Charles Bradley waited more than 60 years to tell his story on his 2011 debut album, No Time for Dreaming. Even as he was touring relentlessly to support that album with his backing group, Brooklyn’s Menahan Street Band, he was impatient, itching to get back into the studio.
“All it did was open the first page of the first book,” says Bradley, whose second album, Victim of Love (Dunham/Daptone), comes out April 2. “A lot of things inside me have not been told. They’re crying for a chance to come forward.
Whether he’s singing about his hungry heart or his deep despair over the world’s inequities, Bradley has become known for his pleading brand of hard, classic soul. Though he’s been billed for years as Black Velvet, appearing in a James Brown tribute show with another Brooklyn group, the AllStarz (whose members have toured with the Intruders, Clarence Carter and Brass Construction), he’s not about smooth: Bradley, also tagged the Screaming Eagle of Soul, emotes like he’s trying to be heard in a “Hurricane,” to name one new song.
Storms are a recurring theme. Another new track, the aptly disorienting “Confusion,” borrows from the psychedelic soul of the Temptations’ later period. It was written, like many of Bradley’s songs, out of a Menahan jam. “Tom [Brenneck, guitarist] started playing it and it hit me,” says Bradley. “It came out naturally.”
Bradley’s tough-luck story – involving a lifetime of odd jobs, occasional homelessness and the murder of his brother – is told in the documentary Charles Bradley: Soul of America. It premieres on April 10 on EPIX after a well-received SXSW debut last year.
Filmmaker Poull Brien says he first encountered Bradley’s music when a buddy was catching him up on recent neo-soul acts such as Sharon Jones and Ale Blacc. “I used to be an old soul and funk DJ,” Brien says. The song “The World (Is Going Up in Flames),” which would become the lead track of Bradley’s debut album, “totally dialed me in,” and soon he was offering to make a video for Daptone free of charge.
Read more: RollingStone
