#I m still in love with you al green full

This is what they are: “I’m Still in Love with You” opens the album with one of Green’s more extraordinary vocals. Why can’t I just accept things as they are?

#I m still in love with you al green full

Or am I just full of uneasy anticipation I’m always expecting my heros to fall so I give them a little push. Green hasn’t reached that point, but there are intimations of its approach here. But at some point, some imperceptible point, getting every rise and fall of his voice just right becomes more important than making all that dynamic movement mean something. You can tell by the squeals and barely-suppressed sighs of the women at the Copa that Green hasn’t lost touch with the emotional content of his songs he keeps it right at the surface and lets it dictate every rise and fall of his voice. This doesn’t mean he’s turned into some kind of supper club stylist - as tasteful and empty as a napkin ring, all form and no content.

No hamburger stands for Al Green, though I guess he figured we could get that greasy stuff elsewhere. The flow is nice but it’s like a lush landscape unfolding outside the car window mile after mile - after a while you begin to look for some landmark, some relief, even if it’s only a tacky hamburger stand. Or am I? I mean I think every cut on the new album is just … great but even after weeks of listening they blur together. So the songs get better (or at least stay within a few points of “Tired of Being Alone” and “Let’s Stay Together,” which would be difficult to surpass) but they also get to be more and more the same.īut like I said, I’m not complaining. Each successive Hi album has intensified and polished Green’s unique approach while it narrowed his range of material. Such are the problems of professionalism. The first flash of lightning is always the most exciting after that they just brighten up the landscape. The technique is brilliant - the incredibly mobile vocals, carrying the songs in an intricate ebb and flow, and especially the rise of the falsetto, thinning out to almost nothing for the delivery of a particularly delicious line - but, ironically, as it’s perfected it seems more obtrusive as a technique and less acceptable as an inspiration. This has been refined with each new album to the point where it becomes, in I’m Still in Love with You, less a style than a stylization. Clearly Green drew from Redding (early Al Green picks up directly from “Dock of the Bay”) and Sam Cooke, but whatever elements of style he might have taken from these and other influences have gradually lost their definition and become instead bits and pieces of the Al Green style. The Copacabana takes its toll.īut I’m not really complaining. Otis was sweet and funky Al Green is, more and more, just sweet. To some extent, it’s a choice between sweetness and funk, and yet these qualities were hardly mutually exclusive in Redding’s work. Whether Al Green is a better singer than Otis Redding is a question that doesn’t interest me, although I prefer Green’s iridescent falsetto to Redding’s rougher, gruffer voice. Is it going too far to say he’s the only truly great male vocalist to come along since Otis Redding? He’s certainly the only black singer since Redding to approach, and in some ways go beyond, Redding’s wide popularity and appeal while developing a style at least as idiosyncratic and exciting (both Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield are taking steps in these same directions but neither have that certain ego-driven Star Quality that would qualify them as top contenders for the long-vacant Otis Redding heavyweight spot). With one hit single after another, all of them turning into a neat stack of gold if not platinum records, Green hardly lost his place on the charts, always seemed to have two or three slots on the jukebox, and now has his second album of the year.Īll this would be of only passing interest if Al Green weren’t so good, so very good. So is there any question that when the music trades rack up their year-end charts for 1972 (and you discover that some group you never even heard of mysteriously became Top New R&B Vocal Group), the number one Male Vocalist will be Al Green? I mean is there any doubt in your mind? 1972 is Al Green’s year and he seemed to snatch it up almost effortlessly.