Supported by
By Andy Beta
It’s 1992, and an Eddie Chacón with long hair, suspenders and giant earrings, smiled and posed alongside Charles Pettigrew in the video “Would I Lie to You?” The duo sang in turn in silky falsetto – the memorable chorus of the pop-soul song is “Look me in the eye, don’t you see they’re wide open? / I’d lie to you, honey, would I lie to you?” ” – and occasionally Chacón would release a “Hoo!” Triumphant and on the rise.
The track was a success, but the fame of Charles and Eddie fleeting. Chacón eventually spent three decades moving away from the music industry.
“I used to say to my wife, “If I ever record a record again, I need to make an album that’s my age to do,” Chacon said in a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles. Now 56, with short black hair and salt and pepper, he returns this week with “Pleasure, Joy and Happiness”, an album produced with John Carroll Kirby, a composer and musician who has worked with a new generation of soul-sized musicians: Frank Ocean, Solange, Blood Orange and Harry Styles.
Chacón’s years away from music have been filled with other artistic activities, however songwriting has been a component of his life since he was 12 years old, a Latin game rock with two other teenagers in his Castro Valley community in Northern California. His bandmates, Mike Bordin and Cliff Burton, shaped Faith No More and Metallica. At the age of 20, Chacón worked as a composer of CBS Songs, but deleted his own music. A Columbia album placed on the shelves and a 2 Live Crew Luther Campbell album fell through the cracks. Demonstrations conducted with production duo The Dust Brothers, in a call to thank for the hits with Tone-Loc, Young M.C. and the Beastie Boys, have not noticed their release.
Josh Deutsch, a music director who was then a young A-R representative at the Capitol, recalled Chacón’s talents. “Eddie’s full, false voice had something about Al Green,” he said in an email interview. “And with jet black hair up to the middle of his back, he presented himself as a general star. Based on the Dust Brothers demonstration, he signed an agreement with Chacon in 1990.
Then came here a twist of New York’s exclusive destiny: one day, Chacón met Pettigrew, a singer from Philadelphia, on the C train. One of them sported a vinyl copy of Marvin Gaye’s 1972 soundtrack, “Trouble Man”, although Chacón doesn’t forget who. They had both signed with Deutsch, but they still didn’t know. And from this meeting of possibilities a musical association was born; they even wrote a song about it, “N.Y.C. (Can you this city)?”
“We wrote songs at breakneck speed: at the back of taxis, lies on the apartment floor, in bars above towels,” Chacón said.
Their first album, “Duophonic”, released in 1992 at a time when artists such as Lenny Kravitz, Terence Trent D’Arthrough and Brand New Heavies combined soul music with hip-hop, rock and swing New Jack, a sound that was later classified as “neo-soul”. Without delay, they reached gold with “Would I Lie to You?”, a stimulating piece that works through drums, crisp guitars and their own mellow harmonies.
It beat the Top 10 in the United States, but rose to the most sensitive of British ratings and in 17 other countries. Tracking singles scratched the back of the Top 40, but Charles and Eddie were wonders. (The song has been a fan for 3 decades, with over 40 million perspectives on YouTube. EDM D.J. David Guetta re-recorded it in 2016).
In 1997, the label stopped taking the duo’s calls and separated amicably. Pettigrew toured with Tom Tom Club before succumbing to cancer in 2001. In the months leading up to his death, “we were back on the phone to communicate every day,” Chacón said. “Even to make some other record. He never told me he had cancer.
After his breakup, “I lost enough,” he added. “I had a real identity crisis after the end. I questioned my own validity as an artist. Chacon turned to his paintings as a photographer and artistic director: “I left my recording studio one day and didn’t turn it on for 10 years. “
Kirby, the producer, said he “photographed Eddie as this guy hunting in his Spanish cottage in Los Feliz, waiting for the right time to come back and make his statement.” A mutual friend reported that the two met in 2018 and there was a quick report. “It’s very Los Angeles sitting in people’s cars,” Kirby said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “The first day we met, we sat in his car for two hours listening to music and discussing ideas.”
“Pleasure, Joy and Happiness” combines Kirthrough’s interest in discreet and contemplative music with Chacón’s vintage soul style. The album avoids the pitfalls of rewinding or reliving a past era, exploring the rarely glimpsed aspect of the hobthrough and pain themes of this genre, sung through a bruised but wiser man.
“Eddie was a game to reflect on his life instead of making sexy and fun music to put on at a party,” Kirby said. “I had overcome everything. He did everything. He’s been fucked, but he’s zen about it. Eddie’s strengths came here in an original and fair way.”
Chacon said he was interested in giving the attendees an escape. “It was a moment when I felt a sensory overload of social media and news,” he said. “I wanted to make a fresh, fresh and very meditative record. A record that other people would pay attention to and that would recharge other people’s batteries.”
Kirby sees a connection between existing B-star stars such as Ocean and Solange and a senior stadist like Chacon. “These 3 artists are very smart to have too many rules,” he said. He had Chacon’s voices recorded as he had told Solange in “By the Time I Get Home”: “In a Shure SM58 in the room, without stand, without headphones, right there,” Kirby explained. “Add a little more immediacy.”
For Chacón, it is an opportunity to record some of his hard-earned wisdom. The bachelor “My mind is crazy” transforms the worn-out theme of a distressed brain into an exploration of fashionable neuroses. In the misty ballad “Hurt,” he revisited a choir that had followed him for more than a decade: “You were hurting yourself.”
“There are a handful of things in this life that have replaced the very essence of who you are, and pain is a component of it,” he said of the bitter dating at the root of the song. “I express the pain a lot.”
Despite all the new aesthetics and misty atmosphere of the album, Deutsch still listens to the same artist who first loved it three decades ago. “The album now has a much more mature singer,” he says. “But Eddie has been an old soul: patient, determined and self-aware.
Advertising