2004, feeling an itch to resume, she “called all of the record companies I knew, and nobody would take me,” she said. “So I went to the bank, I took my funds out, and I made me a record and shopped it around. But still no one would listen to me. I was just about to shut it down and start selling records out of the trunk when Bruce Iglauer came through.”

 

That CD, “Have a Little Faith,” produced the hit “God Is Not Sleeping” and was followed by two other records on a different label that drew positive reviews and respectable sales: First came “We’ll Never Turn Back,” a collection of anthems from the civil rights era that was produced by Ry Cooder, and then “Hope From the Hideout,” a live disc.

 

In 2008 her comeback got another boost. On the campaign trail Barack Obama often concluded his rallies with the Staple Singers’ 1972 No. 1 hit “I’ll Take You There,” with Ms. Staples’s growling lead vocal booming over loudspeakers.

 

“Mavis has had a really great run,” Mr. Tweedy said. “My feeling was that if you put her in front of a microphone and give her stuff to sing that she believes in and then just stay out of the way, you’re doing everyone a favor. That’s what I tried to do, and it really kind of all worked and came together, just like the first time we talked.”

[GtrPlyr]

But in 2004, feeling an itch to resume, she “called all of the record companies I knew, and nobody would take me,” she said. “So I went to the bank, I took my funds out, and I made me a record and shopped it around. But still no one would listen to me.

That is effing sad when someone of Mavis' stature can't find anyone to put out her record. I miss the days when souls, not suits ran the record companies (well, some record companies anyhow.)

[LouieB]

That is effing sad when someone of Mavis' stature can't find anyone to put out her record. I miss the days when souls, not suits ran the record companies (well, some record companies anyhow.)

But the article does point out that Alligator did put her "comeback" record out. Alligator is a very fine independent blues label and that CD is excellent, recorded in Evanston.

 

It is not surprising or new that older artists have a hard time in the market place. Even by the early 2000s things were beginning to deteriorate in the music biz. But again, the entire history of popular music is littered with older artists who couldn't catch a break anymore. I don't know that "souls" ever ran the music business. It doesn't appear they did from the reading I have done. Shedding older artists is a time tested way to clear out artists that are not making top dollar anyomre and have older fans who don't buy their records any more. Nothing new there. The suits may change, but things pretty much remain the same in any business.

 

LouieB

[El Bacho]

It is a very fine album indeed.

 

I had her previous one, which was produced by Ry Cooder. The music was fine but there was too many talking intros that consisted in pure name-dropping. On this one, I was surprised about how little Wilco-esque it sounded. Tweedy mostly refined the sound of her live band but didn't try to make it too contemporary and the result is very solid. The new songs are inspired (much more than "The Thanks I Get" would have suited Solomon Burke) and the arrangements for the covers are great.

 

I enjoy it indeed much more than the latest Bettye LaVette.

[LouieB]

It is a very fine album indeed.

 

I had her previous one, which was produced by Ry Cooder. The music was fine but there was too many talking intros that consisted in pure name-dropping. On this one, I was surprised about how little Wilco-esque it sounded. Tweedy mostly refined the sound of her live band but didn't try to make it too contemporary and the result is very solid. The new songs are inspired (much more than "The Thanks I Get" would have suited Solomon Burke) and the arrangements for the covers are great.

 

I enjoy it indeed much more than the latest Bettye LaVette.

Well the reason it doesn't sound like Wilco is that only Pat and Jeff from Wilco are on it.

 

Bettye's new one is really a snooze and a bit misguided. Sometimes a good idea on paper just doesn't work.

 

LouieB

[LouieB]

And another Greg Kot article in today's Tribune.....

 

LouieB

 

Secret weapon behind Mavis Staples' new Jeff Tweedy-produced album

Greg Kot

 

The story that most fans know about Mavis Staples’ rousing new album, “You Are Not Alone” (Anti), is that the singer recorded it with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who produced it and also wrote two songs.

 

But the most underappreciated aspect of it is that Tweedy didn’t leave his thumbprints all over the session. On the contrary, he not only let Mavis be Mavis, he ensured that she would record the album with her touring band: guitarist Rick Holmstrom, bassist Jeff Turmes and drummer Stephen Hodges.

 

“All the interviewers want to talk about Tweedy, and I can understand that, but the band is really an important part of this and most write-ups aren’t including that,” Staples says while sitting at a South Loop hotel lounge, with her sister Yvonne at her side. “The first thing Jeff said to me after he saw us play together was, ‘That band is good for you. They leave you space to be yourself.’”

 

The relationship with Holmstrom began around the time she was recording her 2007 masterpiece, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” with producer-guitarist Ry Cooder in California.

 

 

“Ry was playing some dangerous guitar; it reminded me of the way Pops (her father, the late Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples) used to sound,” Staples said. “It made me change my band. I had a great band for 20 years, but they couldn’t play like that. In order to play those songs on tour, I had to find someone who did. I finally had to tell them I had to use another band, Rick’s band.”

 

Like Cooder, Holmstrom was well-versed in Pops Staples' guitar vocabulary. Holmstrom had played a couple of intimate, duet shows with Mavis Staples and his trio backed the singer at a festival in California while she was recording “We’ll Never Turn Back.” The singer’s band got hung up at an airport, and Holmstrom’s trio – the opening act – stepped in. The Holmstrom group made a huge impression on Cooder, who was standing in the wings cheering them on, and Staples herself.

 

“Sometimes I have to look around because I think Pops is up there with Rick,” she says. “I say to Rick, ‘Pops is in your fingers.’ ”

 

Pops Staples’ sparse, tremolo-inflected sound was the backbone of numerous hits for the Staple Singers in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the Chicago-based family band was crafting a legacy built on topical, socially-conscious gospel-soul songs such as “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself.”

