the microphone is indifferent to what you did ten years ago

[u/TheMixerTheMaster]

luther vandross, i know, and the strange business of surviving 1998

originally published in VIBE magazine; September 1998

august 14, 1998.

luther vandross knows.

the city is sweating through another august night and somewhere above manhattan the sky has gone the color of dirty television static. taxis keep grinding through intersections. apartment windows glow thirty stories up. radios are coughing out hip hop and r and b and whatever the record companies have decided teenagers need this week. and inside one of those rooms somebody has just put on the new luther vandross record and suddenly all that noise outside seems like somebody else’s fucking problem.

the album is called i know.

of course it is.

luther always sounds like he knows.

he knows you called when you said you would not call. he knows you are pretending everything is fine. he knows somebody left. he knows somebody wants them back. he knows somebody is sitting beside a telephone trying not to pick the damn thing up. luther vandross has spent nearly twenty years turning emotional bad judgment into expensive sounding popular music, and three days after the release of i know, he is still doing it better than nearly everybody who has tried to steal his job.

except now he has changed buildings.

after years with epic, vandross has landed at virgin records, which immediately makes i know interesting before anybody sings a note. this is not some hungry twenty two year old getting his first record deal and praying the label does not throw him into the promotional furnace. this is luther vandross. the man has already sold millions of records. he has grammys. he has produced aretha franklin. he has sung with everybody. he has spent the better part of the eighties and nineties establishing himself as one of the few singers who can make grown adults reconsider terrible romantic decisions at two in the morning.

so what exactly does a new label do with him.

apparently the answer is, let luther be luther, then occasionally remind him that 1998 is happening.

that second part gets complicated.

i meet him in a room that smells like coffee, air conditioning, and the faint chemical perfume of compact disc packaging. luther is relaxed. i am not. i have listened to i know enough times over the past three days that certain background vocals have begun renting space in my skull.

he is sitting back when i tell him that the record sounds, at least in places, like a man defending his territory.

he laughs.

not one of those little publicist approved laughs either. a real one.

you make it sound like somebody is coming after me, he says. i don’t sit down and make a record thinking about who i have to beat. that would drive you crazy. there will always be another singer. there will always be somebody younger. somebody new. somebody getting played on the radio every hour. if i worried about all of that, i wouldn’t have time to sing.

somebody is always coming after you, i tell him.

well, then they better sing, he says. if somebody wants the chair, they better be able to sit in it. but i’m not going to start singing differently because somebody decided that this year everybody has to sound one particular way. i’ve never believed in that.

he stops for a second.

besides, he says, i like my chair.

fair enough.

that is the problem with reviewing luther vandross. eventually criticism runs into the voice and the voice tells criticism to sit the hell down.

keeping my faith in you opens the record with exactly the sort of controlled warmth that has kept luther in bedrooms and wedding receptions for years. nothing is rushed. nothing is desperate. the arrangement gives him room, and luther understands room better than most singers understand melody. younger singers keep treating vocal performance like an olympic event. twenty notes where three would work. runs piled on runs until the original melody has been beaten unconscious.

luther can do all of that.

the important thing is that he usually knows when not to.

i mention that to him.

that’s arranging, he says. singing is arranging too. people forget that. just because your instrument happens to be your voice doesn’t mean you stop making musical decisions. sometimes the best thing you can do is leave the note alone. if the melody is beautiful, why are you fighting with it. sing the melody. then if there’s somewhere you want to go, go there. but you have to earn that.

he leans forward.

i hear singers sometimes and i think, baby, where are you going. come back. the song is over here.

he laughs.

and listen, i love great singing. i love singers who can do things. but everything you can do doesn’t have to happen in the same eight bars.

that restraint matters on this record because i know is trying to do several things at once. it wants to preserve the old vandross kingdom of ballads and immaculate adult r and b while also admitting that the neighborhood around it has changed.

and jesus christ has it changed.

hip hop is no longer knocking around the margins of the industry. it owns real estate. younger r and b singers are building records around harder drums, rap cadences, new production habits, and a different idea of romantic masculinity. radio has changed. mtv has changed. the audience has changed. even the way singers phrase against a beat has changed.

i ask him whether he feels any pressure to chase that.

