Blues
Robert Cray releases “All Over Again” on 12 February 2027 through Thirty Tigers. It is nine tracks recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and produced by Steve Jordan. His last album was “That’s What I Heard”, from 2020.
On 21 October he put out “Push Through”, which calls on Americans to defend the right to vote. “1965, when voting rights for Black people were enacted, wasn’t that long ago,” Cray says. “I turned 12 that year, and my parents were finally able to vote.”
At seven he had spent a few months in Alabama with his grandmother, before joining his father, who was stationed in Germany, and he saw segregation there: separate schools, separate drinking fountains. “I’m not the first to write these types of songs,” he adds. “But I know why they are written — it’s just too bad that we have to.”
The album gives the subject more room. “With Everyone” is for his mother, Maggie Cray, who died in 2020; “Long Way Home” is about a society destabilised by lies, and “Tacky Wack” points straight at the current administration. There are three covers: “For Better Or Worse”, by Wilson Pickett, “I’m In Love”, by Bobby Womack, and “Neighbor, Neighbor”, by Jimmy Hughes.
The closing track, “Soul Shot”, is a tribute to the soul musicians of Muscle Shoals and is co-written by Cray, Jordan and two of those musicians: Clayton Ivey, who plays piano on it, and Spooner Oldham, organ. Cray and Jordan have known each other since 1986, when Keith Richards recruited them both to back Chuck Berry in “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll”.
Text by Enric Vilaplana