"I got onto this thing where I was trying to combine the sound of Bach, the Cello Suites, and how simple they are yet really, really strong," says Van Hunt. "I don't know if you've ever just sat and listened to a cello, but it growls almost like a distorted guitar, and yet it's really pretty."
Artist/producer/multi-instrumentalist Hunt is on the phone from the West Coast talking about his new album What Were You Hoping For?, in stores Sept. 27.
"So I wanted something that was that raw and nasty like a cello, combined with some compositional ideas I had with a punk attitude like The Stooges, you know? I was trying to combine all of that, and that's how it came out [laughs]."
If you're a longtime fan of Hunt, whose mid-Aughts records are some of the most perfectly crafted, criminally under-sung R&B records of the past decade, this might not be what you were expecting. Then again, if you're among the lucky few who have followed his career, you already know about his Stooges fascination — he covered "No Sense of Crime" from the classic Kill City demos for 2006's On the Jungle Floor — and you know that his concept of soul draws heavily from the more psychedelic corners of the Sly Stone and Prince catalogs. He's an artist who's never been easy to peg, and on Hoping he's obliterating any chance of that ever happening.
"Believe it or not," says Hunt, "I've been trying to do something completely new for three, four years now. Probably five years. It started with the Popular record in 2007 and 2008. I was really just trying to find my own place in the history of music recording."
For a minute there, it looked like Hunt's place was going to be in the footnotes and asides of music history. If we can be blunt for a moment, Capitol Records fucked up his first two records. Like, really, really fucked them up. Capitol had two genius records on their hands, yet they somehow couldn't generate any heat. Chalk it up to music industry turbulence or misplaced priorities, but Van Hunt and On the Jungle Floor should have been huge, especially on the strength of singles like "Dust" and "Character." And Popular ... well, that one never even made it to stores, as it was shelved during Terra Firma Capital's takeover of EMI and its subsequent shakeout. If there was ever any evidence that the music industry doesn't know its ass from its elbow, the failure of the first two VH records to make a splash would be it.
Hoping, Hunt's first album as an independent artist, should change all that. A bold artistic statement and an album of intensely satisfying, challenging listening, Hoping is unlike anything we've heard from Van Hunt before. Honestly, it's unlike anything you've probably ever heard — unless, of course, you're the sort of person who sets up two stereos and listens to Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On and Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade simultaneously. And while Hoping is a clear break with the very notion of genre conventions, it's not a clear break from the rest of Hunt's catalog — the songs are still catchy, and his voice is still beguiling. What Were You Hoping For? is still a Van Hunt record, but it's clear that we're getting a much closer, more intimate look into the man's brain.
"I'm never shocked by what I do, because the things that go on in my head are so beautiful and alarming all at once. I'm the quintessential, stereotypical artist with all kinds of boogeymen running around in my head," says Hunt. "So I'm never really shocked by what comes out. I'm actually surprised it comes out as close to being what's in my head."
Those boogeymen make for incredible muses. Songs like "Watching You Go Crazy Is Driving Me Insane," "A Time Machine Is My New Girlfriend" and "Designer Jeans" pulse with crazed energy and reverberate with emotional intensity while digging deep, gnarly grooves that recall — and this sounds a bit crazy even to us — early Funkadelic getting the once-over from Van der Graaf Generator. Slower tunes like "Moving Targets," "It's a Mysterious Hustle" and "Plum" have the clearest connections to his R&B roots, but are swathed in some of the spaciest, most swirling sounds you'll find this side of Lee Perry's classic dubs. And "Cross Dresser"! Oh man, with its barreling punk-rock guitar riff, faint Curtis Mayfield vocal inflections and French-language speechifying on the bridge, "Cross Dresser" is a perfect post-pop anthem. Hoping is a radical departure from, well, just about everything. Even if Hunt doesn't see it that way.
"I'm always surprised that people assume if someone spends their money on an R. Kelly or an Anthony Hamilton record that means they automatically don't know what a distorted guitar sounds like," says Hunt. "I thought that the people that were going to follow my career as an artist anyway would be able to move with the music. I don't think it's like trying explain physics to somebody."
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