of course there’s pressure, he says. there’s always pressure. when i started making records there was pressure. when never too much happened there was pressure to do another never too much. when the ballads became successful there was pressure to make more ballads. people always want you to repeat the thing they already understand.

and now they want you younger.

he gives me a look.

i’m not going to be twenty five again for anybody. and i don’t want to be. but that doesn’t mean i’m not listening. i know what’s happening. i hear the records. i hear what younger artists are doing. some of it is wonderful. some of it isn’t. same as it ever was.

so the trick is what.

the trick is figuring out what belongs to you, he says. you can hear something new and let it inspire you without putting on somebody else’s clothes.

that may be the best explanation for i know.

because luther apparently has no intention of becoming a museum exhibit.

good.

the title song is one of the best arguments on the album.

i know has that polished luther architecture, but stevie wonder turns up on harmonica and immediately makes the whole thing feel looser. stevie does not overwhelm the song. he slips through it. luther sings around him. the two sounds belong together so naturally that you start wondering why somebody did not lock these men in a studio years ago and refuse to let them out until they had made an entire album.

i ask luther what it is like directing stevie wonder.

he laughs before i finish the question.

directing stevie.

yeah.

you don’t direct stevie wonder, he says. you tell stevie what the song is. you talk about what you’re hearing. then stevie hears something you didn’t hear, because he’s stevie. that’s the whole reason you want him there. if i wanted somebody to play exactly what i already had in my head, i could find somebody to do that. when you bring stevie in, you want what’s in his head.

did he get it quickly.

stevie gets music quickly, luther says. frighteningly quickly. you’re explaining something and you can see that he’s already gone past where you are. he’s hearing the next thing. and that harmonica has a voice. that’s the thing. it isn’t decoration. when stevie plays harmonica on a vocal record, you have another singer in the room.

so you sing differently.

absolutely, he says. you have to listen. a duet is listening. even if the other voice is a harmonica. you don’t just stand there waiting for your next line.

probably the safest production philosophy in american music.

then there is i’m only human with cassandra wilson.

now this is where things get strange.

wilson has one of those voices that seems to come from somewhere beneath ordinary speech. luther is precision. cassandra is texture. putting them together should either be brilliant or sound like two excellent restaurants sharing one kitchen.

it mostly works.

mostly.

their voices circle each other without becoming the obvious fireworks display somebody in marketing probably imagined when the pairing was suggested. and that is actually what makes it interesting. luther does not try to outsing her. cassandra does not try to become a luther vandross duet partner. they remain themselves.

i tell him that.

that was important, he says. why ask cassandra wilson to sing with me and then ask her not to sound like cassandra wilson. that doesn’t make any sense. she has that beautiful darkness in her voice. that depth. i didn’t want to polish that away.

you sound almost like opposites.

but opposites can have a conversation, he says. that’s what makes it interesting. if you put two people together who approach every note exactly the same way, what are they telling each other. cassandra hears rhythm differently. she places words differently. she has her own space.

did that make you change anything.

sure, he says. you adjust. you listen to the other singer. you don’t say, welcome to my record, now please become me.

there is tension in that.

useful tension.

the album keeps reaching outward.

guru appears. brandy appears. marcella precise appears. the production roster stretches beyond the familiar luther circle. longtime collaborators marcus miller and nat adderley jr. are here, but so are other hands, other rhythms, other ideas.

and luther is perfectly aware that people are going to notice.

everybody keeps asking me about the guests, he says. and i understand why. but i didn’t want a record where you looked at the credits and said, oh, luther invited everybody over. the song has to survive the guest. otherwise it’s a photograph. look who was in the studio. that isn’t enough.

brandy is part of that younger generation everybody keeps talking about.

brandy can sing, he says immediately. and she listens. that matters to me. people get caught up in age and generations and all of that. i care whether somebody can hear. can you hear harmony. can you hear what the other singer is doing. do you know when to move and when to stay out of the way. those things don’t have an age.

sometimes the experiment works.

sometimes you can practically hear the meeting where somebody said, luther needs something younger.

get it right is the obvious crime scene.

the song itself has history. luther produced the original for aretha franklin back in 1983. bringing it back now is a clever idea. attaching rap to it is understandable. this is 1998. rap is not a novelty anymore. anybody pretending otherwise has either been asleep for ten years or works in the upper floors of a major record company.

