Al Green

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Essential Albums

  • Call Me
    Call Me
    Call Me

    Of all the amazing music Al Green made in the 1970s—a run that included singles like “Let’s Stay Together”, “Love and Happiness” and “Take Me to the River”—nothing in his discography is as complete, nor as complex, as Call Me. By the time of the album’s release in 1973, Green had already proved that soul didn’t have to be effusive to be devastating, and that the true measure of a man’s strength isn’t his power, but his vulnerability and restraint. Some suitors wanted to have you, but Al Green wanted to please you—a quality of devotion that turned conventional gender dynamics inside out, and made his later turn toward Christianity all the more resonant: Even his love songs are worship songs. Call Me isn’t a radical shift so much as it is an enrichment. Green doesn’t just flirt with gospel, he sermonises (“Jesus Is Waiting”); he doesn’t just embrace his Southernness, he complicates it by pointing out how country and soul come from the same well (“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Funny How Time Slips Away”). That adventurousness might explain how Call Me became not only one of Green’s most critically acclaimed efforts, but one of his most commercially successful. Green once said he preferred recording when he was tired, because then he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to hold back how he really felt. It’s a strange image, in a way: The affable, family-friendly showman indulging in personal mysticism to unlock his hidden side. But it also speaks to the supernatural quality in Green’s music that reverberates through Prince, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Frank Ocean and any other artist who’s used the earthiness of everyday experience to discover portals into the unknown. Green’s music is soul, yes—but also seance. “I believe there’s gonna be an explosion,” he sings on “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)”. The fountain of whimpers and half-words that comes next isn’t what he promises—it’s quieter, stranger and less direct. And while you might not know what he’s saying, he makes clear how he feels.

  • I'm Still In Love with You
    I'm Still In Love with You
    I'm Still In Love with You

    Released in 1972, Al Green’s fifth album, I’m Still In Love With You, arrived as the singer was in the middle of a remarkable run that would include such must-have soul classics as Let’s Stay Together and Call Me. This was his commercial peak, and listening to Green now, the first thing that stands out about his early-1970s effort is his restraint: Few singers convey so much with so little. The second is the way he takes the template of the Soul Man—powerful, expressive, assertive—and turns him into something gentle, almost effeminate. Even Green’s peer, Marvin Gaye, had an air of dominance that persisted as his music mellowed out. But while Gaye is the bold, self-assured guy who turned “Let’s Get It On” into a pop come-on, Green is the open-ended guy who asks, “What about the way you love me?”—and then follows it with three minutes of whimpers and coos most men wouldn’t be caught dead making in private, let alone on a platinum-selling album (as he does on “Simply Beautiful”). Green doesn’t come after you—but in his unguarded vulnerability, he makes you come to him. The real coup of I’m Still In Love With You, though, is the way Green manages to sexualise himself without ever sounding risqué, or even adult. Like Prince 10 years later, Green’s qualities are more stereotypically boy than man: tender, simple, curious but willing to explore—a partner whose ego never gets in the way of their intuition. His affinity for country music—which manifests here with a gorgeous cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times”—didn’t just pull up the miscegenated roots of Southern culture for America to see. They also helped Green connect with white audiences, who cast him as a polite young person making his way through a no-good business. Meanwhile, the revelation of “Love and Happiness”—the first single from I’m Still In Love With You, and one of Green’s biggest hits—isn’t just that he can brood, but that his sweetness was a choice all along. So when Green sings something as straightforwardly utopian as “What a Wonderful Thing Love Is”, don’t mistake him for naive—in Green’s world, sweetness is strength.

