Based in Philadelphia, Son Little (born Aaron Livingstone) released his debut album in 2015 under the ANTI- label (Mavis Staples, Bettye LaVette). Receiving critical success for his original material, he also played on Mavis Staples’ Grammy Award-winning performance of the blues classic ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’ in 2017.

For his latest EP invisible, Little enlisted the help of French producer Renaud Letang (Feist, Manu Chao). “I’d always produced myself in the past,” explains Little, “but it’s easy to get caught up in an endless quest for perfection when you do that. Working with Renaud let me see what I was doing from an outsider’s perspective, let me see the songs from a bird’s-eye view. It was liberating to have someone there to help me focus on the bigger picture like that.”

Opening track ‘hey rose’ is a fluid, sexy jaunt tinged with psychedelia. The song pulses with romantic excitement with Little enraptured beyond words – ‘There’s a big brass band in the park today / Those low notes speak what my mouth can’t say.’ The next track ‘about her. again.’ changes tack and addresses a fleeting romance with a raw soul melody evocative of Otis Redding. Inserting tense pauses into the song’s structure, Little also plays into the natural rasps and breaks in his voice. ‘i’m a builder (outtake)’ sounds like an apocryphal folk tune with poetic, ruminating lyrics.

Before closing the EP with a moodier remix of ‘hey rose’, Little delivers a sparse cover of Love’s ‘Skid’, from their ‘lost’ album Black Beauty. Punctuating the chorus with jittery guitar, Little captures the melancholy behind this narrative of a homeless man whose suffering is ignored. “It’s easy to become desensitized to people’s pain when you encounter so much of it every day, but every single person you see struggling, wherever they’re at, is a human being with their own story.”

(Image copyright: ANTI-)