First Impressions: Stone Foundation’s Is Love Enough?

I’ve been grooving to the new Stone Foundation album, Is Love Enough?, this morning and early afternoon. It’s rife with echoes of another era, yet those ancient reverberations never overwhelm the music in the moment; rather, they buttress it in ways near impossible to put into print. I’d planned to offer my thoughts about the set tomorrow, after a few more spins, but one play has led to a second, third, fourth and, now, fifth and sixth. These are days of worry and fear, of not knowing whether or if “normal” life will return, but these songs strip away those unsettling concerns, albeit for just under an hour. The Midlands-based band is providing much-needed sustenance to my weary soul, in other words, and in the best way possible. Their music, as I used to say on my old website, “takes you there, wherever there is.”  

Produced by founding members Neil Jones and Neil Sheasby, the album explores love in its many facets. In the release announcing the LP, Sheasby explains that, “We felt it was the right moment to move the big subjects such as hope, compassion, empathy and indeed love to the forefront of our writing. We wanted to attempt something ambitious.” Suffice it to say, they succeeded.

The album was recorded at Paul Weller’s Black Barn Studios in Surrey. Weller appears on five tracks; he takes lead on “Deeper Love,” provides backing vocals on “Picture a Life” (which, at this stage, is my favorite on the album) and plays guitar on three others; Weller’s Style Council mates Steve White and Mick Talbot also appear. 

They’re not the only guests, however. Durand Jones (of the Indiana-based soul revival band Durand Jones and the Indications) turns in a hypnotic vocal on the heartfelt “Hold on to Love.”

North London soul singer Laville and vocalist Sulene Fleming, who toured with the Brand New Heavies (and now performs with Talbot in Mother Earth), also step to the microphone, as does a Mr Memory (?) and none other than Peter Capaldi, who starred as the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who. The stars aren’t Weller or the other walk-ons, however, but Jones, Sheasby and their band, not to mention the songs themselves. They conjure the soul, R&B and funk of days gone by, from Average White Band to Earth, Wind & Fire to Parliament-Funkadelic to Style Council, while providing musical epiphany after musical epiphany. “I love this,” Diane said earlier of “Changes”…

…and, just now, “this music is so good!” That sums it up, I think.

The closing track features Capaldi reciting a quote from Vincent Van Gogh. “It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” The Stone Foundation has lived up to those words here. It’s one of my favorite albums of the year, thus far.

My ordered LP is still in transit, so my track-list pic is from Apple Music: