Pages tagged “van hunt”

Last Friday, Paste received a notice from Blue Note Records stating that the label would not be releasing Van Hunt's upcoming third album, Popular. After inquiring further, we received the following statement from a publicist at Capitol Records, which, like Blue Note, is owned by EMI Music:

"Van Hunt and EMI/Blue Note Records have mutually agreed to part ways.

Van Hunt would like to sincerely thank EMI for their support over the years. With everyone's commitment and dedication from both Capitol Records and Blue Note Records, Hunt has enjoyed incredible critical acclaim as well as multiple Grammy nominations and a Grammy win. Plans are currently being made for the release of Van Hunt's third CD, 'Popular;' the label to be announced."

Popular was formerly slated to appear in stores on Jan. 15 via Blue Note. Hunt's previous two albums, Van Hunt and On the Jungle Floor, had arrived on Capitol Records. In an interview published in the current issue of Paste, Hunt had this to say on his relationship with the music industry:

“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.”

As Capitol's statement mentions, no new label or release date is set for Popular. Blue Note's official website for the album is still online, however. We'll have more on this story as it develops.

Related links:
VanHunt.com
EMIMusicPub.com
Paste: Van Hunt - Lost Soul

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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!’”

Van Hunt blends funk, rock and R&B into soul panopticon with pop appeal

The slick, monochromatic R&B dominating today’s charts bears little resemblance to the supple, sonically diverse music minted by the Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Contemporary R&B, with its rigidly booming beats, is indistinguishable from rap until the vocals enter. This is partly a matter of pragmatism—after all, the perfunctory rap cameo is a staple of the genre. But the sensitive ladies’ man with a knack for tasteful innuendo is a dying breed; R&B slants ever more toward giddy materialism and belligerent sexuality. Terse, repetitive catchphrases engineered to lodge stubbornly in the brain get more play than languidly unfurling devotional narratives. The “rhythm” aspect is left intact, turbocharged even. But the “blues,” those ragged jolts of pure feeling, are largely suffocated by glossy digital production.

It’s not derogatory to call such music superficial because it’s deliberately superficial, presenting a frictionless surface for the ear to skim across. When done well, the formula can produce incredible pop music—Chris Brown’s “Run It!” swaggered with heartbeat urgency; Ciara’s woozily pulsing “Oh” was immeasurably enhanced by the chameleonic Ludacris’ “picture perfect” cameo; Amerie’s “1 Thing,” with its totally insane drums, sounded more alive than anything on mainstream radio last year. Nevertheless, given modern R&B’s cultivation of the plastic persona, it’s hard to regard it as “soulful” in the traditional sense. “Wanna go platinum? I’m who you should get-get-get-get-get,” Luda boasts on “Oh,” a baldly mercantile sentiment that moves the song even further from anything resembling soul and closer to rap’s sales-as-validation aesthetic. There’s scant leeway for insecurity, for humor, for mixed feelings—in fine, for human specificity.

So while I love a well-crafted, magnificently obvious banger, it’s good to know that a more nuanced take on R&B can still thrive. I posit Van Hunt’s sophomore LP, On the Jungle Floor, as an alternative, not a corrective. Hunt is a pop auteur whose variegated songwriting is reminiscent of visionaries like Prince; equally comfortable opening for Coldplay or Kanye, his music effortlessly spans rock, funk, soul and beyond. If the 12 seconds of studio goofiness that open On the Jungle Floor seem superfluous, they aren’t: they establish the playful spirit that’s writ large throughout the album. The intro rolls into the compressed funk stomp “If I Take You Home (Upon…),” an intricate braid of Rick James ad-libs, splashy handclaps, chuffing drums, fluid bass, silky falsettos, glassy synths and lilting guitars. Despite this teeming abundance, the track never seems crowded; it’s sleek and fleet and turns on dimes. “If I take you home, will you respect me in the morning?” Hunt inquires. “Will you write my name in a song?” But these aren’t rhetorical questions; they’re immediately answered by a raucous chorus of “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” The production is rich yet spare and immediate: when so much R&B sounds assembled by committee, this song conveys a real sense of individuality—of an actual artist in the studio, having a blast.

