Today the NAACP award-winning author, Grammy-nominated producer, and multimedia storyteller The Reverend Shawn Amos shares his new track “Back To The Beginning,” the second single from his upcoming album Soul Brother No. 1. The song builds from a slow-burning soul groove to a revelatory crescendo courtesy of the celebrated Nashville gospel group The McCrary Sisters who lend their powerful vocals to the song. Soul Brother No. 1 will be released on May 3 via Immediate Family Records and is currently available to pre-order here.
Listen: Shawn Amos - “Back To The Beginning” featuring The McCrary Sisters
"It's a song about looking yourself in the mirror and learning to love what you see,” writes Amos. “Like much of the album, it's also a reminder that our time here is limited. We can use it hating or use it loving. I’m working hard to love."
Amos also recently released a video for the hard-driving blues track “Revelation.”
Soul Brother No. 1 represents both the culmination of a unique, two-decade-plus artistic career, and a breakthrough in an ongoing journey of self-exploration. From the get-go, Amos has expressed an ever-evolving musical vision through rootsy Americana, singer-songwriter pop, and, as harmonica ace The Reverend Shawn Amos, the blues. Through “The Rev,” Amos immersed himself in African American culture, directly linking to the ongoing story of his people’s struggles, triumphs, and unshakable joy. “The whole reason I started playing the blues,” he says, “was it connected me to my race in a way that I hadn’t fully understood. With Soul Brother No. 1, I’m taking that journey even deeper.”
Seeking new depths, Amos and producer James Saez (Social Distortion, The Road Kings) crafted a sonic world redolent of the socially conscious, Afrocentric ‘70s soul and funk. Amos and Saez assembled a dream team: drummer Steve Ferrone (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Average White Band, Chaka Khan), bassist Jerry “Wyzard” Seay (Stevie Nicks, Keb’ Mo’, Mother’s Finest), keyboardist-songwriter Dapo Torimiro (Lauryn Hill, Earth, Wind & Fire), and longtime Amos guitarist Chris “Doctor” Roberts.
The fierce vitality and spirit of self-reconnection underpinning Soul Brother No. 1 initially emerged through words and story rather than song, as Amos dug deep into his life and generational experience to author his first published book, the NAACP Image Award-winning youth novel Cookies & Milk, a semi-autobiographical tale based on his latchkey kid years as the son of cookie entrepreneur Wally “Famous” Amos and erstwhile nightclub chanteuse Shirley “Shirl-ee May” Ellis. Like the book’s protagonist, Ellis Johnson, Amos was a Black child of divorce with mostly white friends, struggling to find his identity in colorful-but-chaotic ‘70s Hollywood. In those hothouse times, Amos’s hustler father bequeathed him preternatural willpower to manifest big dreams, but feelings of blood kinship came as much from Parliament-Funkadelic, Isaac Hayes, and the Jackson 5 as they did from Amos’s broken home. The rich, righteous world of Cookies & Milk – and 2023 sequel Ellis Johnson Might Be Famous – emboldened songwriter Amos to tap back into his family of choice: the seminal soul artists of the Black Power era.
In the thick of making Soul Brother No. 1, Amos realized, “I’ve spent so much of my life partially dimming my own light. No more. With this album, I am uncovering every last fucking root, undoing my own programming. I was brought up to think I was white, cut off from my own roots. No more. I spent weeks trying to figure out who this version of Black Pride is for me. Now I know. Soul Brother No. 1 is who I am.”
