It’s easy to root for Charles Bradley, the 67-year-old soul singer who has spent the last few years enjoying a breakout career on Daptone Records. Bradley’s underdog narrative has remained as genuinely endearing as it has perpetually marketable, and Changes, his third album, feels like his straightforward best to date, the result of an improved dynamic between the singer and his band. If he ever sounded awkwardly patched in on previous recordings, Bradley now seems to command ownership of his songs like never before. It’s an accomplished skill in the world of retro-soul, and Bradley sounds vital instead of nostalgic because of it.
Changes’ lyrics are immediately and sometimes overly familiar, but Bradley’s unmistakable voice is the obvious draw throughout. For a guy who has often been affectionately pigeonholed—Bradley has earned a tagline as the “The Screaming Eagle of Soul”—the new album instead finds him at his most versatile and complete. The record opens with a soulful gospel rendition of “God Bless America” in which the singer delivers an organ-laced testimony; the same keys pop up in funkier form on follow-up “Good to Be Back at Home.” After spending much of his seventh decade as a first-time international headliner, Bradley sings about the mixture of relief and disappointment in his return trip. Like other songs on the album, the song is vaguely and upliftingly political: On “Changed For the World” Bradley tells us "Heaven is crying, the world is shaking." Half singing, half preaching, he warns “God is unhappy, the moon is breaking / Blood is spilling, God is coming.”
Musically, Changes fits squarely into the Daptone house sound, but the session players—primarily from Menahan Street Band but also Bradley’s touring group The Extraordinaries—are more restrained here to make room for Bradley's big presence and even bigger voice. But the album is nonetheless inflected with the referential post-funk and hip-hop drum sounds of label guitarist Thomas Brenneck and company. Near the end of “Nobody But You” a horn line quotes the unmistakable saxophone from Seals and Crofts 1972 hit “Summer Breeze,” whereas the opening piano-laced drum break on “You Think I Don’t Know (But I Know)” conjures up Freddie Scott’s “(You) Got What I Need,” now perhaps better known to all as the sample chop Biz Markie finagled into “Just a Friend.”
Much of the album is about love: searching for it, being wronged by it, basking in it. Of the spare forty-minute tracklist, “Things We Do For Love” might be the most satisfyingly retro offering, complete with a dose of doo-wop accompaniment and a nimble, romantic groove. The album’s greatest accomplishment is in its most unexpectedly personal moment though, in which Bradley wrestles an out-of-character Black Sabbath ballad about a breakup into an agonizing paean to his late mother. After spending a lifetime estranged, Bradley patched up his relationship with his mother in time to serve as her caretaker before she passed, and also early enough that she got to see his career finally take off. In her absence and in the midst of post-success family quarrels, Bradley sounds heartbreakingly alone when he wails “I’ve lost the best friend I’ve ever had.” “Changes,” and its accompanying video, show the singer at his most emotionally unhinged and dramatically vulnerable.
A few years ago, Bradley’s success seemed more romantic in its improbability. “We found an authentic soul man that liked our music,” Brenneck glowed of his band’s initial collaboration with the singer in 2012. Changes somehow feels more natural, in which Bradley comes off as an obvious star, like he's belonged here the whole time. Surrounded by talented revivalists half his age, the singer remains a precious commodity: the real thing. He’s not reenacting or revisiting, he’s on his first run through. And it's still inspiring to watch him live it out at last.