Hunt embellishes many of his funk and soul tracks with fillips of rock guitar. On the occasions when he turns his musical viewfinder more directly toward the rock idiom, it’s remarkable how seamlessly he’s able to integrate it into the album’s flow. The most brilliant transfiguration comes with his cover of The Stooges’s “No Sense of Crime,” although it’s given something more like full reconstructive surgery than a mere eyelid tuck. “One, two, three, four,” Hunt counts off in a nod to the song’s rock origins, a tribute that’ll be carried on by his clipped, emphatic vocals. But instead of churning guitars, we get a wash of silvery reverb and lusciously off-kilter woodwinds. “Good evening,” he says in a radio-DJ simper, that abiding playfulness rearing its head again, “you may call in and request any song that you want as long as it’s one of mine.”

If “No Sense of Crime” transmutes rock into soul, a reverse alchemy takes place on “At the End of a Slow Dance.” Tumbling drums, a keening synth lead, splintered rock guitars and Hunt’s commanding vocals roll toward a stately power-chord chorus. That such a convincing rock song can fit sensibly alongside staccato funk jams like “Hot Stage Lights” and “Being a Girl” is a testament to Hunt’s versatility and unique songwriting flair. It becomes clear that he’s less interested in genre limitations than in moving the listener emotionally and physically, using the entire vast range of musical idioms at his disposal. By pursuing a vision instead of a style, hopscotching with abandon through the various musics of his lifetime, Hunt delivers an album so rich, deep and all-encompassing that it successfully embodies not just the genre of “soul,” but the ineffable concept itself.

R&B, rock and funk artist Van Hunt will appear on Late Night with Conan O’Brien tonight, June 7, and then on the CBS Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on Wednesday, June 21. During both shows, Hunt will perform his new single, “Being A Girl,” from his album On The Jungle Floor (4 stars in Paste).

For additional tour dates, visit vanhunt.com.

(Photo by Matt Jones)

Singer-songwriter Van Hunt will join Mary J. Blige on tour in June, opening a series of European and U.K. dates for the fellow R&B crooner. In addition to the international tour, Hunt will headline a string of U.S. dates this summer.

Hunt, who will soon wrap up a tour alongside soul singer Anthony Hamilton on May 21, has shared the stage with such acts as Coldplay, Seal, The Roots and Angie Stone.

For complete tour dates, click here.

Strolling into Six Feet Under, a restaurant on Atlanta’s Eastside, Van Hunt looks like a jive-era GHOST summoned from the cemetery across the street.

He’s Fat Albert’s lean and sharp-eyed Rudy, bedecked in a bright green button-down over a logo T-shirt, skintight black-and-white striped slacks and a brown slouch cap. At 27, he has an adolescent’s buttery skin and the wary eyes of a musician too savvy to brag about his record deal. For now, he’s touring; proselytizing his sultry blend of Isley Brothers vocals and Sly Stone grooves.

“I just call it classic American music,” he says, raising his eyebrows and leaning toward the tape recorder so the sparse tufts of his goatish beard brush the mic: “CLASSIC AMERICAN MUSIC.”

Capitol Records calls it “postmodern soul.”

Decades ago, James Baldwin—Hunt’s favorite author—wrote that although in music there is nothing new, musicians risk “ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen.” This is truer for Hunt than for most. Like Baldwin, he’s lived a life of voyeurism within society’s margins; the soul of his songs was there all along in the days and nights of his strange existence.

He is, after all, the son of a pimp. While Hunt was supposedly too young to understand the situation, he periodically visited his father in a duplex where Dad held the lease of both units and “a lot of strange women” lived on the other side of the wall. The arrangement allowed Hunt to do something he really loved: paint. But even in a town as busy as Dayton, Ohio, someone’s bound to notice a whorehouse. Eventually, Van’s dad had to take a straight job in a factory that was so hot in the summer that he faked insanity to escape to an asylum—where Van saw him once more before moving with his mother to Dallas, Texas.

In 1988, as an eighth-grade saxophone player in the Oak Cliff Junior High Symphony, while watching the choir director play Van Halen’s “Jump” on keyboard, Hunt tried it himself. While he was playing, some high-school guys came in to listen and asked him to join their band.

He played keys and some bass, laying down the rhythm for AC/DC and Van Halen cover tunes. And—if the band was feeling progressive—R.E.M.

