Until now, it's been easy to separate Aaron Neville's career into two separate but equal strains: the funky stuff he's favored when working with his esteemed band of brothers, and the angelic balladry you associate with him when he's punching his own time card as a solo artist. Casual fans might admit they don't know much -- to borrow a phrase -- about Neville's musical center, but they've perceived a certain split in his career. An education is about to be provided, then, in the form of Apache, a solo album that makes the case for Aaron Neville as the most holistic of soul men. Its hard R&B side matches anything the Neville Brothers ever recorded for true grit, while still allowing plenty of space for a singer who's arguably the most distinctive vocal stylist on the planet to tell it like it is.
Apache also reflects Neville's social and spiritual concerns, marking only the second time in his 56-year recording career that he's co-written nearly an entire album's worth of material. The words are straight out of a poetry journal he began keeping in the 1970s, which more recently migrated to his iPhone. The music was written and produced by a pair of collaborators well known to enthusiasts of the retro-soul scene, Eric Krasno (guitarist for the groups Soulive and Rustic) and Dave Gutter (frontman for the Rustic Overtones). Together, they've come up with a modern/revivalist marvel harking back to a golden age that produced classics like Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On (which Neville just happens to reference in the eco-conscious "Fragile World").
"I call it The Other Side of Aaron," says the 75-year-old legend, offering an alternative album title, "because people know me from doing the ballads and New Orleans stuff. They're getting another feel of Aaron" -- a record that touches on the mystic gumbo of "Yellow Moon" and sheer sweetness of "Everybody Plays the Fool" while diverging toward a third path we've never quite heard from Neville in the studio. And as much as he wants to surprise long-time fans with it, he says he's "hoping that a lot of other people that might not even know me get turned on to it." Which is far from unimaginable: It's easy to picture a 20-year-old listening to the tracks that feature the Dap-King horns and wondering who this new guy is who's following in the tradition of Amy Winehouse.
Apache also reflects Neville's social and spiritual concerns, marking only the second time in his 56-year recording career that he's co-written nearly an entire album's worth of material. The words are straight out of a poetry journal he began keeping in the 1970s, which more recently migrated to his iPhone. The music was written and produced by a pair of collaborators well known to enthusiasts of the retro-soul scene, Eric Krasno (guitarist for the groups Soulive and Rustic) and Dave Gutter (frontman for the Rustic Overtones). Together, they've come up with a modern/revivalist marvel harking back to a golden age that produced classics like Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On (which Neville just happens to reference in the eco-conscious "Fragile World").
"I call it The Other Side of Aaron," says the 75-year-old legend, offering an alternative album title, "because people know me from doing the ballads and New Orleans stuff. They're getting another feel of Aaron" -- a record that touches on the mystic gumbo of "Yellow Moon" and sheer sweetness of "Everybody Plays the Fool" while diverging toward a third path we've never quite heard from Neville in the studio. And as much as he wants to surprise long-time fans with it, he says he's "hoping that a lot of other people that might not even know me get turned on to it." Which is far from unimaginable: It's easy to picture a 20-year-old listening to the tracks that feature the Dap-King horns and wondering who this new guy is who's following in the tradition of Amy Winehouse.
Aaron Neville
Pop
Until now, it's been easy to separate Aaron Neville's career into two separate but equal strains: the funky stuff he's favored when working with his esteemed band of brothers, and the angelic balladry you associate with him when he's punching his own time card as a solo artist. Casual fans might admit they don't know much - to borrow a phrase - about Neville's musical center, but they've perceived a certain split in his career. An education is about to be provided, then, in the form of Apache, a solo album that makes the case for Aaron Neville as the most holistic of soul men. Its hard R&B side matches anything the Neville Brothers ever recorded for true grit, while still allowing plenty of space for a singer who's arguably the most distinctive vocal stylist on the planet to tell it like it is.
Apache also reflects Neville's social and spiritual concerns, marking only the second time in his 56-year recording career that he's co-written nearly an entire album's worth of material. The words are straight out of a poetry journal he began keeping in the 1970s, which more recently migrated to his iPhone. The music was written and produced by a pair of collaborators well known to enthusiasts of the retro-soul scene, Eric Krasno (guitarist for the groups Soulive and Rustic) and Dave Gutter (frontman for the Rustic Overtones). Together, they've come up with a modern/revivalist marvel harking back to a golden age that produced classics like Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On (which Neville just happens to reference in the eco-conscious "Fragile World").
"I call it The Other Side of Aaron," says the 75-year-old legend, offering an alternative album title, "because people know me from doing the ballads and New Orleans stuff. They're getting another feel of Aaron" -- a record that touches on the mystic gumbo of "Yellow Moon" and sheer sweetness of "Everybody Plays the Fool" while diverging toward a third path we've never quite heard from Neville in the studio. And as much as he wants to surprise long-time fans with it, he says he's "hoping that a lot of other people that might not even know me get turned on to it." Which is far from unimaginable: It's easy to picture a 20-year-old listening to the tracks that feature the Dap-King horns and wondering who this new guy is who's following in the tradition of Amy Winehouse.
If the final musical aesthetic of Apache is something of a hybrid, well, Neville knows all about hybrids. He is one, even at the core of his racial identity... which is where the title of the album comes in.
"We have Native American blood in us," Neville explains. "My great-grandmother came from the island of Martinique, and they settled down in Convent, Louisiana, and they hooked up with some of the Native Americans back there -- so we are African, Native American, and whatever else. Sometimes I say that with all the different colors we have going, we're Heinz 57 -- you know, the 57 varieties," he laughs. "I have a picture of my grandmother right next to a picture of Geronimo, and they look like they could be sister and brother. When I was in school days, if they were doing a Thanksgiving play, they would always pick me to be the Native American in the play, because of my high cheekbones and all. When I was in my late teens, in the summer I'd be out front and my skin color would turn red, and I used to wear my hair straight down with a headband around it. So my uncle started calling me Apache Red, and then I just shortened it to Apache."
If there's anywhere that Neville has embraced being a crossbreed, as it were, it's in his musical impulses. That comes out of his childhood, where he became immersed in all the New Orleans and R&B culture you'd expect -- including Sam Cooke, possibly his foremost vocal role model -- and a few things you wouldn't.
Neville no longer lives in New Orleans, which may baffle some of those who think of him as the city's foremost musical ambassador, or at least tied with his late friend Allen Toussaint for that honor. He's a New Yorker now -- "from the Big Easy to the Big Apple," as he puts it. "This is where my heart is right now." He loves the transition he's making to farm life with his wife of five years, Sarah, who inspired two songs on the new album, "Orchid in the Storm" and (obviously) "Sarah Ann." But the transitions of the last dozen years have hardly been seamless or painless. And, yes, Hurricane Katrina was a turning point.
"I had been with my wife Joel since I was 16 years old, and I buried her on our 40th wedding anniversary, almost 10 years ago," he says. When the hurricane was approaching, he instructed Joel to pack up three days' worth of clothing and meet him in Memphis, figuring they'd come right back. On the day they expected to return, the floods hit, and they never did return to their home. "We were lucky enough to have insurance and be able to sell it, but I didn't even want anything out of it. I was bitter," he admits. "I was mad. I didn't know at who. But it was just from seeing all those people that had lost their lives, while we only lost material stuff." He still has family to visit in New Orleans, including two brothers, three kids, and a slew of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But, prefiguring the change that he would soon be making in his professional career, he decided it was time for a geographical change of pace, moving to Nashville with Joel until her 2007 passing.
He didn't directly write about those experiences in Apache, but you can hear his thoughts about how nature's calamities are reflecting the way of the world in one of the new songs, "Fragile World." "You look at the news, and it give you the blues," he says. "Hurricane Katrina was bad, but you look around the world and so many disasters going on everywhere. It looks like the earth is saying, 'Man, you've been misusing me all these years, and I'm fighting back now. I'm pissed at you.'"
Sarah is not the only object of Neville's affection on Apache. There is God himself, in "Heaven." Neville also gave thanks for his blessings in a prayer of thanksgiving he posted to Instagram and other social media last January on the occasion of a milestone birthday. The prayer was accompanied by a photo of the famously buff singer lifting weights in the gym, which led one website to lead with the headline, "Aaron Neville is 75... and Fine!" Neville was decades ahead of the curve in taking care of himself, but...
