Day 21: Neo-Soul

Remy Shand
The Way I Feel

I don’t care much for most of what passes for rhythm and blues these days. The kind of music that certain snobs and I derisively qualify as “contemporary” R&B or separate from rhythm and blues altogether with the tag “urban,” today finds an outlet via the unceasingly grating tunes of Ne-Yo, Mario, Ciara and Omarian, among others. Had it not been coined by former Motown president Kedar Massenburg in the late 90s, the term neo-soul—or some variant thereof—probably would have emerged anyway, as a necessary means of distinguishing between the slick and shallow flavors of the week and such deeply soulful artists as D’Angelo, Maxwell, and Erykah Badu. Unfortunately, the success of a few genuinely talented neo-soul arts spawned a movement, which in turn led overeager labels and budding artists to co-opt the term and bits of the aesthetic without paying proper musical tribute to genre they claimed to emulate. The neo-soul label thus quickly fell out of favor among those with discerning taste and ceased to be an effective means of elevating a select few modern R&B singers above their peers.

While the label may no longer do it justice, Remy Shand’s 2002 debut album The Way I Feel is neo-soul at its finest. A blue-eyed crooner (Canadian, no less), Shand grew up on R&B and soul and the influence of soul legends Marvin Gaye and Al Green is borne out on his only release to this day. “Rocksteady,” for example, has a prototypical Green groove while the title track sounds like it an unreleased outtake from Gaye’s I Want You. The extraordinarily talented Shand recorded and mixed the entire album himself, over the course of four years at his home in Winnipeg, and with help of US distribution by Motown, the record managed more than respectable commercial success: it spawned three music videos (“Take a Message,” “The Way I Feel” and “Rocksteady”), went gold, and received four Grammy nominations. So what happened to Shand? It’s unclear. Amazingly, the information age notwithstanding, it appears that there haven’t been any public releases of information about him since late 2003, when Shand’s official website stated, as it still does today: “Remy is back in the studio, and you’ve come to the right place to listen to his new song ‘Day in the Shade.’” Here’s hoping the mystery will be solved soon.

Watch video clips of Remy Shand’s “Take a Message,” “The Way I Feel,” and “Rocksteady.”