The infrequent spate of gigs ended shortly after the lead singer contracted pubic lice and the band, including Hunt, advised him to shave absolutely everything. He did, and while the look worked for Bob Geldof in The Wall, it didn’t go on the high-school circuit. Meanwhile, Hunt’s musical personality—nurtured by his mom’s Isley Brothers collection and her boyfriend’s Richard Pryor tapes—was maturing independently from everything going on around him. As the flamboyant ’80s dulled to the grungy drone of the ’90s, the chasm between Hunt and the modern world grew.

He found himself drawn to the liner notes of Sam Cooke’s and Sammy Davis Jr.’s recordings. A photo of Cooke taken at The Copa in 1961 held an almost spiritual allure for him and prompted him to explore the history of R&B, blues, bebop and the Big Band era. He found the same sort of glamour in Ray Charles and—closer to his own era and more passionately—in Prince.

At the same time, Hunt entered Morehouse University, colliding with popular culture in Atlanta’s hip-hop mecca.

“I think the reason hip-hop grew to be so big in the ’90s was that it matched the ’90s,” he says. “The ’90s were all about marketing; it was all about the image and glorifying a product and hip-hop was the perfect music for that.”

He often skipped class, ending his marketing-analyst mother’s willingness to pay his tuition. Abandoning the pre-law track, he dropped out of Morehouse, friendless, as he’s spent most of his life. The problem with friendship, Hunt says, is that he feels as if he’s living in the wrong time, a difficulty that robs him of the commonalities of music and television and fashion.

“I am a songwriter in rebellion against my era,” he says, and in fact, a closer look at Hunt’s post-Morehouse life reveals a modern era not so different from the Great Depression. He worked for a janitorial service for $100 a week before taxes while he lived in the dorms, but after dropping out, he needed more money. He then worked for a uniform service, picking up soiled uniforms and delivering laundered ones to the General Motors plant in the grey-concrete industry-scape of Doraville, Ga.

“These men had worked 40 years banging out cars and there I was going through their pockets looking for change,” he says. “If I found a few dollars, I would eat that day.”

He didn’t last long there. One day while his supervisor was in the bathroom, he wrote her a note and quietly walked out. The note said, “I’m sorry, but I know I’m meant for something better than this.”

Hunt called a small-time producer he knew and did session work until the producer went to prison for selling drugs. But the studio owner’s wife told Dionne Farris, who was looking for a guitarist, about Hunt.

Hunt couldn’t play, but he said he could and quickly learned the song required for the audition. He also sang, which helped, and about a year after quitting the uniform service, Hunt wrote Farris’ half-million-seller “Hopeless.” Soon after, producer/songwriter Dallas Austin vetted him to Capitol Records. Now, Capitol sells about 5,000 units of Van Hunt weekly.

Recently, after appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Hunt was introduced to Prince at Hollywood hangout The Sky Bar. The superstar didn’t seem human—more like an idol kept polished by those who worship him. He told Hunt he’d been hearing good things about him and asked him to stick around so they could talk. A few minutes later, Hunt and the people he was with, including Nikka Costa—who shares Hunt’s manager—were inexplicably hustled out of the club before the conversation could take place.

In the darkness of the car, Hunt told the others what Prince said, but a separate monologue was playing in his head. He had just met the heir to the Ray Charles/Sly Stone legacy and he didn’t feel that a crown had been passed. He didn’t feel chosen. Instead, for the first time, he felt accepted.

“I still feel like I’m living out of my time,” he says. “But it’s only now, with the acceptance of my record that I’m feeling like it’s okay, I’m cool now—I’m affecting my culture.”

Dedicating his record “to the pimps, ho’s and hustlers for whom I strive to provide background music,” Van Hunt might give the impression he’s little more than another streetwise poet penning his thug memoirs, but all such contemporary clichés are dispelled by the timeless mixing of soul, funk, blues, pop and R&B that characterize his debut. Having arranged, produced, and recorded the album himself, he makes a decidedly convincing audition, ranging from the bubbling electro-soul of “Highlights” and the surprisingly lush piano balladry of “What Can I Say” to the slinky funk of “Anything (To Get Your Attention).” To be sure, Van Hunt owes more than a few debts of inspiration, as everyone from Prince to Stevie Wonder and Al Green are evoked by his complex arrangements and silky croon, but he arrives at a point few of his contemporaries have reached, translating inspiration into a timeless yet contemporary amalgam. In an era of R&B posers and white-boy soul wannabes, Van Hunt stands out as the real deal.