 

“I’ve been playing in a blues band since the late ‘80s, and a friend turned me on to Pops Staples in the mid-‘90s,” Holmstrom says in an interview from his home in California. “I used to listen to a tape of his songs while I was driving and coming down after a gig. It was quiet, airy, perfect stuff, and Pops’ style just started seeping into my own songs. When I started playing with Mavis, I wanted to use some of that.”

 

The empathy and sense of space with which the trio plays while backing Staples is documented on “Live Hope at the Hideout,” a 2008 recording at the Chicago club. The members of Wilco attended the show and Tweedy came away impressed. He had initially thought of using Wilco to back Mavis on the “You Are Not Alone” sessions but ended up insisting that Holmstrom, Turmes and Hodges do the job when the album was recorded last December and January in Chicago.

 

Holmstrom visited Tweedy last fall at the Wilco Loft studio on the North Side to go over ideas for the album before it was recorded. “Jeff told me, ‘I’m a band guy,’ and that he really values what happens when people play and travel together,” Holmstrom says. “He liked the sound we get with her. I think the Wilco guys would’ve made an interesting record with her, but they wouldn’t have had the shared experience we’ve developed with her, and I think Jeff wanted to document that.”

 

Tweedy focused on older gospel songs and a few early Pops Staples tunes to get the album rolling. The apotheosis of that approach came when Staples recorded the old gospel hymn “Wonderful Saviour” in a cold stairwell on a winter afternoon at the Wilco Loft with her backing singers.

 

“Jeff had these songs on his iPod that my family and I used to sing together,” Staples says. “I was used to bustin’ down on stage with all the songs I did with Ry (civil-rights era protest songs). These songs were more hopeful, it felt fresh, the style I knew from when I was a teenager when everyone was harmonizing and we’d go back and forth.”

 

When promoters called Staples’ management making an offer for her to appear at last summer’s Lollapalooza festival in Grant Park, the 71-year-old gospel-soul singer was incredulous.

 

“They want me?” she says with a laugh. “I thought I was going to be on a festival with all these kids who don’t know me. They were all going to be there to see Gaga, not me.”

 

Staples happened to perform the same day as Lady Gaga, but she needn’t have worried about being outshined by the pop diva. Underneath a blazing August sun, Staples looked radiant and vivacious in white. She opened her set with “Wonderful Savior” – pure, gospel harmonizing without instrumental accompaniment.

 

“I saw a few jaws dropping, a few eyes getting big out in the audience, like, ‘What is happening?’ ” Staples says. “Uh-oh, I was afraid of that. I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, maybe I made a mistake.’ ”

 

Not hardly. By the end of the performance, a raucous, outdoor church service broke out in the middle of a rock festival. The audience was clapping along, and then cheering.

 

“Whew! We’re off to a good start,” Staples says. “I had a feeling everything was going to be fine after that, and I was right.”

[mfwahl]

Bought this yesterday. Listened to it twice so far and this will stay in my car stereo for a while. Love the songs, love her voice, and the production is great. Her voice is out in front like it should be, and the guitar and drums sound great. The production is simple but the sounds vary enough from song to song to keep it interesting.

[BreezyGrass]

After listening since it came out, I have to say that the album works on many levels. Aside from the title track and save No East or West - Tweedy's prints aren't really on this album at all. Mavis is out there in front as was mentioned and that's perfect placement. The song choices are on spot and it's much better than the last album. More focused I think. And while I agree many wouldn't have bought this save for Tweedy's producing it - I would have bought it even if he didn't after seeing her open up for Wilco at Solid Sound! The backing band is fantastic. And its a testimony to Jeff that he didn't choose Wilco to back her. Although that might have been interesting it probably wouldn't have gelled. I would suggest those on the fence to go out and get it! My favorite track right now is Only The Lord Knows with Wrote a Song coming in a very close second!

 

Happy Wed. everyone! Two more days to the weekend!

[pnêyu]

Not sure if this has been posted, but Mavis and Jeff will be on Letterman next Tuesday (Oct. 5).

[hazel]

Not sure if this has been posted, but Mavis and Jeff will be on Letterman next Tuesday (Oct. 5).

 

thanks for the heads up

[MattZ]

Aside from the title track and save No East or West - Tweedy's prints aren't really on this album at all.

 

Wow, really? I hear what I think are his ideas and sounds and flourishes on every song. In a really good way: understated, but definitely there.

[Kalle]

Great review on Pitchfork today. An 8.2, that's higher than they have given any Wilco record since YHF...

 

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14666-you-are-not-alone/

[BreezyGrass]

Wow, really? I hear what I think are his ideas and sounds and flourishes on every song. In a really good way: understated, but definitely there.

 

Really. Besides those two tracks, I really think that he's pretty transparent. And I mean that in a good way - don't get me wrong. The producer's job, as I see it, is to get the most/best out of the artist as possible. Jeff did this in every way on this album. And let's really look at it as I think Jeff probably is - it's all about Mavis! And that's pretty awesome! Great job all around!

[LouieB]

I just gave the Ry Cooder produced album and found it better than the first listen I gave it at a party a couple years ago. If you like civil rights era type material, it is also a good one.

 

LouieB

[Magnetized]

Great review on Pitchfork today. An 8.2, that's higher than they have given any Wilco record since YHF...

 

http://pitchfork.com...-are-not-alone/

This may have been posted before, but if so I missed it. It's an acoustic video of "Wrote a Song for Everyone" with Mavis and Jeff--the whole song, not just a snippet. They are so damned adorable together!

 

http://link.brightco...id=593531762001

[GtrPlyr]

Came across this interview with Mavis and Jeff the other day:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCLqaMPqtkQ