FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Eddie Chacon – Sundown
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ONE of the very best albums of last year…
PHOTO CREDIT: Pat Martin
was also one of the most under-reviewed and overlooked. The tremendous Eddie Chacon released the wonderous, beautiful and hugely memorable Sundown. I wanted to alert people to it. I would encourage people to go and buy the album. A mediative and soulful debut for Stones Throw Records – as Rough Trade describe Sundown -, Chacon wrote and produced the album with John Carroll Kirby. Many might know Chacon from the legendary duo, Charles & Eddie. Following on from his magnificent 2020 album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, Sundown is an even finer creation. His work has been acclaimed by the likes of The New York Times and The Guardian. I shall come to a review from The Guardian for Sundown. There is a lot to get through, so I will jump in now. I will get to an interview from FADER in a minute. First, I want to drop in 15 Questions and their interview with Eddie Chacon from last year:
“Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?
I’m generally at ease with the ebb and flow of being creative.
I tend to wait patiently until I have something I need to get out. In the meantime, I’m paying attention to everything. Just waiting to be moved by something I suppose.
For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work?
I need to have fairly concrete subject matter worked out in my mind before I start working on something new.
I use visualization a lot. Not only in my songwriting but across the board. Literally in everything I do.
What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?
I don’t plan when I’ll be creative. I have access to my recording studio 24/7 so I tend to just wander in there when I’ve got something on my mind that I feel strongly about. In my personal life I’m quite the opposite in that I’m a meticulous planner. So on one hand I create when I feel like it but I’m also well aware of the scheduling of things.
I know I need to come prepared when I’m gonna be working at a certain time with a producer or writer. Somehow this method has worked for me ever since I can remember. I’ve always had a fairly easy no stress relationship with the creative process. Suffice to say I quit for nearly 20 years because I’m well aware that I need to work with a great producer and it took that long for me to get the opportunity to work with one. (laughs)
I’ve always had a great ability to delay gratification.
Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?
I don’t prepare. I have meticulously built my studio so that nothing gets in the way of my creative process.
I think I don’t prepare because the significance of that somehow freaks me out.
Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?
I don’t really have a ritual in this regard. I do have this thing about my creative space being clean and minimal with no chaos. Maybe that is my ritual.
What do you start with?
I try to be mindful of my stress level. I’m not creative when I’m stressed so I do things that make me feel open and relaxed.
How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?
I usually don’t start unless I’ve got a line or title that I feel strongly about.
When do the lyrics enter the picture?
Lyrics are the first order of business for me. Not a finished lyric but a strong sense of knowing what I’m writing about.
Having said this, much of my work is stream of consciousness. I guess it’s just free styling really. Where do they come from? They occur to me naturally once I feel strongly about something. I’m not saying
I have to understand the subject matter. In fact, much of my work is about the sadness, confusion, loss and suffering that comes my not understanding something. I think this is where a lot of my best material comes from.
Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?
Both.
What makes lyrics good in your opinion?
Subject matter that sheds some much needed light on something or communicates that we’re not alone. I try to give the listener a door to their own feelings or sometimes I’m searching for a door to my own feelings.
What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?
All of the above.
Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?
Some songs happen in a few minutes and some I work on for a week. Some are ideas I’ve tossed around in my head for years.
Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control over the process or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?
If I’m well prepared. Meaning my thoughts are sorted in my mind. Some of the songs will seem to write themselves and sometimes I rely on good old fashioned experience to be able to articulate what I’m trying to say.
Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it?
I usually let things be what they want to be as long as the work is potent and meets my criteria for what I enjoy in a song.
There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally?
I call it a meditation but when I’m in the zone I feel it’s all a meditation. Life I mean.
Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process?
I’ve read that a lot of people tweak endlessly but for me it’s like a cake. When it’s finished it’s finished with some exceptions of course.
Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on?
I’ll sometimes make a few tweaks here and there but generally I don’t continue to work on it.
