Aaron Neville’s ache-soaked voice was nourished by the romance of doo-wop tearjerkers and late 1950s black rock’n’roll: the Drifters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and other silken-toned purveyors of proto-soul. It’s hardly surprising that he should record an album that recreates the glory of repertoire classics such as “Money Honey”, “Under the Boardwalk", “Bye Bye Baby” and other much-covered hits of an era whose innocence we have definitively left behind.
Neville’s signature success, “Tell it Like it Is”, demonstrated how much mid-'60s soul owed to an earlier style that verged dangerously on the sugary and sentimental. Neville’s high tenor voice, adorned by spine-tingling falsetto flourishes filled with the spiritual feel of gospel, made the song a classic. The best moments on My True Story capture some of that magic. Produced by Don Was and Keith Richards, both of them slightly unlikely fans, the sound is faithful to the glittering originals, complete with subtle baritone sax riffs, cool scat backing vocals and a superior pop aesthetic, stripped of the sometimes excessive adornment that Phil Spector would pile onto the genre once it had become a little tired.
At best, with songs like “My True Story”, “Tears on My Pillow” and “That Magic Moment”, the music and interpretation gel, and revisiting originally near-perfect material make sense. Neville is a fabulous singer and he loves this stuff to bits. There are moments, though, when the ultra-smooth production, determined to faithfully reproduce the feel of the originals, gets stuck in technique and loses the very soul that propelled these songs into collective pop memory. The CD is worth buying though, just for those moments when you can feel the recording studio light up, fired by the passion that Neville communicates with perfect cool, never over-egging it, in the elegant manner that is essential to the best African-American art.
