Album Review: Sad and Beautiful World by Mavis Staples
Mavis Staples’ fourteenth solo outing finds her looking back and leaning in: it’s a record about survival, sorrow, and joy by one of America’s great voices that speaks to our present.
The first thing that any review of Mavis Staples must do is acknowledge the weight of history she carries. She wasn’t just around when gospel met soul. She was one of the people who made it happen. Born into the Staple Singers, she became the group’s lead vocalist in her teens, her contralto floating over her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples’ tremolo-soaked guitar and her siblings’ harmonies. This family band spent the 1950s and 1960s preaching in Black churches across segregated Chicago and then taking the civil-rights struggle into pop charts; they were among the first to cover a young Bob Dylan, and they scored hits like “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself” while sharing stages with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and marching in Selma. By the time Stax Records marketed them as soul stars, Staples had learned to make a universe out of a handful of lines through improvisation and call-and-response, and she has remained a beacon of moral authority ever since. In her eighties, she’s the lone surviving Staple, now decorated with blues, rock, and gospel Hall of Fame inductions and a Kennedy Center honor, yet she still tours, speaks out, and—crucially—still sings.
Whereas 2019’s We Get By was a fiery Jeff Tweedy-produced rallying cry, Sad and Beautiful World is its quieter, more contemplative sister. It’s produced by Brad Cook, a younger musician best known for work with Bon Iver and Waxahatchee, and it deliberately builds everything around Staples’ weathered voice: Cook started the sessions with nothing but drums and piano, recorded her vocals, then layered instruments and guests so as not to crowd her. The resulting ten-song set spans seven decades of the American songbook and blends originals with covers of Tom Waits, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Frank Ocean, Curtis Mayfield, and Leonard Cohen. Cameos from Buddy Guy, Derek Trucks, Jeff Tweedy, Bonnie Raitt, Justin Vernon, and Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) nod toward Staples’ inter-generational reach, but the focus never drifts away from the singer. At 86, her contralto isn’t as forceful as it once was, but it has thickened into something huskier and more intimate. When she drops into a low moan or cradles a note on the edge of breaking, it feels like she’s right next to you.
Opening with a cover of Tom Waits’ “Chicago” is a memoir. The original is a boisterous carny shuffle; Staples turns it into a gospel-blues stomp, a high-octane journey north that mirrors the Great Migration she and Buddy Guy actually made as children. Buddy Guy and Derek Trucks supply wiry guitar lines that intertwine like train tracks, but Cook wisely keeps them in the margins; the locomotive here is Staples herself, her voice pushing through the chorus like a preacher urging the congregation onward. “Beautiful Strangers,” the Kevin Morby ballad, is even more affecting: she sings “If you ever hear the gunshot… think of mother/I am a rock” in a tender, almost lullaby-like cadence, as if offering comfort from the front lines. The title track, written by the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, uses a funeral-march beat and spartan lyrics to find grace in grief; Staples carries the song with a whispered intensity, turning its resignation (“this sad and beautiful world”) into a benediction. Gillian Welch’s “Hard Times” (“we’re gonna make it yet”) becomes a hand-clapping call-and-response, the band building from a quiet hymn to a roiling country-soul groove while Staples’ ad-libs summon the old church. It is the moment when sadness and hope collide most directly.
Original written for her by Hozier and Allison Russell, “Human Mind,” swings amiably between folk and soul, but the lyrics (“Even in these days, I find… good in it sometimes”) feel like a Hallmark card compared with Staples’ own lived complexity. “Hard Times” and “Sad and Beautiful World” shimmer because they find poetry in suffering; “Human Mind” tells us to look for the silver lining. Her reading of Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” fares better: backed only by keyboards and murmuring guitar, she sinks into the song’s pledges of unconditional love (“There will be mountains you won’t move/I’ll always be there for you”), and those promises sound weightier coming from someone who has spent a lifetime offering sanctuary. “We Got to Have Peace,” Curtis Mayfield’s plea, is framed by Staples as both prayer and protest; when she sings “we don’t need no war,” her voice wavers and then steels, and the groove behind her—Rick Holmstrom’s guitar twang, hypnotic bass—feels like marching feet. Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” is the record’s most quietly radical moment: its refrain “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in” is delivered with a simmering anger that suggests choosing peace doesn’t mean acquiescence. By the time she reaches Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind” and The Temptations’ “Everybody Needs Love,” her voice has softened into a storyteller’s croon; she sounds exhausted but resolute, closing the record not with triumph but with an invitation to hold one another.
Cook’s production serves these performances more than it surprises. The arrangements stay in a mid-tempo pocket, often built around piano, pedal steel, and lightly brushed drums. When the guest players appear—Bonnie Raitt’s slide guitar on “Satisfied Mind,” Justin Vernon’s ghostly harmonies on “Human Mind,” Katie Crutchfield’s country twang on “Hard Times”—they ornament rather than reshape the songs. That restraint is admirable; it allows Staples’ voice to sit front and center. Yet the uniformly languid pacing also means the album never quite achieves lift-off. Waits’ “Chicago” hints at the rollicking show that could have been, but after that opener, the tempos rarely exceed a sway. That’s intentional; the record is about contemplation and community, but it may frustrate listeners expecting the fiery energy of her live shows. There’s also the unavoidable fact that Staples, for all her interpretive skills, isn’t writing these songs; she remains dependent on collaborators to give her material. When the songs are as strong as “Hard Times” or “Anthem,” she transforms them into staples (no pun intended). When they’re as slight as “Human Mind,” her charisma can’t fully disguise their thinness.
But the album’s power lies in its proximity to heaviness and hope. Staples has always believed that singing is a form of testimony, and in these covers she testifies not just to her own endurance but to the endurance of the songs themselves. By spanning from Waits to Frank Ocean, she collapses generational divides and underscores her role as a bridge builder. Her voice is no longer the booming contralto of her youth, but its cracks and rasp convey experience in ways a smoother tone never could. When she bellyaches, “I’ll always be there for you” on “Godspeed,” the promise feels earned because she has already shown up for decades. The record adds to her legacy by embracing vulnerability: it’s less about rallying the masses and more about sitting with them in mourning and joy. That shift is appropriate for an elder stateswoman who has nothing left to prove but still so much to give.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Chicago,” “Sad and Beautiful World,” “Godspeed”