I do reference my own music when I’m having problems getting to something that I did right on a previous song.
What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally?
I think production is key. At this point in my life I don’t consider myself a producer but I have a strong desire for my music to be in its own lane so for me there are very few producers out there that I feel can do this.
It’s aspirational but my desire is for my music to live in its own rarified airspace. This is high minded I know but it’s helpful to strive for this.
How involved do you get in this?
I work with producers that I feel are beating to the sound of their own drum. This resonates with me. I work with John Carroll Kirby and Nick Hakim and I feel they both embody this.
After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness.
I can’t relate to this. I think celebrating your hard work is a super important part of the process. All of my favorite artists throughout history played as hard as they worked. I subscribe to this.
How do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?
Celebrating or rewarding yourself when you’ve completed something is the best way to get back to work I believe”.
I don’t mean to mangle this interview but, as it is extensive and detailed, I am editing down this from FADER for clarity. Though some of the flow and narrative might be cut short and fragmented. I think what remains should compel people to read the entire thing – and give a good idea of what Sundown is about and Chacon as an artist:
“Nobody else in the world has had a career quite like that of Eddie Chacon. He started his first band, Fry By Nite, with his two buddies, Cliff and Mike, in the mid-1970s at the age of 12, playing shows in the Castro Valley’s abandoned movie theaters. Fry By Nite never took off, but those theaters turned out to be some of the smallest venues those three kids would ever play. Mike Bordin founded Faith No More; Cliff Burton joined Metallica.
Eddie went in a different direction. He moved to L.A., got a job as a staff songwriter at CBS Songs, and earned himself some respectable credits — though the debut solo album he’d been working on turned out to be a flop. He wound up in Miami, signing a deal with Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew. The idea was that Chacon would record an album called Sugaree under the pseudonym Edward Anthony Lewis. But sessions with the legendary Dust Brothers turned out to be — according to a recent article in the Guardian — “an education in heavy weed consumption.” Chacon ended up being credited as an engineer on 2 Live Crew’s infamous As Nasty As They Wanna Be — the first album in history to be legally defined as obscene. But he was 26 years old and no closer to realizing his dreams of working as a solo singer-songwriter.
Chacon moved to New York and signed with Josh Deutsch at Capitol Records. Soon after, he met another young, aspiring singer-songwriter, Charles Pettigrew, on the C Train. The two bonded over a copy of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man — nobody’s sure exactly which of them was carrying the LP — and realized they were both signed to the same man at the same label. They teamed up and, as Charles and Eddie, wound up with one of the biggest R&B hits of the 1990s (the smooth and irrepressible “Would I Lie To You?”) and a pretty successful debut album, Duophonic. They also wrote and recorded “Wounded Bird,” a sugar-packet-sweet ballad for Tony Scott’s True Romance. But their second album, Chocolate Milk, would end up being their last. The music industry had changed around them. What they thought would be a hiatus in 1997 turned out to be an amicable breakup. And though they started talking daily again in the early aughts, even sharing ideas for new music, Charles never told Eddie he was sick. He died of cancer in 2001.
PHOTO CREDIT: DeMarquis McDaniels
Eddie hadn’t stopped making music. He wrote songs for other people, including the English pop group Eternal. He worked with the Danish producer Poul Bruun, which led to credits on a handful of massive Scandinavian records. But, as he told Aquarium Drunkard in 2020, he was lost in those years. One day he walked into his studio, the same as he had every day, and realized he didn’t want to make any music. He was depressed. A perceptive friend sent Eddie a camera with a note saying “I think you’d be good at this.” Somewhat inevitably, he was. In fact, he ended up as the Creative Director at Autre Magazine.
It was only in 2018, when a mutual friend set up a meeting in L.A. between Chacon and the jazz-soul songwriter and producer John Carroll Kirby, that he really entertained the notion of returning to music. The result was Pleasure, Joy, and Happiness — a moody, gently funky, oddly meditative record that sounded unlike anything Chacon had done before. Chacon, between a falsetto and a honeyed croon, always seemed to be ruminating on something or dispensing some gentle wisdom. And, though at times it seemed as though it might have been his swan song — a perfectly unexpected record to call time on a completely unconventional career — Chacon is back again. His new album, Sundown, is out this Friday.
Our house was filled with music. I’m the youngest of three, and my older brother was obsessed with Led Zeppelin and Robin Trower and [Crossby, Stills, Nash & Young]; Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon and Pink Floyd Animals, these were the soundtracks of my childhood. That was through one bedroom wall, and on the other wall, my brother Jim was obsessed with early Barbara Streisand and the soundtrack from Lady Sings the Blues where Diana Ross is playing the part of Billie Holiday. So I just had this mixture of hard rock — my mom and dad called it acid rock — and crooning soul music. I became obsessed with James Brown when he came out with “Get on Good Foot (Parts 1 & 2).” I remember having that 45 and playing it on our green shag carpet on this little record player we had. We three little kids danced around that 45 until we wore it into the ground, man. We would go to Walgreens and buy the same 45 over and over again because it would get so scratched up from skipping all around.
Were you writing your own music as early as Fry By Night?
My brother tells me that I would make up songs and tell him they were mine from the time I was six years old. He would say, “You didn’t write that.” I would say, “Yes, I did.” I was trying to make up songs that sounded like the Delfonics or Bloodstone, pivotal songs to me. There was a band called Cold Blood featuring Lydia Pense from the San Francisco Bay Area — they were really popular in our house. She was a Janis Joplin-esque soul singer, a beautiful blonde girl singing like Janis Joplin. It freaked me out.
I can almost decipher the vocabulary of myself as a singer, where certain aspects of my tone came from. My voice has somewhat of a raspy grit, and I always used to try to mimic Lydia Pense. I wanted to have this crooning, easy, low tonality, and I became obsessed with the song “Natural High” by Bloodstone. Of course, Tower of Power was a pivotal band if you grew up in Northern California in the late ’60s and early ’70s — and, of course, Sly Stone. I can put together this little jigsaw puzzle of where different parts of my voice were formed.
When you then moved to New York City, it seems like you and Charles almost had a compulsive desire to keep writing music — that you were writing wherever and whenever you could.
That was largely driven by Josh Deutsch. I never met anybody like Josh, and I have to credit him for taking what was already a strong work ethic and upping the ante. This guy had me whipping out my guitar in taxi cabs going from Uptown to Downtown to a studio. I’m like, “Dude, we’re going to be in the car all of five minutes.” He’s like, “Just get it out, man, let’s do something.” We were lying on the ground, writing lyrics on napkins.
Then it just dissolves. When you realized you were leaving the label, did you think you would pick up and take it somewhere else?
We thought that what turned out to be a permanent break would just be a short break initially. There was a series of awful events in which, around that time, Charles lost his father and his sister, and he was overcome with grief. I was much younger and far more narcissistic, so I was more driven by the music and career. I wasn’t able to process what he was going through the way I would’ve processed it today. So months turned into years, and a few years after that, I got a phone call that Charles had passed away. I didn’t know that he had cancer. In fact, within six months of his death, we’d started talking on the phone again, sending cassettes back and forth to each other with song ideas. I remember one of the last things we said was, “Let’s get an attorney to get us a record deal again and make another record.”
All I could think of was how we started with nothing. I was on my last $500, and I know he was broke too. I looked around, and by that time I’d bought a beautiful house in the hills, my rockstar dream home, and I had my walls covered with 25 gold records. I had this immense sadness come over me: The man who traversed the whole journey with me from nothingness to us both having our dreams come true — homes and comfort and all the joy and gratification that goes with that — was gone. I remember being in touch with those emotions, and it made me feel such a depth of sadness.
PHOTO CREDIT: DeMarquis McDaniels
What is that you find in this communion with other people, in collaboration, that helps you to find your peak?
I’ve always felt like the job of a good collaborator or producer is to mine the gold in the people you work with. I find that the essence of great collaborations is a genuine interest in helping out the other, not helping out yourself. It has to be in the service of someone else to be great, I believe.
When did you realize that you wanted to keep doing this — that this was the beginning of something, not the end of something?
I didn’t have a realization. I have zero entitlement and don’t think the universe owes me anything. I just take it moment to moment. I never really thought of it as a followup record. And even if it was a followup record, what I’ve learned from my past experience with Charles is don’t overthink it. If there’s magic in the room, let it be. So we didn’t continue with the heaviness or significance of, “We’re making a followup record. We’ve got to make it better or bigger or splashier.” We just showed up”.
I am going to end with some positive reviews for the sublime Sundown. If you are not sold or still unsure whether you want to check out this album, then I hope the reviews push you towards the affirmative. Record Collector Mag had this to say about one of the musical treasures of last year:
“The re-emergence of US soul singer Eddie Chacon has been one of the more heartening musical stories of recent times. In a nutshell: Chacon was one half of Charles & Eddie, the early 90s R&B duo who scored an international smash hit in 1992 with their then-inescapable debut single, the sugar-sweet Would I Lie To You?. The pair’s fame was short-lived as subsequent singles failed to set the charts alight and their second album, 1995’s Chocolate Milk, struggled to find an audience. They were dropped by their label and Chacon embarked on a series of unrealised projects, including collaborations with 2 Live Crew and the Dust Brothers. When his former partner, Charles Pettigrew, died of cancer in 2001, Chacon put music on hold to become a successful fashion photographer.
Still, an urge to create music that had taken hold as a teenager wasn’t easily shaken off. Chacon released “dark disco” as The Polyamorous Affair with his wife Sissy Sainte-Marie from 2008-11, but to little fanfare. It was only when he met pianist and producer John Carroll Kirby in 2019 that Chacon’s musical fortunes changed. Kirkby’s production work with Solange on A Seat At The Table (2016) and When I Get Home (2019), along with performance credits on Frank Ocean’s 2019 single DHL and The Avalanche’s We Will Always Love You (2020), meant he was in demand. He and Chacon bonded over music and began jamming together, work that coalesced into 2020’s Pleasure, Joy And Happiness, a sublime and cathartic collection of modern soul that was apparently meant to bring closure to Chacon’s career, but through word of mouth became the hit that launched an unlikely third act.
Sundown takes the slinky, lo-fi wooziness of Pleasure, Joy And Happiness and uses it as a blueprint to expand upon. Where there were brittle drum machines, there’s now shuffling percussion and inventive drumming. Layers of synths have been joined by live flute, saxophone and trombone. There’s a new sense of confidence in the vocals, the clarity of the melodies, and production flourishes. Lyrically, too, there’s a shift – the troubled soul-searching has (mostly) given way to a sense of joy and acceptance at his place in the world.
There are songs here that do not so much start as saunter into earshot, in no rush to reveal themselves and all the more seductive for it. Haunted Memories is a case in point, beginning uncertainly – all fluttering Rhodes and searching, stuttering beats – until a groove has emerged from nowhere for Chacon to drape a subtly sing-song melody upon. Or the soft jazz-funk of Far Away, with its insistent groove that simmers away seductively beneath Chacon’s careworn falsetto. Songs that at first appear slight become formidable with repeated listens without losing their freshness, it’s some trick Elsewhere, as on the glorious strutting dry-funk of Holy Hell, the languid, warped soul of Step By Step, or the sunshine groove of Morning Sun there’s a directness to Chacon’s music that adds a new dimension to his sound. As does the healing, near-new age sound of the title track, a blissed-out evocation of the wonder of nature that sounds inspired by Chacon and Kirby’s Ibizan jam sessions. Far from signifying an ending, Sundown suggests Eddie Chacon is just getting started”.
