Soul music has poured from this living legend since the 1960s, when he was a teenager in North Carolina sweating it out on juke joint stages.
With all these years, and all this life, comes wisdom. Lee Fields believes in people’s ability to love and be loved, believing that music is the divine bridge to these places.
‘We should be conscious at all times of what is good and what is bad,’ he says. ‘Once we lose that consciousness, we are deceived, we are tricked.’
This worldview, equally stern and loving, rocksteady and welcoming, finds its fullest expression yet on It Rains Love, his latest and possibly his most honest record ever.
Now in his late 60s, Fields is ushering in the most fruitful period of his career. His music has been chopped up and sampled by hip-hop artists as diverse as J Cole and Travis Scott.
It Rains Love is music of endless love, of endless hurt, of reverberating kindness and wisdom, of a lifetime of pain alchemised into kindness.
He ended up putting more of himself into his music than he used to dare. As he puts it on the titles of the new album’s last two songs, ‘God Is Real’ and ‘Love Is the Answer’.
Taken together, they could be everything Fields has been trying to say ever since his recording career began. It is nothing less than his take on the human condition.
Joel Culpepper opens this show with a stripped-back acoustic set, delivering a sizzling slice of bittersweet sunshine soul to Meltdown.
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