...As some may or may not know, I had the pleasure of working with Miss Brown for many years as her A&R and PA, it was her that pushed me to express myself through music and gave me the inspiration to what i'm doing now. So let me tell you a few things you might not know about the new Jocelyn Brown "Unreleased" album that is out now, worldwide on itunes....
..."Unreleased" is a fascinating insight at Jocelyn's unreleased demo's over the past 15 years. When I was working with her, I remember one morning she came into the kitchen and pulled out a bundle of old DAT tapes, she then from her handbag pulled out her personal DAT player and casualy told me that she'd found a collection of demo songs that she wanted me to hear.
The story goes something like this. apparently she had been asked by a major lable (who will remain nameless) to record and write an album, so Jocelyn, being Jocelyn hired all the studio equipment and had it set up in her own lounge room. She then called on the production skills of Al McDowell, a bass player and producer that has played alongside Don Blackman, Weldon Irvine and many others as well as JB back in the day... Well, he came over from New York and recorded, "Real Thing" "Find Someone To Love" "I Love You" "Sweet Fine baby" 'Vacation Time" "Foever" and "Don't Make A Mistake" (many of which feature players from Incognito)
So, the first one she plays me is "Find Someone To Love"... I was speechless.
Apparently, she had produced all these wonderful songs for the major label, and when she took the finished songs back to them, they didn't think the music would do very well as it wasn't very commercial sounding... Basically, they didn't know what to do with it, or how to promote it so they cancelled the project. This is typical of major labels, many of them don't have any idea about soulful music, and are scared to put anything out that is soulful and heartfelt... So it all worked out OK, their loss was our gain.
She then went on to play the rest as well as a few beautiful acoustic songs she had done with the Bacci Brothers... It was the that I said to her that she should put these out as unreleased demos... She agreed, so between us we compiled an albums worth of her favourites.
It was released on a small scale through CD in 2006 but was never given the right promotion, as the investors for Digisoul at the time were another bunch of people who didn't understand soul music, so after a catalog of disasters with this release, and Digisoul nearly being taken over by useless maniacs that didn't understand what we were trying to do! So, myself and my brother (together we own Digisoul) decided to call it a day with these people and get our company back to being owned by just ourselves.
5 years have passed since then and Digisoul is back, this time doing things the right way, by ourselves with nobody else's intervention. So it was a natural progression for us to re-release this lovely album on a worldwide scale through iTunes.
"Unreleased" a wonderful collection of soulful and beautifully written songs by Jocelyn Brown, and I highly recommend it for your ipod!
You can get the whole album now on itunes: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/unreleased/id419142225
