Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again

The final album released in Ray Charles’ lifetime was the 2002 collection Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again, written almost entirely by Ray’s latter-day collaborator Billy Osborne. It was only released on CD, making it one of only two Ray Charles albums (along with 1996’s Strong Love Affair) to be unavailable on vinyl. (The posthumous and popular 2004 collection Genius Loves Company was released on vinyl, incidentally.)

About the songs on Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again

Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again begins notably, with a new recording of Ray’s own legendary “What’d I Say”, retitled “What I’d Say”. (Ray, in fact, seemed to personally always refer to the song simply as “What I Say”, which undeniably rolls of the tongue better.) There may have been no song that Ray was more familiar with: in nearly every concert over the preceding several decades, “What’d I Say” served as the final encore. He could do the song in his sleep.

This 2002 version is fairly unrecognizable from the 1959 original, driven along with a sometimes-sparse, sometimes-cluttered synth-dominated backing. We first hear Ray the Septuagenerian’s voice as a strangled but still-expressive instrument, and he spits out the song’s nonsensical couplets with newfound relish. “What I’d Say” bridges the new, modern Ray across his younger selves to the beginning in one danceable and surprising moment, showing that this was the same old Ray with new tricks up his sleeve.

Billy Osborne’s “Can You Love Me Like That” follows, and we have Ray singing his first new song in six years. This one is a duet between Ray and Brenda Lee Egar, who is also multi-tracked for the backing chorus. Ray and Brenda trade verses which list many of history’s famous couples and insist that this relationship be every bit as legendary.

On “How Did You Feel The Morning After”, Ray not only makes the most of the baldly sexual lyrics but sings the verses with his own multi-tracked voices, a technique he had long employed. His electric synthesizer solo (which he gets a specific credit for in the liner notes) warbles and wanders about funkily over the comfortable, mid-tempo backing; he loved exploring the new sounds offered by technology and fitting them into the emotion of a song. The lyrics recall “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” with their reference to being brought “coffee in my favorite cup”.

Ray thanks a woman who rescued him from exasperated despair on “I Love You More I Ever Have”, which features the multi-tracked Katrina Hooper Cooke as a one-woman Raelets. The snappy synthesizer backing grooves along, and Ray emotes powerfully with his richer-than-ever voice.

The programmed drum tracks and instrumental backing is made funkier on “Really Got A Hold On Me”, another expression of appreciation rooted in physical love. Ray is multi-tracked again on the choruses, and his main vocal track has him growling with giddy abandon over the top. He gets another credited keyboard solo, again turning in a wild, adventurous performance with each unusually juxtaposed note curling and dying just in time for the next one.

Back of the CD case of Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again.

Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again‘s title song is the sixth track on the CD, a plodding, slower-tempo tune that echoes the sentiments of “I Love You More Than I Ever Have” as is evident from its title. The song is thick with densely vibrating sounds, a wash of glittering emotion over which Ray sings a simple, direct, non-multi-tracked vocal. It’s a great performance, and this time minimalist backing vocals are provided by Brenda Lee Egar and author Billy Osborne. Also like that previous song, “Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again” features a curiously Ray Charles-sounding keyboard solo without any corresponding credit. Liner note oversight or evidence of a Ray copyist in the studio?

Brighter and peppier is “Save Your Lovin’ Just For Me”, a warm and energetic entreaty to a woman to be faithful because she blows his mind and “Venus DeMilo ain’t got nothin’ on you”. Ray adds a solo consisting of his breathy, exploring synthesizer that sounds like a cheeky stand-in for his own voice. The song ends up in a repetitive, longer-than-expected final section dominated by shrill faux trumpet blasts.

“I Just Can’t Get Enough Of You” continues the overall style of the CD with a chorus of Rays rhapsodizing about his sex life with his woman – they can hardly get through a movie before they’re jumping into bed again, and in another comically specific verse the woman goes shopping all day in Los Angeles before coming home and modeling her new lingerie for him. Ray on keyboards and guitarist Jack Wargo each get a solo on this effusive performance.

Except for “What I’d Say”, the first non-Billy Osborne song on Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again follows with “Ensemble”, an unusually soaring, new-millennium R&B song with a slow pace and several verses sung in French by the sultry-voiced Ginie Line. Aside from some English lyrics of his own, Ray even joins her, singing in French on the final verse though he’s mixed a little lower than her. Perhaps he was lacking in confidence about his French. “Ensemble” is the only song on the CD not recorded completely in Los Angeles: it was done in France and in Chicago.

“New Orleans” brings the album back to the United States, and back to Billy Osborne, but this time it’s his first song on Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again not about women and sex. It’s a celebration of the city: “They eat File Gumbo and they stay on the go down in New Orleans!” Ray again does the keyboard solo and his many multi-tracked voices give it an apropos party vibe.

Following on from the “Creole girls” of “New Orleans” is the song “Mr. Creole”, written by Renald Richards, who co-wrote “I’ve Got A Woman” with Ray back in 1954. Over simultaneously haunting and comforting instrumentation, Ray delivers a long spoken monologue – no singing – about New Orleans legend Mr. Creole, who turns out to be a personification of human kindness. With a warm, rambling amiability, Ray lists several instances when “Mr. Creole” visits you, including when a friend lends you some money, the paper boy cheerfully gives you the morning news, or a neighbor invites you for a chat over coffee.

The final song on this final Ray Charles solo album brings the Genius back to the major transformational event of his life: his mother’s death when he was only 14. More than watching his brother George die or going blind or any other tragedy in Ray’s life, it was Retha’s death in 1944 that drove Ray nearly insane and haunted him forever. “Mother” is an affecting and stunning elegy for her and the memory of her love. A chorus of Rays repeats the main eight-line lyrical section several times in this morose elegy, while Ray sings a few extra lines on top.

“Mother” ends with the Ray chorus continuing one last time through the main stanza a cappella, and eventually it slowly fades out, the final sound on the final Ray Charles album being the 72-year old millionaire superstar still openly bleeding from the unbearable wound endured by his 14-year-old self.

Track listing

1. “What I’d Say”
2. “Can You Love Me Like That”
3. “How Did You Feel The Morning After”
4. “I Love You More Than I Ever Have”
5. “Really Got a Hold on Me”
6. “Thanks for Bringing Love Around Again”
7. “Save Your Lovin’ Just For Me”
8. “I Just Can’t Get Enough of You”
9. “Ensemble”
10. “New Orleans”
11. “Mr. Creole”
12. “Mother”

Listen to Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again

Copies of the compact disc of Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again are easy to find, and brand new copies can usually be located for prices lower than most new CDs. It’s a wonderful and inspiring album to end Ray’s storied career with, and well worth seeking out for anyone interested in learning how a living legend feels at a late stage of his career but who still has the fire and enjoyment of guys less than half his age.

Get your own Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again on CD or MP3 from Amazon.