There are two more reviews I am keen to get to. MOJO definitely showed a lot of love and respect for Eddie Chacon’s Sundown. An album I only recently listened to in full. I think that it is so magnificent. Revealing something different every time you pass through it. An album you can not listen to only once. It is such an astonishing work:
"I ALWAYS said if I got my head screwed on straight I could make one great record where I was honest with myself," Eddie Chacon told me in 2020. We were talking just prior to the release of his debut solo LP, Pleasure, Joy And Happiness, released some 28 years after his brief shot at fame with neo-soul duo Charles And Eddie, and following a good decade in which he’d turned his back on music completely. "I’d wanted to make this album my whole life," he said, but it’s taken my whole life to get there.”
That album, an ethereal, stripped-down collection of haunting confessionals, recorded with Solange and Frank Ocean collaborator John Carroll Kirby, in which Chacon revisited past failures and regrets, his haunted falsetto floating on Kirby’s vaporous synth lines, all underpinned by skeletal drum patterns, was Krapp’s Last Tape via Channel Orange. It was, in Chacon’s words, his “one great record”. So where do you go after you’ve made the album you’ve been waiting your whole life to make? How do you follow up on a swan song?
First you go back to working with the man who made it all happen. Recorded in Ibiza with Kirby, utilising the island’s sole Fender Rhodes, and then bolstered at 64 Sound Studios in northeast Los Angeles, with Logan Hone on flutes and saxophone, Elizabeth Lea on trombone, Will Logan on drums and David Leach on percussion, Sundown is both a bigger sounding LP than Pleasure, Joy And Happiness but also a deeper one. Ushered in by the deceptively simple opening track, Step By Step, a reeling ‘quiet storm’ appeal to “listen to your heart”, reminiscent in its seductive slink of peak-era Sade or Robert Palmer, here is an enticing soul record about barely hanging on (Far Away), losing everything (Comes And Goes), the difficulty of long-term relationships (Holy Hell), blaming the world for your own failures (Same Old Song), and, on the title track, age and loss. Tellingly, Chacon and Kirby say Sundown was inspired by repeat listens to Pharoah Sanders’ cyclical 1975 live track, Greeting To Saud, vibing on its meditative power. That mood is certainly present but so is that seductive atmosphere of ’80s/’90s soul; ruminations on mortality, failure and experience dressed up in a livery of pointillist seduction. The resultant combination is incredibly powerful, an emotionally rich and often lyrically dark album underpinned by both the “be here now” spirituality of Sanders and the “in the moment” seduction of Sade and Palmer. At its heart is a powerful message: if you’ve lost everything you can still embrace the beauty of the present instant or, as Chacon sings on the deceptively light Every Kinda People groove of the final track, The Morning Sun, “The morning sun/Touches everyone”.
Let’s finish off with The Guardian and their review of Sundown. Awarding it five stars, it is clear that this album should have got a lot more airplay around the world. I heard it on stations like Soho Radio, though it didn’t really reach the commercial stations. It is an album that deserved more exposure and love. Let’s hope stations tune in when Eddie Chacon puts out his next album – whenever that comes:
“It was hard not to notice a tone of amazement about the glowing reviews of Eddie Chacon’s debut solo album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness. Whatever musical highlights people expected 2020 to bring, a warped soul album by a singer in his 50s, working with a producer who had previously collaborated with Harry Styles, Solange and Frank Ocean, wasn’t among them. Nor was a comeback by one half of Charles & Eddie, previously filed away alongside Tasmin Archer and Tony Di Bart in a drawer marked early 90s one-hit wonders. No matter that Charles & Eddie had been a more substantial proposition than most of said drawer’s other denizens, as anyone who listened to the charming retro-soul of their 1992 album Duophonic would tell you.
