Van Hunt: The Soul Man Returneth

For some people, it’s quitting smoking. For others, it’s losing weight. Everybody has a New Year’s resolution. Preparing to release his third album, Popular, a slab of Prince—style funk and acoustic soul, Van Hunt discusses his resolutions for 2008.

1. Stay Happy: “I live by my own rules. I’m as happy as you can be. ... It’s not like I have to sell a gazillion records to be satisfied. I don’t have that kind of ego; material things don’t mean that much to me. Success for me is being able to create these albums and have somebody give me money to put them out.”

2. Continue to Create: “There’s always something on the verge of happening inside my head. I can sit down pretty much at will and pull something out. When I wrote the song ‘Bits & Pieces,’ I had just listened to [Franz Liszt’s] ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’ and was like, ‘Wow. I have to do something that 200-and-some-odd years from now will sound as amazing and relevant as this does today,’ so I sat down and wrote something that was like nothing I’d done before.”

3. Keep Being a Good Father: “Parenting is something I’ve grown to enjoy. When my son was born, I thought he needed me more than I wanted him to. But I’ve come to find out my time away from him is my loss. Those moments with him are precious to me.”

4. Control My Temper: “I have a temper I could learn to sit on a little better. It has certainly surfaced in dealing with the business of music. Every day, somebody in the business wants me to change something about who I am so they can have an easier time dealing with me. There are evidently lots of people who would like to see Van Hunt become a little more like everybody else. That’s not going to happen.”

5. Make an All-Time Great Album: “I’m going to make the definitive statement with my fourth album next year. I think Popular is really good, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as good as what I have in my head or what I’m capable of. I’m trying to make an album that when audiophiles listen, when singers listen, when composers listen, when musicians listen, they’ll say, ‘That’s it. No one needs to hear another record. Everybody put your pens and pencils down!’”