My Favorite Producer

I wanted to do each of these individually, but I'm as backlogged as ever, and the themes unique to this producer, that I'll do the two albums together. I love when a producer takes an artist seen in one light, and creates magic with them in a new light. I'm thinking Don Was with Bonnie Raitt, or Rick Rubin with Johnny Cash, and now Neil Diamond, or even Jack White with Loretta Lynn. In 2002 Joe Henry did the same with R&B great Solomon Burke. In 2005 he does it even better, twice. With Burke's record, he recruited some of the great songwriters of our time to contribute songs - he got great ones from Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson and Van Morrison.

This year he produced R&B obscurity Bettye LaVette - she's popular on the northern soul circuit - and released the gritty and ambitious I've Got My Own Hell To Raise, with an equally impressive staff of writers. Make that distaff of writers. By focusing on female composers, he has lent this album a perspective that personalizes the journey in a very unique manner. Bettye sings like Mavis Staples, only with a vocal more raw and expressive, as if that is somehow possible. Opening with the vocal only "I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got," Bettye somehow takes Sinead O'Connor's deeply personal song and makes it hers, saying in the process that this is a woman's journey, and you're welcome to come along with her. Lucinda Williams' "Joy" is just that, a funky search for joy (what she has not got, ironically), while she offers proof long sought, using gospel backings and dirty gutbucket guitar on "On The Surface," that Roseanne Cash is a soul mama at heart. Using Joan Armatrading, Aimee Mann, Dolly Parton and Fiona Apple, Henry and LeVette have crafted an album that is my favorite of 2005.

Another enjoyable, though no less ambitious effort from Henry, was released at Starbucks recently. I Believe To My Soul, Vol. 1, is a collection of classicist R&B performed by some of the greats as a benefit for Katrina victims. And how apropos, given this lineup, and the legacy of New Orleans and the South that they offer. Irma Thomas, the towering Allan Toussiant, both Crescent City mainstays, provide excellent slices of funk and soul that are rarely heard these days. Mavis Staples sounds as magnificent as she did during her tenure with Prince, particularly on opener “You Must Have That True Religion,” while Ann Peebles positively sparkles and has me eagerly awaiting a full-length followup from her.

I have been playing and discarding lots of releases in recent weeks, but these have been getting lots of play both at home and at work. They are both excellent reminders that the soul masters of the 60’s have as much to offer today as the Neil Youngs and Paul McCartneys and other white rockers of their day do. Let’s see more of this. A Smokey Robinson resurgence, perhaps?