What I am Listening To - Curtis Harding- If Words Were Flowers

One of my favorite things each year is putting together a list of my favorite 20 albums of that year. I’m probably close to having done this for 20 years. It is of course impossible to hear every album released in a year. Though with the current environment, I suppose one could get close. To a certain extent, the “old ways” are the best. One needs albums to marinate sometimes, and at some point, the task of listening to as many albums as possible becomes a full time unenjoyable job. Nor would I ever take an approach that I would only listen to “new” music so that means a favorite album of Q1, 2022 is an album that came out in 2021 but missed my ears in 2021. I am not sure how I missed Curtis Harding. It seems criminal. Yet even after three albums, he’s not quite a household name. I loved Harding on first listen. He reminds me of the 70s soul records that have become a recent soundtrack of mine with artists like Curtis Mayfield, Al Green and Bobby Womack, among many others. The so called neo-soul genre has thrived though it often gets played as an affectation (Cee Lo Green, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, the Heavy, Aloe Blacc, Anthony Hamilton, Baba Ali, Nathaniel Ratliff and so on) But listening to Harding, I don’t feel that it’s playing for a joke (though the video for “Can’t Hide It” has those vibes). A look at Harding’s history is well, unexpected. He’s recorded for Burger and Anti records- labels most well known for bratty punks. The musicians he has worked and crossed paths with are so varied - Cee Lo, OutKast, the Growlers, Mastadon, the Black Lips, the Oh Sees, and Danger Mouse I bring this up because it is important to note that we look at music legends from a long distance to present day lens, and we do give them modern day attributes. We view Johnny Cash via a punk rock and Rick Rubin scope to a point where his image assumes a personality indistinguishable from a hard drinking, brawling, flipping the bird Mike Ness character or a gothic bible-quoting Nick Cave character. So it is with classic soul which these days brings to mind, Tarantino soundtracks and driving rap samples. While I would suggest both Marvin Gaye and Mr Harding have made timeless music, I would also suggest that Harding has the benefit that no circa-1971 soul singer would have - extensive knowledge of the discographies of Parliament-Funkadelic, Gil Scot-Heron and Outkast. Anyway, this is the first “new” artist that I have been this passionate about in awhile.