“Hey Rose/Your Soul Is a Picture/But Your Body Is a frame’. That half-stanza gets swirled around in Son Little’s ‘hey rose’, with riffy guitar licks just north of Cody Chestnutt-The Seed(2.0) regions. Even the first couple of seconds of the song be fucking with musical timelines. He’s just a couple of bass notes off from the intro to Curtis Mayfield’s’ “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go”. That’s not a mistake.
Dude be trollin.
Son Little, the musical alias of LA’s Aaron Earl Livingston, plays every damn instrument on his upcoming invisible EP, out October 11th via ANTI-. Recorded in Paris at the iconic Studios Ferber with producer Renaud Letang, known for his work with Feist and Manu Chao, invisible offers up a quick study of Little’s third full-length album, set for release in 2020.
Livingston’s grip on music, which earned him a GRAMMY Award for his work helming Mavis Staples’ acclaimed See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, is extensive. From classic soul/old-school R&B to indie rock eclecticism by way of his collaborations with hip-hop royalty bearers The Roots and electronic pioneer RJD2. So yeah. ‘hey rose’ is purposely moving shit all around, baiting us to commit and then pulling the rug on us again. The guitar licks, coming and going, stay tranquil but threaten to get real loud in a hurry at any second. Little keeps his vocal closeness, real close, with hum-sung segments that vary between Sam Cooke and Leon Bridges.
While the video, animated by 60’s betty-boop dancers, filmed with soupy dreamlike veneer tricking us into believing, all of this, could have happened last week on a backlot? Or in a more “urban” version of Twin Peaks from the late ’80s. Either way, Son Little has you trippin.
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