"As a singer grows older," starts a charming cut of sampled dialog on Bobby Womack's first album of original material in 18 years, "his conception grows a little deeper because he lives life and he understands what he's trying to say a little more." The voice belongs to Womack's mentor and friend, Sam Cooke, who spoke those words of wisdom in 1963, when he was 32 years old. Cooke was murdered a year later when, acting in self-defense, a Los Angeles motel manager sent a bullet through both of his lungs and his heart. A few days after his idol's funeral, Womack began a scandalous relationship with Cooke's widow, and the two married just a few months later. Bobby was soon seen wearing Sam's clothes.
As all of his classic-soul peers passed on over the last 50 years, often due to bizarre or dramatic circumstances, Womack endured. It's not that he's led a cautious lifestyle; after Cooke's widow found Bobby sleeping with Sam's daughter, she shot at him, and barely missed; for 30 years, from the 1960s to the 90s, Womack was hooked on hard drugs; and more recently, he's evaded both prostate and colon cancer. As trends and sounds rolled through the R&B landscape, Womack was there as a signpost of soul. The late 60s had him hollering along to Motown-style pop, and playing guitar for everyone from Dusty Springfield to Ray Charles to Elvis Presley. ("He wasn't shit," Womack recently told The Guardian, talking about the King. "Everything he got he stole.") His most fruitful period came in the early 70s, during which he explored an intoxicating funk sound that peaked on his 1971 career best, Communication. There was Bobby doing coked-out disco in the late 70s, and then sanding down his grit throughout the 80s with increasingly plastic slow jams. By the 90s, he sounded a hell of a lot more like Michael Bolton than James Brown. And then he went away.
However foolish, thoughts of "What if?" have crossed the minds of many while thinking about the premature deaths of any number of soul greats. Womack provided a proxy answer to those questions, and the results weren't always pretty. But there was always that voice, a wonderfully gnarled, god-grown instrument that could turn any style into the most sincere soul, where swagger, hurt, and ecstasy got equal time. Womack sang of love and its knotted complications, and if it was sometimes hard to tell if he was making a song laugh or cry, that seemed to be the point. He's known unspeakable loss-- of his mentor, his brother, his four-month-old son-- and while he's sometimes tried to use music as an escape, that strife echoes in the crevices of his voice. At 68, he's a survivor in every sense of the word. This is not lost on him. "I'm speaking for all those singers who gave up. Marvin, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett," he told The Guardian. "They need more respect than can ever be given to them. And I'm gonna set the record straight."
With that in mind comes The Bravest Man in the Universe, an attempt to bring out the best in Womack once again, and introduce him to a new generation, by a couple of talented guys young enough to be his sons: Damon Albarn and XL Recordings owner and producer Richard Russell. This sort of arrangement has become more common in the last 15 years, whether it's Rick Rubin offering Johnny Cash a stark last act, or Jack White reigniting Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson, or ?uestlove helping Al Green get his funk back, or Russell himself pushing Gil Scott-Heron to complete his bittersweet final statement with 2010's I'm New Here. Oftentimes, these albums find the young producers chopping back the layers of schlock that tend to build around aging artists like garish armor, allowing their natural gifts to rise again with accompaniment that harkens back to a previous era. And while The Bravest Man is a skeletal affair with the spotlight keenly trained on Womack's cracked vocals, it doesn't attempt to sound like "classic" Bobby Womack, for better or worse.
The album is peppered with minimal electronics that recall the dank trip-hop of Massive Attack and the xx's spacious atmospherics. Fittingly, it's the most remorseful album of Womack's career-- an apology for his rampant drug use and womanizing, apparently written with his ex-wife Regina in mind (the two are separated but still legally married, and Womack calls her the love of his life in a biographical TV documentary from earlier this year). And while Womack's voice-- the very essence of earthy-- is not an obvious match for Albarn and Russell's synthetic, loop-based accompaniment, the pairing pays off surprisingly well on the two most wistful tracks on the album. "Please Forgive My Heart" is an open plea, where the breaks in Bobby's voice double as admissions of vulnerability. "I'm a liar, I'm in a dream," he sings, "going my way, nothing to rely on." There's not much relief here, only the realities of looking back on a reckless life. The same goes for the nostalgic lament "Whatever Happened to the Times", an ambient smear of a track featuring dynamic production tweaks and instrumentation from young Warp studio wiz Kwes.
Too often, though, the album's tightly wound drums and repetitive rigidness undo Womack's spontaneity, forcing him into an unsuitably cloistered space. Many of the singer's 70s touchstone LPs had him taking his time, vamping off the cuff, or even telling stories-- just talking, basically-- for minutes on end. These techniques resulted in an intimacy between performer and listener that's hard to achieve. Unfortunately, The Bravest Man rarely hits a similar feeling, and while Womack does his best to step up to his alien surroundings, he can't help but sound like an out-of-place guest on his own album. Songs like the skeptical "Stupid", which finds Womack aiming his ire at corrupt preachers, the nearly comically flimsy "Love Is Gonna Lift You Up", which has the singer throwing out meaningless platitudes that go directly against the album's general darkness, and the annoyingly caustic take on the traditional song "Jubilee (Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around)" are open-minded experiments, but they don't connect.
Which brings us back to that Sam Cooke quote about growing deeper as you get older. It's a comforting ideal. Ironically, the Bravest Man song that uses Cooke's observation, "Dayglo Reflection", is a duet between Womack and the 60s-indebted singer Lana Del Rey. When those two voices are presented together on the same track, the veracity of Cooke's koan is apparent; Womack clearly understands what he's singing about while Del Rey can only muster a projection of comprehension. The thing is, Bobby Womack has always understood: From a preternaturally young age, he's always known. "If you get anything out of life, you gotta put up with the toils and strife," he sang with a sweet tenderness on 1971's "That's the Way I Feel About 'Cha", at age 27. Back then, the music understood him, too.
