R.I.P. Charles Bradley

I first heard of the late Charles Bradley, the “Screaming Eagle of Soul” in 2015. By then, he had gained public notoriety, partly through the documentary Soul of America, as a member of Daptone Records who released his debut album at the shocking age of sixty-two. His remarkable story has been covered in detail elsewhere–here and here, to start–but now, with his passing due to cancer on Saturday, I just wanted to share the brief story of when I first heard his music.

I had listened to Bradley’s songs on occasion via Spotify’s suggested artists (perhaps because I was listening to a lot of his Daptone Records peer Sharon Jones, who died last year). When I first delved into his listings, it was a matter of due diligence; he’d be playing live the next day in southeast D.C., and I hadn’t decided whether it was worth attending.

But in the grander picture, it was a sad and incredibly weird time for me. I’d been getting my ass beat at a job I didn’t care for; I’d lost control of my own schedule, such that I was privy to weather fluctuations and weird aircraft regulations more than any human should be, such that I went on the Charles Bradley Soundcloud binge in the Cincinnati airport after my return flight to D.C. had been inexplicably cancelled. I’d punted and procrastinated on my reading and writing, which I believed to be my path out. I’d recently struck out horribly with a girl, but at the time, I was stuck in the middle ground where I hadn’t yet confirmed I’d struck out with her despite harboring the creeping sensation that I had. I had worn the rest of my life down to a nub, neglecting the ancillary items to such a degree that my car would sit in the garage for six months with a failing battery, my now-frayed phone charger incapable of the one job it had.

So when I began listening to Charles Bradley (on my laptop), I was in a particularly charged state of mind. What happened, though, was a shift–a leavening of my modest, inconsequential complaints. Bradley’s voice, which everyone almost rotely compares to James Brown’s, has an impossible quality of simultaneous mournfulness and hope. It makes the listener feel overwhelmed with Bradley’s lived, almost incomparably pained experience: At once, you become small and awed, crushed and liberated and inspired.

I learned Bradley’s story, how he ran from home and bounced around the country, working odd jobs at every stop. He even spent time in my hometown of Bar Harbor, Maine, during a stint with the Job Corps. He’d stare at Cadillac Mountain, the tallest of the peaks there, pondering how to make a career as a musician. I had spent seventeen years there, with the mountain occasionally fogged out but never too far from view; I’d never done that. I’d never bothered. I thought things would be easy because they had been. I’d never thought that a career could take four-and-a-half decades to build.

When I got home that evening, I was–in hindsight–a bit different. More impatient, more determined. I ordered a new phone charger. I texted the girl to see if she was free that weekend, but I didn’t get a response. Nevertheless, the next day, I went to Southeast D.C. on my own, for the sole purpose of seeing Bradley with the Menahan Street Band in-person. When his next (and final) album Changes came out, on April Fool’s Day 2016, I was set to start a new job as a writer in just a couple weeks.

I listened to those eleven songs in order, in full, in a very different set of circumstances. They still hit the same way, with a weight impossible to ignore.