Mavis Staples is known as many things: soul hitmaker, civil rights trailblazer, 21st-century torchbearer of American gospel music, roots music luminary, world-class entertainer, and singular lead singer of her family band, the Staple Singers. But throughout her career, Staples has also proven to be a superb interpreter of song. From her teenaged take on standards like “Uncloudy Day” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” her Seventies showstopping rendition of “The Weight,” or her 1984 cover of the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People,” Mavis has always had a knack for taking songs the public knows and making them utterly her own.
Such is the premise for Staples’ stunning new album, Sad and Beautiful World. Staples transforms disparate material across genres and decades — some well known standards, some semi-obscure originals — into her most powerful statement as a solo artist in more than a decade. The album further cements Staples alongside Bettye Lavette and Willie Nelson in the pantheon of great American song interpreters still doing great work later in life.
More than that, this gentle collection of covers by everyone from Frank Ocean to Gillian Welch to Sparklehorse serves as a survey course on her storied 72-year(!) recording career. There’s the nod to the Staples’ Muscle Shoals record-making (Eddie Hinton’s album-closing “Everybody Needs Love”,) her earliest roots in Chicago gospel (“Satisfied Mind,” made famous by Mahalia Jackson), and her album-opening cover of Tom Waits’ “Chicago” that channels the ear she’s always had for her own contemporaries. Meanwhile, Mavis’ covers of songwriters who could be her grandchildren (indie rocker Kevin Morby, Frank Ocean), is a nod to her recent role as patron saint of for several younger generations.
Brad Cook, who produced Waxahatchee’s last few records, is the latest in the long list of hip dudes paired with Staples over the past few decades. The arrangements are sparse, breezy, clearing the path for Mavis’ voice, which has only gathered gravitas and richness. Sad and Beautiful World finds Mavis, 86, exploring, rediscovering, and poking holes at her lifetime of righteous optimism. On the title track, she sounds weathered and world-weary singing about how fast the days go “speeding past.” She imbues Morby’s “Beautiful Strangers,” with its references to mass shootings and death, with the hard-earned grief of someone who’s experienced profound loss.
At times, Staples’ reckoning and zen reflectiveness on Sad and Beautiful World feel like a photo-negative of the grimly dark late records by Leonard Cohen: Like those collections, Mavis’ latest is a document of a legend brimming with life even as they directly confront their own mortality. But Mavis comes to the opposite conclusions, drawing even more depth and power in her faith, even, or especially, as she finds it fractured.
That faith comes across clearly on her cover of Cohen himself (“Anthem”). Listen to her gather strength as the track progress: the way her voice cracks with emotion when she sings the line “they’re going to hear from me,” the way she summons 250 years of American history in her phrasing of a single word—thundercloud — halfway through the mournful, horn-filled R&B arrangement. But it’s on “Human Mind” that Staples lays out her philosophy most plainly. It’s the sole original written (by Allison Russell and Hozier) specifically for this project, and it shows: Of all the songs written for Mavis in recent years, none speak to her radiant work better. Staples’ belief sounds battered but beautiful: “Even in these days I find/This far down the line,” she sings, “I find good in us, sometimes,” her voice hovering over that final word. It’s as if she’s reminding herself that even when her own hope in humanity has been cracked, she can find a way to let the light get in.
