CURTIS HARDING WAS BORN FOR SOUL MUSIC

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The singer Curtis Harding’s history in the industry is as rich and layered as the music he creates, offering a unique take on soul music that has percolated through a whole plethora of genres, creating a textured and nuanced sound. His latest record, Face Your Fear, sees Harding step it up a gear, with Danger Mouse and his companion Sam Cohen serving as producers. There is an increased sense of melancholy on this new release, which Harding ascribes to “more layers—and I think that makes it seem like its sentiment is different.” After a first album entitled Soul Power that was an exploration of the raw energy of music, Face Your Fear offers the idea that music, for him, now carries something more in the way of resistance. These added layers give his songs the depth and space for them to breathe, wherein this extra something can found.

Brought up by an itinerant gospel singer mother, Harding spent his formative years traveling across America from church to church, all the while slowly absorbing the soulful music that constantly surrounded him. His path into the genre can seem somewhat predestined, but it is clear that his talent is due to much more than happenstance. He explains that in his late teens he “used to do promotions for a record label called The Face. Whenever The Face would put out a new group or a new record, we would be the guys who would be on the street promoting, putting up flyers at the clubs and stuff. CeeLo [Green] had been working on his first record and a session broke out and [so we] just started singing and rapping.” This stroke of good timing might harden one’s faith in the invisible hand of fate, but Harding argues, “We definitely put ourselves in the environment where it could happen that way. We knew what we were doing.”

Harding’s glowing laugh bellows through the phone as he offers a refreshingly self-conscious admission of his ambition. His path may look organic on the surface, but he knew exactly what he needed to do to get to where he wanted to be. Green proved to be a valuable mentor for Harding from then on. “He invited us out to his studio where he was recording his first record and I got some takes on that,” Harding recalls. “The time came for him to go on tour and he needed backup singers. I was one of the guys that he chose to go, so the rest is history. That’s how our working relationship started.”

The years spent on tour with Green were formative, Harding explains. “I learned a lot about the business, a lot about being on tour. I was around when he and Brian [Burton, who performs as Danger Mouse] came up with Gnarls Barkley,” he recalls. ”We were all in the studio when he recorded ‘Crazy.’ I was around. I learned a lot about how to work in the studio, how to sing, writing on the spot and coming up with different stuff. It was like an internship.” St. Elsewhere, on which the hit “Crazy” appears, is one of the seminal albums of the Naughties, a virtuosic performance from both Green and Danger Mouse, and Harding’s presence through its creation process undoubtedly helped push him along his learning curve.

After this first plunge into the industry, recording and touring and being caught up in all the swells and riptides that go with it, Harding began to get swept up. “I moved to Toronto. I wanted to try and push reset and figure out exactly what it was I was doing,” he explains. “I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to represent myself in the music business. Sometimes [the music business] can be one of those situations where you get caught up, especially with rap with all the partying, and I just needed to catch my breath and press reset.” This more reflective, quieter outlook in Canada led Harding to write many of the songs that appear on Soul Power. An exceptionally strong track from the album, “Freedom,” reveals this forging of his identity through resilience and truth and Harding’s subtly adept lyricism: “So louden your heart and quiet your mind/The shackles you wear are papier-mâché/They’re not really there, so be on your way.”

More than a decade after Harding witnessed firsthand the creation of Gnarls Barkley, the singer was recently in the studio with Danger Mouse working on his new single “Wednesday Morning Atonement” from Face Your Fear. “Working with him was a dream come true, seriously,” Harding says. “I’ve known Danger for over probably twelve years now and when he was doing Gnarls Barkley, I was sitting there just dreaming of him one day producing a record for me. It was cool to get the chance to finally have him producing stuff. Honestly, I was like a kid in the studio.” The track is a nod to the early days of soul, with a Fifties-style violin introduction before a strong descending guitar riff flickers behind Harding’s powerful and delayed vocals. The song is textured, with a key change and a falsetto that becomes disconcerting at times, pointing towards a deviation from traditional soul or rock norms.

This added depth to the single applies for the whole album thanks to the introduction of Cohen, Danger Mouse’s close affiliate who took over as the main producer on the record. Cohen and Harding quickly formed a strong, “even-keel” relationship and the music followed suit. Face Your Fear is a wonderfully crafted record with a number of standout tracks. “On and On” is ignited by a propulsive drum snare, allowing the rhythm to sprint alongside the infectious soulful melody. Harding’s lilting falsettos are magnificent enough before he switches back to his head voice and his true vocal power shines through. In the next track, “Go As You Are,” the vocals seem like a silky ribbon slowly snaking in a soft breeze, like an elegant gloss to the laid-back, funky feel of the song.

There is an effortless in these tracks that Harding also retains in his live performance. Back in November at the EchoPlex, in the less Hollywood end of Los Angeles, his voice was pitch perfect, the band was relaxed, and he was, quite simply, the leather-jacketed, ice-cube cool frontman that you expect from hearing his songs. Recently, he took this suave outset to Europe, where oddly, he is generally better received than in his home nation. “I’ve been getting good responses all across Europe,” he explains about his regularly sold-out shows. “For the most part, Europe has been really, really busy, even on the first record. The US has been the one that’s been kind of hard to crack. I do really well on the West Coast and I do really well on the East Coast, but the in-between states are a little slow, but I think it’s coming along.” Although it’s not quite on the level of Searching for Sugarman, Harding admits there is something strange about being better received in foreign countries than your own. “It can kind of set you back a little bit,” he admits. “Of course you want where you’re from to respond well to your music, but at the same time it also means we have more work to do and that I haven’t arrived. I feel like once you get to a point where you feel like you’ve arrived, you can prophesize.” His heartwarming laugh comes chuckling down the phone line once again.

Harding is self-aware enough to realize there’s still more to do in the short-term future, but long-term he still has ambition—he’s not going to be resting on any laurels anytime soon. “I think five years into the future, I would like to be able to facilitate whatever I want. I want to get behind the scenes and work with other artists, I want to get my hands dirty doing that. For the live show, I want to step up the stage production too. If I want to bring in an orchestra, I would like to be able to afford to do that or be able to be more of a shot caller as far as being able to have big-budget trills. I think there’s something to be said about marrying the æsthetics of what you’re trying to get across to the music. If you can do that successfully, then you’re pulling something off that is going to stick in people’s minds forever.”

With his two records and his powerfully captivating performances, which he’ll be bringing across America with a tour starting next week, Curtis Harding has proved he is an artist of integrity, of ambition, and most crucially of talent. He is unequivocally soulful, giving off a sense of debonair about it all that’s seemingly accidentally pieced together, but it’s clear there’s intent in his actions and he has worked hard to get where he is. From the soulful beginnings of his gospel childhood, through trials and tribulations of the perennially challenging music industry, to then finally releasing two wonderfully soul-baring albums, there is no doubt that he is about to arrive in the USA.

Find Your Fear is out now. Harding begins his tour on March 20 at Turf Club, St. Paul.