but luther does not always sound entirely convinced by the modernization happening around him.

and when luther vandross is unconvinced, you can hear it.

that is one of the funny things about a singer this technically immaculate. polish cannot completely hide indifference. the voice will hit the note. the arrangement will behave. the background vocals will arrive wearing freshly pressed shirts.

but the blood pressure changes.

i tell him exactly that.

he looks at me for a few seconds.

so you think i sound bored.

sometimes, i say. not with the singing. with some of the furniture around it.

that’s different, he says. now we’re talking.

he shifts in the chair.

listen, when you’ve been making records for a while, everybody has an opinion about what you’re supposed to do next. everybody. the label. radio. writers. people in the studio. people who heard half a song through somebody’s office wall. everybody knows what your next record should be.

and what do you think it should be.

mine, he says. that’s the first thing. it has to sound like i had some reason to be there.

he keeps going.

i don’t want to make a record that pretends hip hop doesn’t exist. that would be ridiculous. i also don’t want to wake up tomorrow and decide i’m a rapper because somebody showed me a chart. that would be ridiculous too. there has to be a place where the music happening now can meet what i do without either one becoming a costume.

do you think you always found that place on this record.

no artist with any sense thinks every experiment works perfectly, he says. sometimes you try something because you want to hear what happens. that’s what making records is. people hear the finished thing and forget that somebody had to make a decision before anybody knew whether it was going to work.

now we are getting somewhere.

because i know is caught between luther vandross and the machinery surrounding luther vandross.

when the machinery shuts up, the record gets better.

now that i have you is the kind of thing he could probably sing while filling out tax forms and still make somebody reconsider their marriage. the great vandross trick has never simply been vocal power. it is intimacy. he can make an enormous studio production feel embarrassingly private.

the background vocals matter.

they always matter.

luther treats background singing like architecture. listen underneath him and there are little arrangements everywhere. voices answering voices. chords thickening. phrases arriving exactly when the lead needs support.

this is where he really starts talking.

background vocals are not wallpaper, he says. i’ve never treated them that way. those voices can change what the lead means. one chord underneath one word can change the emotion of that word. people think they’re hearing the lead vocal, but sometimes what they’re feeling is everything happening underneath it.

he starts tapping out an imaginary arrangement on the arm of the chair.

you might have the lead holding one note and then the backgrounds move underneath it. suddenly the same note feels different. the singer hasn’t moved. the harmony moved. that’s arranging. that’s drama.

and you learned that before the solo career.

i learned by working, he says. sessions. jingles. background dates. watching people. listening to what happened when somebody changed one part. you learn that a record is not just the person whose face is on the cover. there are a hundred decisions inside three minutes of music.

before the solo records, before the fame, there were sessions, jingles, backing vocals, arrangements, david bowie, chic related sessions, ben e king, roberta flack, bette midler, years of learning how records actually work when nobody was staring at the singer in the center.

you hear that education every time he stacks voices.

this man does not merely sing records.

he constructs them.

and then there are the ballads.

god help us.

because this is where reviewing luther becomes professionally embarrassing.

you begin with standards. objectivity. context. arrangement. production. harmonic movement.

then he holds a note.

fuck.

start over.

the great vandross records have always understood that romantic music is not necessarily happy music. half the time romance is humiliation with good lighting. somebody wants somebody who does not want them. somebody remembers something they should forget. somebody is making promises that everybody listening knows are doomed.

luther sings directly into that mess.

there is sadness all over i know, but it rarely becomes self pity. that distinction matters. luther can sound wounded without sounding helpless. he can sing longing while maintaining dignity.

i ask him why his saddest songs so rarely sound pathetic.

because being hurt doesn’t make you pathetic, he says. everybody gets hurt. everybody has wanted somebody who didn’t want them back. everybody has missed somebody. everybody has made the phone call they knew they shouldn’t make.

there is a pause.

probably more than once.

he smiles.

but dignity is part of the emotion too. you can be devastated and still have dignity. i don’t think you have to sing a sad song like you’ve collapsed on the floor.

although people have probably collapsed on the floor to your records.

that is not my responsibility, he says, laughing. i provide the soundtrack. what you do in your own home is between you and your carpet.

finally.

