etnobofin

One of those road-trip moments… the view of Mont Blanc over Lake Geneva

Lewis Taylor – Bittersweet

From Lewis Taylor: Island CID 8049 [Buy]

Lewis Taylor – The Way You Done Me

From Lewis II: Island CID 8098 [Buy]

It’s been a while between posts, mainly because the dayjob has become a bit of a nightjob and an awayfromhomejob for the past few weeks. Moving to a new job in the UK, and the chance to travel around Europe again has been (mostly) a great decision, although pretty exhausting at times! Here’s some recovery music.

So the sun was just about gone from the sky, and we were driving back up the A39 across the vast rolling expanse of the Champagne region (the dreary countryside doesn’t quite match the reputation of the eponymous drink).

All the way from Geneva, we’d been listening to just about everything you could imagine – R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People (still one of the perfect pop albums ever), a compilation of 1930s black gospel, Eminem, James Brown’s Living in America. And the GPS tells us our overnight hotel in Reims is still an hour away.

I whack on Lewis Taylor, and the Citroën’s stereo selects Bittersweet as the first track… the hints of trip-hop are only an overture to a sprawling masterwork that touches every soul reference point you can shake a stick at: Stevie Wonder, Prince, Earth Wind and Fire, Marvin Gaye. The smile is back on our faces for the day’s final stretch of road.

Thanks to IanB at RetroBabe! for introducing me to Lewis Taylor, an English soul genius who really deserves a lot more recognition than he currently gets. And good luck with your new blogging project Ian – looking forward to seeing what form it takes

* For Bonus Music Points: track the time signature changes all the way through The Way You Done Me – it’s definitely 7/8 in the chorus but I haven’t quite nutted out the verses yet.

On the N5 through the Jura, eastern France: hints that autumn is here…