  • Let's Stay Together
    Let's Stay Together
    Let's Stay Together

    The lesson of Al Green’s 1972 breakthrough album, Let’s Stay Together, is that soul music doesn’t have to go big to make its point. No disrespect to Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin or Solomon Burke, but while 1960s soul found its power in force of expression, Green introduced the possibility of finding it in restraint: the murmured delivery, the pillowy vibe, the way Willie Mitchell’s arrangements lean back where they could press forward. Green wasn’t the first or only artist to soften soul in the 1970s (the Chi-Lites come to mind, as do the Delfonics). But where the blockbuster strings and soft-focus dramatics of the Philadelphia and Chicago sounds projected sophistication for a Black, urban middle class, the best moments on Let’s Stay Together—including the title track, and Green’s cover of the Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”—were grounded in the same rural, Southern modesty as classic country. It was a connection Green would explore more explicitly a year later, with the hit follow-up Call Me. But Green didn’t just subvert the conventions of masculinity in pop and R&B with Let’s Stay Together. He also helped break down the walls between outward expression and inward feeling—it was pop music, but private. You can hear it in the way he slides into his falsetto on the “everything” in “I’ve Never Found a Girl (Who Loves Me Like You Do” or the chorus of “Judy”; the way Green buckles on the long “I” during the title track’s opening line, as though surrendering sweetly to the weight of his own affection. It was an approach that Green perfected during live performances from the era, which were revolutionary in part because it sounded like he was barely aware the audience exists. Instead, he sang directly to the subject of the song itself. It was a quality of intimacy and fragility you hear in everything from Green’s peer Marvin Gaye through Prince through the shy indie R&B singer who takes up the mic in their bedroom because it feels safer (and realer) to them than any stage. Of course, for some listeners, Let’s Stay Together will always be best exemplified by its title track—a song that has endured for decades. As these stories sometimes go, Green wrote “Let’s Stay Together” in 15 minutes. Interestingly, the spark wasn’t romantic, but sociopolitical: He was thinking about the dismantling of the Black Panthers, the assassination of Dr King, the riots of 1968. Let’s stay together—not let things fall apart. A different take from Sly Stone’s, that’s for sure, but one that reflected Green’s approach as a performer: scaled back, simplified, domestic—the small and personal before the big and political. After all, if you can’t make it right with your lover, how are you going to make it right with the world?

  • Gets Next to You
    Gets Next to You
    Gets Next to You

    Otis Redding’s death left a huge personality void in Memphis soul. It took a couple of years for Al Green to signal his ability and intention to fill it, but his 1970 Gets Next to You already presents an artist with most of his gifts and idiosyncrasies in place. The album opens with a slowed-down version of the Temptations’ recent frenetic hit “I Can’t Get Next to You” that allows plenty of room for a distracted lovesickness to rule, while “Tired of Being Alone” looks toward the mellow breakthrough of “Let’s Stay Together.” Green also hits hard on rockers—“Driving Wheel,” the funny “I’m a Ram”—and offers the reassuring gospel message of “God Is Standing By.” GetsNext to You is a stellar statement of direction and intent.

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About Al Green

In the '70s, singer Al Green transformed soul music, dispensing with machismo in favour of seductiveness, his creamy, silken croon spiked with church-like interjections, a deep sexuality lurking beneath a hushed vulnerability. Born in Arkansas in 1946, Green moved with his family to Michigan, where at age 10 he started singing with his brothers. He later formed a vocal group of his own; after his first couple of singles failed to connect, in 1969 he hooked up with Memphis producer Willie Mitchell, who signed him to Hi Records and began helping Green develop his own musical identity. Mitchell and his killer house band gave the singer a unique sound: lean grooves meticulously accented with lush strings, fat snare and horn punctuations that lag ever so slightly behind the beat. Green was given generous space to play with phrasing like it was putty. Beginning with his second album for the label, Al Green Gets Next to You, he released a string of hits, including “Let’s Stay Together” and “I’m Still in Love with You”, that have remained cultural markers and synonyms for intimacy decades later. By the mid-'70s, Green’s personal life had led him toward religion, and in 1976 he established the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis. He continued to record secular music until 1979, at which point he dedicated himself fully to gospel, as Reverend Al Green. Starting in the late ’80s, he sporadically returned to the soul world, and in the 2000s he made a series of albums for Blue Note, including a reunion with Mitchell and another album made with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. He returned to the road in 2019, for the first time in seven years, carrying on a tradition of allowing audiences to sing the words to tunes that have become common currency.

HOMETOWN
Forrest City, AR, United States
BORN
13 April 1946
GENRE
R&B/Soul

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