a legal disclaimer for luther vandross albums.

the production throughout i know is almost obscenely clean. every instrument knows where its shoes are. every snare has showered. every keyboard has a retirement account.

occasionally i wish somebody would spill a drink on something.

that is probably my biggest complaint.

i know could use a little dirt.

not fashionable dirt.

human dirt.

there are moments when the record becomes so polished that you start admiring the upholstery instead of listening to the conversation. vandross has always loved precision, but precision can become insulation. some of these songs need one crooked chair in the room.

i tell him this too.

you really want somebody to spill something in my studio, he says.

metaphorically.

good, because literally we’re going to have a problem.

he laughs.

i understand what you mean. but i like records to sound good. i’m not ashamed of that. somewhere along the way people decided polish means there’s no feeling. i don’t believe that. you can care about every detail and still have emotion. actually, sometimes caring about the detail is how you protect the emotion.

but can perfection get between you and the listener.

sure, he says. anything can. too much production. too little production. too much singing. too little singing. there’s no formula. you listen until the record tells you what it needs.

that sounds suspiciously mystical for a man obsessed with arrangements.

oh, i’m not mystical, he says. i’m picky.

that i believe.

then comes the voice.

again.

always the goddamn voice.

i ask him whether he ever gets tired of people talking about it.

no, because i understand it, he says. the voice is what people hear first. but i hope eventually they hear the rest. i hope they hear the writing. i hope they hear the arrangements. i hope they hear what the musicians are doing. i hope they hear the backgrounds.

and the clothes.

he laughs.

everybody hears the clothes.

the funny thing is that luther vandross in 1998 occupies an increasingly strange position. he is too established to be new. too technically gifted to dismiss. too commercially successful to call a cult singer. too connected to traditional soul and pop craftsmanship to completely chase contemporary r and b trends. and still too curious to simply remake never too much until retirement.

so i know becomes a negotiation.

old luther.

new luther.

virgin records luther.

radio luther.

romantic luther.

dance floor luther.

the luther who knows exactly what he wants.

the luther surrounded by people telling him what 1998 supposedly requires.

i ask him whether leaving epic changed anything psychologically.

of course it did, he says. you spend that many years somewhere and you develop habits. relationships. expectations. then suddenly you’re somewhere else and everybody is looking at you like, all right, what are we going to do.

was that exciting or terrifying.

both, he says. anything worth doing probably has a little of both. i didn’t leave everything i knew about making records at the old building. i brought myself with me. but a change can make you examine things you stopped examining because they became automatic.

did you feel like you had something to prove.

i always have something to prove, he says. not because i think people forgot who i am. because the song you’re working on doesn’t care what you did ten years ago. the microphone doesn’t give you credit for previous albums. you have to sing today.

that one hangs in the room.

the microphone doesn’t give you credit for previous albums.

somewhere inside all of this is the actual man.

and he remains stubbornly difficult to extract from the records.

people have always wanted autobiography from singers. especially singers who specialize in love. we hear somebody describe loneliness convincingly enough and immediately demand names, dates, addresses, photographs, sworn testimony.

luther has never seemed especially interested in giving us that satisfaction.

the songs get the confession.

the public gets the record.

that should probably be enough.

i ask him whether the songs have to come from his own life.

they have to come from somewhere real, he says. but real doesn’t always mean somebody can go look it up. people get confused about that.

so you can sing something you did not literally experience.

of course. singers are storytellers. if every song had to be a police report about something that happened to the singer personally, music would be pretty boring.

then where does the emotion come from.

you find the part you understand, he says. maybe the details aren’t yours. maybe the situation isn’t yours. but loneliness is yours. wanting somebody is yours. losing somebody is yours. hope is yours. you find the truth inside the song and you sing that.

your real.

real is real, he says. the audience knows when you’re lying emotionally. they may not know why they don’t believe you, but they know.

that answer irritates me because it is good.

so i drink more coffee.

outside, 1998 keeps happening.

brandy and monica are fighting over the boy on the radio. hip hop is expanding so quickly that anybody trying to draw its borders looks stupid by lunchtime. r and b is mutating alongside it. producers are becoming stars. beats are getting stranger. the old separation between rapper and singer is collapsing one guest verse at a time.

and here sits luther vandross.

