“Everything old is new again” has rung true for so long that the expression has become the embodiment of itself. But it’s also extremely applicable to Texas music. The sixties are certainly alive and well with Leon Bridges serving as a contemporary analog, while Leon Bridges and Gary Clark, Jr. are the 2016 versions of Sam Cooke and Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. “We’ve got our modern day Sam Cooke, we’ve got our modern day [blues guitarist], but we don’t have our modern day Ronettes or Shirelles or Crystals,” singer Charlie Faye explains. “But there was something so cool about that sound and those groups—I just felt like if nobody’s picking up on that yet, wouldn’t it be so much more fun to do that than just another solo record?”
To that end, Faye—who rocked a soulful singer-songwriter vibe on previous records like You Were Fine, You Weren’t Even Lonely and Wilson Street—decided to tap her friends and her collection of vintage dresses for her new project Charlie Faye and the Fayettes. Partnering with Akina Adderley (granddaughter of saxophone colossus Cannonball Adderley) and regular collaborator BettySoo, Faye finally had the chance to memorialize one of her favorite genres. “I love the sixties girl groups and I always have. Carole King was my idol when I was a little kid, and I wanted to follow in her footsteps and became a singer/songwriter—but she also wrote so many of those sixties pop hits,” Faye says. “I think the singer-songwriter thing and the sixties pop thing aren’t as far removed from each other as you might think. The songs I was writing were feeling more and more like that, and so I made a conscious decision to make a sixties soul-pop record.”
The self-titled debut from Charlie Faye and the Fayettes is out June 10. In the meantime, take a listen to “Coming Round The Bend” below, and hear for yourself that Texas is ready to make the girl-group new again.
