Here's the song that speaks to why I left and why I'm here again — or at least the chorus does:
That's Mayer Hawthorne's "The Ills" off his album from last year, A Strange Arrangement. Oddly enough, two Wednesdays ago, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal dropped articles on Hawthorne. The NYT goes into the entire neo-retro-soul "movement" — I guess some 'd call it that, not sure it's quite tight enough though. In it, Hawthorne says what could easily be this site's manifesto, if it had one:
“I hate it when people say, Let’s take it back to the good old days. Screw that. Smokey Robinson wasn’t saying that when he was making his songs. Run-DMC wasn’t trying to take it back. They were trying to do something new and different, something exciting. I don’t want kids listening to my music thinking it’s for their parents. I want them to feel it’s theirs. I wasn’t even alive when all those soul records were made.”
Claps, Mayer.
Now I'm not going to lie to you: I don't know how much I'll be putting up over the next few weeks. But I'll try. If it doesn't work out though, there's a crowd of modern soul artists in the NYT article that you can spin while I'm away.
