Charles Bradley is an anomaly. His international breakthrough came in his ’60s when Daptone Records co-founder Gabriel Roth discovered him giving it his all as a James Brown impersonator. With Roth’s help, he was given the chance to release the pain that lay inside his soul, and convert it into something resoundingly positive to share with the world. Separated from his mother when he was just eight months old, Bradley knows heartache all too well. He has endured homelessness, witnessed the devastating murder of his brother and fought tooth and nail with life threatening health problems. It’s been a long and harrowing road to success for Bradley, but standing beside him through it all was one powerful accomplice – music.
“I tell you, music helped me get through this,” Bradley says. “Back in the day, I couldn’t express what was on my mind. I was afraid to say what was on me; that I’m going to get punished or something was going to happen to me. So the only way I could really express myself was music.”
On his LPs, 2011’s No Time For Dreaming and 2013’s Victim of Love, the New York-based soul singer draws on his lifetime of rugged experiences and lets them out through song. It’s a necessary catharsis that has helped heal severe emotional wounds. For Bradley, returning to darker moments in his life is the only way he can find release from them.
“The best time I can write music is when I’m hurt. I need to put it on tape and just let it out,” he says. “If you don’t catch it this time, it ain’t going to come out that same way the next time. So when I hear it I say, ‘Gimme the mic real fast so I can spit it out’. That’s when my best music comes out of me. My ears have to love it, and once my ears love it, the vocals inside of me come out right with it.”
To hear Charles Bradley’s music is to hear his anguish. To see him throw his arms open and hug the audience is to share his triumph. He talks about music and life with uninhibited honesty that shows he’s tightly attuned to the visceral elements of human experience. He is the epitome of soul music – not just because of his stylistic mastery of the genre, but because he genuinely uses music to connect with the soul.
“Hurt. Pain. Joy. Those are the deepest thoughts of life,” he says. “When you do something live, you never know what’s going to come. Once my spirit gets opened, I sometimes be on the stage and say, ‘Dawg, I did that?’ The spirit is the life inside of all of us. We have a life spirit inside of us, and we don’t even know what that spirit gonna give us. I think that comes from a gift of life – by being honest to who you are.”
The spirit that Bradley talks of may be intangible, but his sincere belief in a higher connection radiates through everything he does. It’s this unwavering belief that keeps him present in every performance he gives, and will continue to do so until his last breath.
“Honestly, look right into their face and you can see the hurt,” says Bradley on his audience. “I can see the hurt that I went through. That’s why I don’t like to be a performer just to entertain the women. I want to entertain the women, the men, whoever got a soul out there looking for honesty and wanting to be loved – who want to hear some true music – that’swhat I’m for. I’m not singing to the agenda, I’m singing to the soul of the peoples. That’s what I’m about. I’m here to sing and perform for you, to give you a feeling and memory that I hope you can always remember – I give you my heart and my soul.”
And so we return to the first proposition: Charles Bradley is an anomaly. In a world where musical acts are engineered for success, he arrives without pretence – fully formed and loaded with primal emotion. He has experienced heartache, loss and pain. But throughout his life and career he’s remained fiercely resilient, and benevolently positive.
“If you can find love inside you in your soul and heart, and find lyrics to put it in your mouth to sing it to the world, the world is going to hear what you’re saying. They’re going to feel what you’re saying is real. That’s where I got my late start at, because I was always in front of people trying to keep me hidden under them. People will try to get in front of me. They’ll try to block me. But my mum always says, ‘This world is not your home, son’. She told me the day before she died, she said, ‘Son I can say it now: you’ve been a good child’. She said, ‘If I could have had all my kids like you, I would have had ten of them’. This is what makes music in you. When you’ve got that honesty in you, that’s what makes music.”
BY JAMES DI FABRIZIO
