Reprinted from Soul Express Magazine

Music, however, leans heavily to blues and rock this time with echoes from pop, country and even swamp music, and only a couple of tunes have been out before. Freddie: "This is my first time ever to do a blues album and I did it with Jon Tiven, who does primarily blues." In the liner notes the producer, Jon Tiven, calls it also New York Soul: "…a musical landscape for Freddie to travel that would both recall his previous hits, yet take him into the territory which would be recognized as the future of rhythm & blues. Today's hiphop and rap artists have taken what was once the r&b audience to another place, and Soul Music artists must go elsewhere- someplace inbetween traditional r&b and the blues."

    Three years ago we had a profound look at Freddie's career ('The million dollar soul baby" in # 2/98), when together with him we reminisced his start in gospel, first secular recording in '56, his tenth single (Hey Girl) turning into a hit in '63 the glorious Shout period with Bert Berns in '66 and '67 and his last recording on Mainstream in '74 before this new, his sixth album.

    Freddie hooked up with Jon Tiven while preparing the Van Morrison Songbook album (out later this year), on which Freddie does a fantastic version of Brown Eyed Girl. Brand New Man is released on Evangeline Records out of England. Jon: "I have been friends with Andrew Lauder, who runs it, since the early seventies, when I first went to England and met him at UA Records."

    The fifteen songs were mainly written by Jon (also on guitars) and Sally (bass) Tiven, Roger Reale (bass) and Alan Merril (keys and background vocals) with Freddie getting co-writer credits on four tracks. One of them is the opener, a bluesy and hypnotic mid-pacer called All I Wanna Do Is Sing- a song that could have been cut by Geater Davis or O.V. Wright in their heyday.

Next two songs- a melodic beater called Laugh To Keep From Crying and a beaty mid-pacer with some rock elements in it named Brand New Man- were co-written by Don Covay. Freddie: "Don, who had a stroke, has been in the business for a long time. Mick Jagger and those guys bought him a van, so he can move around now. After Don came back, I thought that doing these songs would be a sort of a tribute to him, who has been a friend for years. The rock elements came about, because we had a lot of the musicians from England." According to those close to him, Don is doing much better these days. The Adlib album has been nominated for a Handy award, and- to quote Horace Ott- " Don is still the prolific writer that he always was, ready to turn out more hits."     Everybody Loves Soul Music, a driving scorcher with Ellis Hooks duetting - co-written by Freddie - lists in lyrics many giants of our music. "This is also a tribute to the guys that I know form the past and that I worked with - people that I respect artistically."

    Two other delights are a melodic toe-tapper called Second hand Paradise and lilting mid-pacer named Other Side Of Town - co-written by Sir Mack Rice - which is also Freddie's own favourite. Just Enough To Keep Me Holding On, a melancholy thumper, was co-written by Frederick Knight, and the rest of the selection varies from bluesy romps (Your Love, Yes Man), stompy and rocky beaters (Look Into Your Soul, Don't Reward The Sinner, Midnight Train - a duet with Graham Parker), easy mid-pacers (Protection) to even boogie-woogie (Last Night). Gloomy and slightly psychedelic Locked In A Mystery rounds things up....

    ...Freddie is till active and performing regularly... "I've been working primarily in the States right now, but I'll be doing a promotion tour on the album to England next summer. I'm not including the new tunes in my show yet. I sing a lot of my old tunes, and it still gets a rousing response from people. When they call me, I go to work. Otherwise I'm just writing right now and producing. That's primarily what I wanna do, until somebody calls me and says 'guess what, we just went into top ten on the charts. Next I can invite you in for the Grammy,."

    Known mainly as a balladeer, there are, however, no slowies on the new album, but that will be corrected soon, when Freddie starts working on a more adult contemporary material with Horace Ott. "My next album will be filled with ballads. I expect to start working on it around May. It should be on my FSC label and will be distributed by a major company. Now Freddie Scott is coming back."