Truth and Soul: the production team making Texas sound vintage, and helping Lee Fields rewrite history
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Version 0 of 1. It's a decent bet that, as you read these words, somebody somewhere is listening to a classic soul record and thinking, "They don't make 'em like that any more." Yet, possibly at exactly the same moment, a group of record collectors-turned-musicians-and-producers in New York is busy proving them wrong. Buy it from On a muggy Monday in early May this year, in a studio buried inside an old warehouse near the Queensboro Bridge, what looks and sounds like a 1960s soul music recording session is in full swing. In the main performance space, a band comprising a drummer, a bassist, a keyboard player and guitarist is cutting a song the old-fashioned way: playing live, together, rather than having each individual record their part on their own. On the other side of the glass, there's an Apple computer next to the 16-track mixing desk, but the music is being recorded to tape rather than a hard drive. The singer is in the control room, providing a guide vocal to keep the band on track, making sure the performance has a human heart to it rather than the mechanised precision that often results when musicians are kept in synch by a click or a drum machine. The track they're creating is a blend of the modern and the traditional. Guitar licks borrowed from the Spinners' 1970 hit It's a Shame and James Brown's Blues and Pants are dropped in to a gently funky soul groove as if they're samples. The song – the Texas hit Inner Smile – dates from the 21st century, but the musicians playing it hadn't heard the original until 25 minutes ago so the emerging sound is at once retro yet brand new. "I think the stuff we're doing is not just like traditional soul music," says the keyboard player and co-producer of the session, Leon Michels. "Some people might be like, 'That just sounds like an old record,' but to me it sounds like now: it's got influences from hip-hop and other places. We cherrypick the best shit out of the soul music that we like, and we add other things in there too." Welcome to the world of Truth and Soul: a record label, production team and musical philosophy that was born in Brooklyn, recently moved a couple of miles up the road into Queens, and which is, slowly but surely, infecting the minds of listeners around the world. Michels and his production and writing partner Jeff Silverman aren't old enough to have bought those Motown or James Brown 45s when they first came out, but over the past two decades they've built a reputation as the go-to guys for any musician who wants to make records that ring with the rootsy authenticity that makes 60s and 70s soul sound so potent. Texas are the latest in a long list of artists who've passed through the Truth and Soul studio. Adele pitched up in 2007, looking for the perfect way to finish off her debut LP: she wrote and recorded Right as Rain with the Michels-Silverman team. Aloe Blacc's global hit, I Need a Dollar, was co-written by the pair, and was recorded and produced at Truth and Soul. Among the more esoteric of their releases is an album of instrumental covers of Wu-Tang Clan songs, and this week they unveil their fourth full-length collaboration with Lee Fields, a veteran of the 60s funk-soul scene who has found new audiences around the world thanks to his work within the T&S set-up. Silverman and Michels were introduced in the 1990s by Phillip Lehman, a scion of the banking family and an avid collector of rare funk singles. Not content with digging up ancient obscurities, Lehman wanted to make new records in the same style, and set up a label he named Desco, after the vacuum cleaner shop in Manhattan its offices were located above. Lehman learned to play drums and assembled a crew of like-minded funk-fan musicians. Silverman was DJing in a club when Lehman introduced himself and handed over a stack of Desco releases; among them was Thunder Chicken, an LP by the Mighty Imperials, a teenage band in thrall to the Meters, whose keyboard player was Michels. By the time Lehman and his partner at Desco, Gabe Roth, went their separate ways around the turn of the century, Silverman and Michels were established parts of the label's musical and production team. While Roth set up a new label, Daptone, Michels, Silverman and Lehman inaugurated an imprint called Soul Fire. Roth took Desco singer Sharon Jones; Soul Fire kept Fields, whom Lehman had tracked down on the southern blues circuit. The same pool of musicians continued to work on releases for both labels, putting out records as the Dap-Kings for Roth, and under names such as the Expressions and the El Michels Affair for Truth and Soul, the successor to Soul Fire which Silverman and Michels set up after Lehman left the music business. "Part of the reason we started Truth and Soul was that we figured that no one else would ever put our music out," Silverman recalls. "Working with Phillip showed us it was easy to do if you wanted to." The scene remained an underground one, but that changed after Mark Ronson sampled a Daptone record and began working with the musicians. He used the Dap-Kings on the six tracks he produced for Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, and in 2008 Jay-Z sampled a track by Menehan Street Band – a Truth and Soul/Daptone hybrid group – on his single Roc Boys (And The Winner Is)…. The Desco dynasty suddenly found they were the makers of pop's hottest "new" sound. And it's not just music buyers who think they're making a pretty decent fist of it, either. "If I were to move these guys back to those days," says Fields, musing on how the Truth and Soul team would have fared back when his recording career began as a teenager in the 1960s, "history would be rewritten. They'd be super-competitive. They've got it, man – no doubt about it." Word continues to spread. Michels has been working with Dan Auerbach, a part of the crew the Black Keys guitarist has assembled to make albums for Dr John and Ray Lamontagne, while Silverman's recent gigs include several months as music consultant to video games giant Rockstar. Texas, who've hired Truth and Soul to rework some of their hits for a package to mark their 25th anniversary, are also among the growing army of admirers. "We wanted to strip the songs back and perform them in a different way," explains singer Sharleen Spiteri. "Soul was the roots of the writing of all the songs, so that was the obvious route. These guys are looking at our songs with fresh eyes." "We're making something new," says Fields, "we've just got an older way of doing things. If we did things totally new we'd just sound like the rest, since pop music has moved over to synthetic sounds. But it's not a 60s sound – it's the way real musicians sound. "I thought," he adds, "that at this time of my life I'd be tellin' people about what I used to do: 'Man I used to sing, used to draw some big crowds. I had a band.' I waited 40 years, but I know this is the band: I can tell from the way I feel around 'em. It was worth the wait." Lee Fields plays at XOYO, EC2, 4 Jun. His new album, Emma Jean, is out on 2 Jun on Truth and Soul |