"I've been working out all my life, off and on, so I was taking care of myself in some aspects. In some aspects I wasn't. I went through changes until I was about 40, really," he says, alluding to the fact that even a fitness buff can struggle with substance abuse problems. "It was what life was putting on me at the time, and how I accepted it. My mother turned me on to St. Jude, saint of the impossible. I used to go to this place called the Santa Ana shrine, where you go up the steps on your knees and you say a prayer on each step. I went there a bunch of times, and each time I went, my prayer was answered. So people can say what they want, but that's my belief. If I didn't have faith, I wouldn't be here. Faith brought me through adversity after adversity. I remember sitting in the gutter one day, down in the dump -- Joel and I had split up for a while -- and I started singing 'Ave Maria' to myself, even though I didn't even know the words. And it raised me up out of that gutter. Another night in New York City, I remember needing prayers, and I was sitting by a piano at 3 or 4 in the morning and started singing [a gospel song by] Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, and it did the same thing... There are so many times when God saved me and I didn't even have an idea that he was looking out for me."
If Neville's voice had that effect on himself at key moments in his life, it's incalculable how it affects others. "I've had people tell me different things, like this lady who told me they had a 5-year-old little boy who was autistic, and they had to keep him in a padded room -- and the only thing that would calm him down is if they put a headset on him with my voice. She gave me chills when she said that. All I could say is, it's the God in me touching the God in him. I can't take responsibility. I'm just a singer, you know. And I'm trying to make the tenderest notes that could heal, in some way. I used to say that I wish I could make a note so pure that it could cure cancer."
It may not actually replace a doctor's care, but Apache will provide the elixir for just what ails a lot of music fans, whether it's offering a contemporary spiritual as deeply felt and divine as "Heaven" or just providing the cure for a serious funk deficiency. With a voice and spirit that are that much of a salve, the artist whose nickname was "Apache Red" really is a one-man musical Red Cross.
Apache also reflects Neville's social and spiritual concerns, marking only the second time in his 56-year recording career that he's co-written nearly an entire album's worth of material. The words are straight out of a poetry journal he began keeping in the 1970s, which more recently migrated to his iPhone. The music was written and produced by a pair of collaborators well known to enthusiasts of the retro-soul scene, Eric Krasno (guitarist for the groups Soulive and Rustic) and Dave Gutter (frontman for the Rustic Overtones). Together, they've come up with a modern/revivalist marvel harking back to a golden age that produced classics like Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On (which Neville just happens to reference in the eco-conscious "Fragile World").
"I call it The Other Side of Aaron," says the 75-year-old legend, offering an alternative album title, "because people know me from doing the ballads and New Orleans stuff. They're getting another feel of Aaron" -- a record that touches on the mystic gumbo of "Yellow Moon" and sheer sweetness of "Everybody Plays the Fool" while diverging toward a third path we've never quite heard from Neville in the studio. And as much as he wants to surprise long-time fans with it, he says he's "hoping that a lot of other people that might not even know me get turned on to it." Which is far from unimaginable: It's easy to picture a 20-year-old listening to the tracks that feature the Dap-King horns and wondering who this new guy is who's following in the tradition of Amy Winehouse.
If the final musical aesthetic of Apache is something of a hybrid, well, Neville knows all about hybrids. He is one, even at the core of his racial identity... which is where the title of the album comes in.
"We have Native American blood in us," Neville explains. "My great-grandmother came from the island of Martinique, and they settled down in Convent, Louisiana, and they hooked up with some of the Native Americans back there -- so we are African, Native American, and whatever else. Sometimes I say that with all the different colors we have going, we're Heinz 57 -- you know, the 57 varieties," he laughs. "I have a picture of my grandmother right next to a picture of Geronimo, and they look like they could be sister and brother. When I was in school days, if they were doing a Thanksgiving play, they would always pick me to be the Native American in the play, because of my high cheekbones and all. When I was in my late teens, in the summer I'd be out front and my skin color would turn red, and I used to wear my hair straight down with a headband around it. So my uncle started calling me Apache Red, and then I just shortened it to Apache."