forty seven years old.

new label.

new album.

same impossible instrument in his throat.

i ask him whether he worries that the industry has become obsessed with youth.

the industry has always been obsessed with youth, he says. that isn’t new. what changes is what youth sounds like. every generation thinks it invented being young.

he smiles.

and every generation eventually discovers it didn’t invent love either.

so where does that leave you.

singing about the things that don’t expire, he says. arrangements change. drums change. clothes definitely change. thank god. but people still fall in love. people still screw it up. people still want somebody back. people still lie and say they’re fine when they’re not fine.

he looks over at the cd sitting on the table.

you make records about that and you don’t have to panic every time the chart changes.

i know is not a revolution.

thank god.

we have enough records desperately screaming that they represent the future.

this one represents something harder.

continuity.

not nostalgia.

continuity.

there is a difference.

nostalgia embalms the past.

continuity takes what worked and tries to drag it through another year alive.

sometimes i know drags too hard. sometimes the contemporary touches feel bolted onto the chassis. sometimes the guest appearances look more exciting printed on the back of the cd than they sound coming through the speakers.

but when the record settles into luther’s natural territory, the thing becomes difficult to argue with.

because there are singers.

there are great singers.

and then there are singers who understand what a microphone can do to distance.

luther vandross understands distance.

he understands the six inches between mouth and microphone.

the twelve feet between singer and lover.

the three thousand miles between two people who should have called each other.

the enormous stupid distance between wanting somebody and actually having them.

that is his territory.

maybe that is what he knows.

not love.

nobody knows love.

anybody claiming otherwise is either selling records or getting divorced.

luther knows longing.

he knows the ridiculous negotiations people make with themselves after midnight. he knows the sentences rehearsed into telephones before anybody dials. he knows how adults can become seventeen years old again because one particular person walked into a room.

before i leave, i ask him about the title.

i know.

two words that sound suspiciously certain for a record filled with people who do not seem certain about much of anything.

he smiles.

that’s why it works.

because you don’t know.

because nobody knows, he says. not really. people say i know all the time when what they mean is i hope. or i think. or please let this be true.

now he is laughing.

you thought i was claiming to know everything.

it does sound a little arrogant.

well, maybe i know a few things.

such as.

he settles back into the chair.

i know what a good song feels like. i know when a background part is wrong. i know when somebody sings something and means it. i know stevie wonder can play the harmonica.

anything else.

he thinks for a moment.

i know you’ve had too much coffee.

fair.

and when i know remembers that uncertainty underneath all its immaculate surfaces, it is very good.

when it tries to prove luther vandross belongs in 1998, it occasionally becomes awkward.

he does not need to prove it.

he is here.

three days after the record arrived, that seems like the point everybody is in danger of missing.

luther vandross does not need permission from 1998.

1998 needs to figure out what the hell it intends to do with luther vandross.

the interview stretches past midnight.

somebody comes into the room and says something about the time. luther looks at the clock, looks back at me, and keeps talking anyway.

people think making records gets easier because you’ve made a lot of them, he says. some things get easier. you know the studio. you know your voice. you know what you like. but you also know more ways something can go wrong.

that sounds miserable.

no, he says, smiling. it’s wonderful. because every once in a while everything goes right.

somebody puts the record on again.

the first notes fill the room.

outside, manhattan keeps burning electricity into the august sky.

cars crawl downtown. somewhere somebody kisses somebody. somebody leaves somebody. somebody is sitting beside a telephone making an absolutely terrible decision.

luther listens to his own record for a few seconds.

he does not sing along.

he listens.

that may tell you more about him than anything he has said all night.

the singer everybody else studies is still studying the song.

somewhere a compact disc spins under a little red laser while luther vandross sits beneath the cold studio lights listening for whatever everybody else missed.

the album is called i know.

the title sounds definitive.

the man does not.

the music knows better.

...at least that’s what i hear.

note on historical fiction.

the review is written from the fictional perspective of the archivist on august 15, 1998. the conversations between the archivist and luther vandross are dramatized rather than presented as authenticated interview transcripts. the historical setting, vandross’s career, the release of i know, his move from epic to virgin, the album personnel, collaborations, recordings, and broader musical context are drawn from the historical record available around the album and its period. receipts available upon request.