T.L. BARRETT: SAIL AWAY (WITH GOD!)

T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir: Like a Ship
From Like a Ship (Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 1971/Light in the Attic, 2010)

First off…just wanted to share that this has been a pretty intense summer. As some of you know, I have a day job and this summer, I dedicated myself to taking care of as much academic commitments as I could take on. That’s been a good thing – an important thing – but it’s also left me completely drained by day’s end. I’m just creatively and emotionally tapped and since so much of my time invested in this blog is based on emotional passion, the more drained I am, the less I have to put in here.

As always, this is all to say that I’m ever appreciative for people who put up with these gaps in postings and I wish I had all the time and energy to make this more consistent than a cycle of droughts and floods (the last few months, mostly droughts). But I’m still here. And I’ll be here. Believe that.

Anyways, back to the music…I was really happy to see that Light in the Attic is going to be reissuing T.L Barrett’s gospel soul masterpiece, Like a Ship. I first hear the title song on the recent Numero Group gospel funk comp, and it’s been haunting me for a minute. The effort between Chicago’s Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir is lucky meeting of elements that couldn’t have been assumed to automatically work so well together. I’m sure there’s some great sub-genre of “choir soul” but the singing style can be hard to corral into a solid R&B format but they sound incredible here.