I don't know if it's because I grew up in Beverly or my friends, but I listened to a lot of alternative rock music. I loved Incubus, Weezer and Jimmy Eat World. It almost felt segregated because I loved all of those acts over here, but then I also loved R&B and soul music I grew up with.
Absolutely, I grew up listening to soul music. People like Stevie, Aretha, Ray Charles, Michael and Prince. My parents' record collection was all I had when I was a little kid. If it wasn't that, it was something else in their collection.
I love soul music.
Soul music is about longevity and reaching and touching people on a human level - and that's never going to get lost.
I've always been a firm believer that soul music never dies. The artists we still listen to today, years after their music was first heard are mostly soul artists; Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan. We still sing along to all of them with our hearts.
There's a constantly applicable nature to soul music, whereas sometimes pop music can be a periodical.
The one thing about Essex is that there's a lot of people there that are into their soul music. And I'm talking '80s and '70s soul music, that was a big part of my childhood, there was Al Green, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, people like that.
I discovered the same thing Gram Parsons did, that soul music and country music are practically identical. Based off of the same chord structures, and the songs are of heartache and loss. The main connection is they both came up in church.
I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, and a lot of folk music.
Really, what I'm trying to do is make soul music, but I don't even think of it as a genre. It's more of a feeling.