If there's anywhere that Neville has embraced being a crossbreed, as it were, it's in his musical impulses. That comes out of his childhood, where he became immersed in all the New Orleans and R&B culture you'd expect -- including Sam Cooke, possibly his foremost vocal role model -- and a few things you wouldn't.
Neville no longer lives in New Orleans, which may baffle some of those who think of him as the city's foremost musical ambassador, or at least tied with his late friend Allen Toussaint for that honor. He's a New Yorker now -- "from the Big Easy to the Big Apple," as he puts it. "This is where my heart is right now." He loves the transition he's making to farm life with his wife of five years, Sarah, who inspired two songs on the new album, "Orchid in the Storm" and (obviously) "Sarah Ann." But the transitions of the last dozen years have hardly been seamless or painless. And, yes, Hurricane Katrina was a turning point.
"I had been with my wife Joel since I was 16 years old, and I buried her on our 40th wedding anniversary, almost 10 years ago," he says. When the hurricane was approaching, he instructed Joel to pack up three days' worth of clothing and meet him in Memphis, figuring they'd come right back. On the day they expected to return, the floods hit, and they never did return to their home. "We were lucky enough to have insurance and be able to sell it, but I didn't even want anything out of it. I was bitter," he admits. "I was mad. I didn't know at who. But it was just from seeing all those people that had lost their lives, while we only lost material stuff." He still has family to visit in New Orleans, including two brothers, three kids, and a slew of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But, prefiguring the change that he would soon be making in his professional career, he decided it was time for a geographical change of pace, moving to Nashville with Joel until her 2007 passing.
He didn't directly write about those experiences in Apache, but you can hear his thoughts about how nature's calamities are reflecting the way of the world in one of the new songs, "Fragile World." "You look at the news, and it give you the blues," he says. "Hurricane Katrina was bad, but you look around the world and so many disasters going on everywhere. It looks like the earth is saying, 'Man, you've been misusing me all these years, and I'm fighting back now. I'm pissed at you.'"
Sarah is not the only object of Neville's affection on Apache. There is God himself, in "Heaven." Neville also gave thanks for his blessings in a prayer of thanksgiving he posted to Instagram and other social media last January on the occasion of a milestone birthday. The prayer was accompanied by a photo of the famously buff singer lifting weights in the gym, which led one website to lead with the headline, "Aaron Neville is 75... and Fine!" Neville was decades ahead of the curve in taking care of himself, but...
"I've been working out all my life, off and on, so I was taking care of myself in some aspects. In some aspects I wasn't. I went through changes until I was about 40, really," he says, alluding to the fact that even a fitness buff can struggle with substance abuse problems. "It was what life was putting on me at the time, and how I accepted it. My mother turned me on to St. Jude, saint of the impossible. I used to go to this place called the Santa Ana shrine, where you go up the steps on your knees and you say a prayer on each step. I went there a bunch of times, and each time I went, my prayer was answered. So people can say what they want, but that's my belief. If I didn't have faith, I wouldn't be here. Faith brought me through adversity after adversity. I remember sitting in the gutter one day, down in the dump -- Joel and I had split up for a while -- and I started singing 'Ave Maria' to myself, even though I didn't even know the words. And it raised me up out of that gutter. Another night in New York City, I remember needing prayers, and I was sitting by a piano at 3 or 4 in the morning and started singing [a gospel song by] Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, and it did the same thing... There are so many times when God saved me and I didn't even have an idea that he was looking out for me."
If Neville's voice had that effect on himself at key moments in his life, it's incalculable how it affects others. "I've had people tell me different things, like this lady who told me they had a 5-year-old little boy who was autistic, and they had to keep him in a padded room -- and the only thing that would calm him down is if they put a headset on him with my voice. She gave me chills when she said that. All I could say is, it's the God in me touching the God in him. I can't take responsibility. I'm just a singer, you know. And I'm trying to make the tenderest notes that could heal, in some way. I used to say that I wish I could make a note so pure that it could cure cancer."
It may not actually replace a doctor's care, but Apache will provide the elixir for just what ails a lot of music fans, whether it's offering a contemporary spiritual as deeply felt and divine as "Heaven" or just providing the cure for a serious funk deficiency. With a voice and spirit that are that much of a salve, the artist whose nickname was "Apache Red" really is a one-man musical Red Cross.