Their debut single Would I Lie to You? was the kind of hit that achieves what you might call obliterating ubiquity: a global smash that succeeded in overshadowing everything else its authors did. Under the circumstances, you couldn’t blame Chacon for walking away, which he eventually did, becoming a photographer and creative director after his erstwhile partner Charles Pettigrew’s death from cancer in 2001. And yet, nearly 30 years after Chacon’s solitary hit, and apparently out of nowhere, here was Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, an understated, left-field triumph, Chacon’s plaintive but emollient voice drifting over collaborator John Carroll Kirby’s gauzy, off-beam synths, samples and electric piano, singing songs that seemed to speak of hard-won experience: Trouble, Hurt, My Mind Is Out of Its Mind.
The question that haunts Sundown is whether the unexpected success of Pleasure Joy and Happiness can be replicated: a sense of anticipation attends its release that clearly wasn’t there before its author’s status was upgraded from one-hit wonder to low-key R&B legend. The answer turns out to be a qualified yes: it replicates its predecessor’s success precisely because it doesn’t try to replicate it, taking a noticeably different route to invoking a mood of hazy calm. The sound has shifted. The drum machines have largely been replaced – or at least augmented – by live percussion; there is brass and woodwind alongside the samples and electronics; it feels jazzier.
On Far Away and Haunted Memories, Chacon, now 59, sings over muffled clusters and runs of electric piano notes, like a particularly inconspicuous improvised solo that runs throughout the track. The sound of Same Old Song exists on the cusp of pillow-soft early 70s soul and the era’s spiritual jazz. Chacon has mentioned Pharoah Sanders as an influence on the album, although the Lonnie Liston Smith of Astral Traveling might be a more obvious comparison – and its electronic washes and drones stop it shifting into the realm of homage or pastiche. And with its spiralling synth solo and 80s groove, you could append the descriptor “jazz funk” to single Holy Hell without anyone getting too upset, while noting that it is jazz funk of a distinctly warped cast.
The tone of the songs has shifted, too. Although a vein of melancholy still runs through the album – “I’ve been thinking too much,” it opens, “I’ve been barely hanging on” – it’s more obviously tempered by optimism, albeit optimism of an ambiguous variety. “We’ve got each other and that’s a start,” offers Holy Hell’s equivocal assessment of a relationship. “We can keep on shining / But we can’t stop the hands of time.” Meanwhile, The Morning Sun’s component parts seem to pull towards slightly different ends: the blissed-out lyrics and breezy sax at odds with the slightly discordant, faintly ominous synth weirdness that’s going on underneath them.
Tightly written melodies – as on Holy Hell or Step by Step’s appealingly rough-hewn take on a vintage slow jam – vie for space with more abstract tracks. Haunted Memories feels as if you are eavesdropping on a jam session at the precise moment when a song starts to emerge through the mist. The title track moves in the opposite direction, gradually, joyously unravelling. Regardless of the setting, Chacon’s voice sounds fantastic – his falsetto on Comes and Goes is particularly gorgeous – and the effect is the same, potent and affecting: it’s an album that pulls the listener in close and envelops them in its rich, heady world for its entire duration.
When Pleasure, Joy and Happiness was released, Chacon talked about it as a culmination, half an hour of music into which he’d poured everything he had: “a perfect representation of who I am”. It made you wonder if it was a one-off, a curio unlikely to be followed up. Soothing, moving, occasionally disquieting and utterly immersive, Sundown suggests its predecessor was something else entirely: merely the first step of an entirely unlikely and entirely delightful career renaissance”.
An album that I was keen to promote and spotlight. One that I think everyone should listen to. If you have not heard it or are not aware of Eddie Chacon, then I would urge you to play Sundown. It is an album that you will not forget! It did get some press, though not as much as it should have. More an underground album rather than one that was reviewed a lot and played far and wider. It is a same, as Sundown is a work of…
MAJESTIC beauty.