Soul music flows from Lee Fields as freely and generously as the love of God. He's been doing it since the sixties., when I was a teenager in North Carolina, soaked in sweat on the stages of the juke joints, with crumpled bills falling at his feet. And keep doing it now, when this living legend is around seventy, inaugurating the most successful and fruitful period of his career.
Like any living legend worth its salt, Fields has known despair, oblivion and defeat. Although today he tours stages around the world, and although he helped other soul legends like Sharon Jones (Who was your backup singer?) y Charles Bradley (who he took on his first tour) to take your first steps, It didn't always occupy that place.. There were years—known as “the 1980s”—when Fields was on the verge of giving up.. His current success has, therefore, a bittersweet nuance: his dear friends Bradley and Jones have passed away, leaving him the task of surviving them and carrying forward their legacy.
With all these years and all this life behind him, a kind of divine wisdom arrives, and Fields has it in abundance. “I am a sinner, like everyone else”, he says gravely. He is not a “self-righteous guy.”, duck. Simply believe in people's ability to love and be loved., and understand that music is the divine bridge to those places. “We must be aware at all times of what is good and what is bad”, tells me. “Once we lose that awareness, We are deceived.” This vision of the world, both severe and affectionate, firm and welcoming, finds its fullest expression in It Rains Love, his latest and perhaps most sincere album to date.
It Rains Love It is music of infinite love, of infinite pain, of kindness and wisdom that reverberate, of decades and lives of suffering transformed into goodness. It's the warmth of an outstretched hand that grabs yours. His lyrics shine with a supernatural purity that he has never allowed himself to touch before.. He has never been a James Brown-style dictator, but his usual band, The Expressions, gave him absolute freedom to do whatever he wanted. And he ended up putting more of himself—of his eloquent and quirky personality—into his music than he had ever dared.. As it says in the titles of the last two songs on the album, “God Is Real” y “Love Is The Answer”. Together, could sum up everything Fields has been trying to say since he began his recording career. Es, no more no less, his vision of the human condition.
The love of God, whatever form the divine mystery takes, radiates from the dank, joyfully laid-back arrangements of The Expressions. Para Lee Fields, born Elmer, Jesus is Buddha is the Torah is the Bible is the love we feel for our families. “I am of Christian faith, But I believe that God is in everything.", dice. “I believe in any religion that tells you to do the right thing.” His music covers the same, without ever losing your compass in the soul: The deep echoes of the drums on “God Is Real” hint at the dub.
Only a true survivor could have created It Rains Love, and Fields is nothing more than that. He has been married to the same woman 50 years. Lives in the same house. He is a man of deep and unwavering faith., and part of its foundations date back to the eighties, when his career seemed to be over. I had never achieved fame, and the concerts were scarce. It was time, thought. There would be no more Lee Fields. “I thought I was finished”, says of that time when the soul revolution of the previous decade seemed to recede under the brilliant assault of new synthesized equipment and the rigid programming of early drum machines. “I had almost literally given up.”
made other plans: worked in real estate. I was planning to open a restaurant. He settled into his role, not like Lee Fields, but like Elmer, the reliable and constant family man who supported his wild alter ego on stage. “My wife stopped me, amigo, told me: ‘Stick with what you know.’”
Today he is at the forefront of the soul renaissance, a vibrant and constantly growing corner that has fed the impoverished waters of 21st century pop music with virtues it lacked.: a sense of timelessness, of the eternal, of a tradition that goes back generations. Lee Fields' music has been cut and sampled by hip hop artists as diverse as J. Cole and Travis Scott. Fields laughs when he remembers that Cole thought the sample It came from a song “from yesteryear”. It wasn't like that, strictly speaking: Cole sampleó “My World Is Empty Without You” y “Ladies”, both from his album My World, published in 2009. But, in a deeper sense, I was right. Fields' music does not belong to the "now"; belongs to eternity. has been testifying, in the purest sense of the word, since Otis Redding was alive. It's living history.
