Philip Bailey – Love Will Find A Way

Earth, Wind and Fire never really wasn’t on our radar, apart from the occasional listens to “September” or some other SoulFunkDisco-gem the prolific band released in the 1970ies. So we just didn’t know that one of the two lead-singers of the group had been pursuing a solo career since the early 1980ies in which he tended to follow a much more jazz and less disco approach to his music. And now his new album completely tooks us by surprise. “Love Will Find A Way” is a wonderful and ambitious piece of work. Deeply grounded in the funky and soulful ways of the 70ies, the album integrates soul and funk into a state-of-the-art production which makes it just the more intriguing. Forget all the remastered deluxe box sets of the classics (no, don’t) and listen to this. With guests like Kamasi Washington, Chick Corea, Robert Glasper and many more the album, of course, could have been a tiresome affair with plenty of vain performances but no, this is a definitely a group effort on master-level by a bunch of highly sophisticated musicians who found a common thread to weave something that really makes up a superior album in the way the format seldom appears. And as kids of the 80ies we of course love his rendition of the Talking Heads classic “Once In A Lifetime” very much. But in this case, it’s the album as a whole that gets us. Give it a listen …