I miss Otis Redding. I miss Wilson Pickett. I miss Sam Cooke. I miss Jackie Wilson and Bobby Womack and Marvin Gaye and the music Stevie Wonder made in the '70s. And it's not because I'm old, dammit. It's because these guys were gods.

Ryan Shaw

Videos

Interview and Performance Snippets

We Got Love

I Can't Make You Love Me (Amateur Night at the Apollo)

They made music that stopped the room. Unforgettable melodies. Lyrics that got down to the nitty-gritty of love. And voices that broke --- or healed --- your heart.

Ryan Shaw takes you back to that music. With good reason. He was born in Georgia in 1980. His family was Pentecostal; the church rocked with gospel, and he was in the choir that induced the Spirit. After college, he performed in black musicals, then joined a group that recycled the early days of Motown. He saw the power of mixing gospel with rock and soul, he got discovered, and here he is --- the hottest thing on my iPod and a total throwback.

I'm not kidding. Here's late '50s R&B dance music. And here's a channeling of Stevie Wonder in his prime. And here's a Bobby Womack song (“Lookin' for a Love”) that you know because J. Geils knocked it off.

On and on it goes. Nothing sounds new --- even the new songs. And none of it has cheap production gimmicks to freshen it up. The entire CD is just a crisp band and a singer who only knows one trick: to sing each song as if it's his last.

“So many people are searching for something that's true, something that's real,” Ryan Shaw says. He's talking about much bigger things, of course. But he could very well be describing the longing for the kind of old-fashioned CD that is his soul-satisfying, five-star debut.

--- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To buy “This is Ryan Shaw” from Amazon.com, click here.

For Ryan Shaw's website, click here.

Jesse Kornbluth

2/15/08