Mavis Staples – Sad and Beautiful World
‘I am the last, Daddy, last of us,’ sings Mavis Staples with a trembling voice on “Human Mind”, and in that one line, the weight of 75 years of American music history comes together. The last surviving member of The Staple Singers, the voice that sang the Freedom Highway alongside Martin Luther King Jr., the woman who fused gospel, soul and the civil rights movement into something inseparable – she is still here, at 86, and she has something to say. Where Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone have already left us, Mavis Staples is the forgotten legend who refuses to disappear. And with “Sad and Beautiful World”, her fourteenth solo album, she provides proof that she may well be one of the most important American voices of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is not a nostalgic farewell, not a sentimental victory lap. This is a statement from an artist who remains more relevant than most musicians a third of her age.
When Staples stood in a sold-out TivoliVredenburg in early August, shuffling in her slip-on shoes towards the microphone, something magical happened. That deep, earthy, spiritual voice filled the room as if not a single day had passed since the glory days of The Staple Singers. She sang “Chicago” and “Human Mind” that evening, songs that three months later would form the heart of this album. It was already clear: here stood someone who still understood the essence of what American music means.
Producer Brad Cook, who recently scored triumphs with Waxahatchee and Bon Iver, opts for a brilliantly simple approach: he builds everything around Mavis’s voice. He began the sessions at Lost Boy Sound and Chicago Recording Company with only drums and piano, recording her vocals first and adding the instrumentation afterwards. The result is a production so transparent that you hear every grainy detail of her 86-year-old vocal cords, every emotional crack, every breath – and that is precisely the point. This is not a voice to be polished; it is a voice forged by 75 years of history.
The song choices are brilliant and unexpected. The opening track, “Chicago”, written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, is transformed into a personal story about the Great Migration that the Staples family themselves undertook. With Buddy Guy on guitar – who made that same journey from the South to Chicago – and Derek Trucks’s sliding lines, the track becomes a locomotive charging forward with the force of a mass migration. This is where Staples’s voice belongs: broad, warm, filled with the history of thousands of voices who made the same journey before her.
“Beautiful Strangers” by Kevin Morby gains new urgency in Staples’s hands. The references to police brutality, the death of Freddie Gray, the Pulse nightclub shooting – she sings them with the authoritative calm of someone who has already seen all this, who has survived it. MJ Lenderman and Rick Holmstrom contribute subtle guitar lines that give the words space to breathe, to carry weight.
The title track “Sad and Beautiful World”, originally by Mark Linkous’s Sparklehorse from 1995, is a funeral march that deals with the impossible reconciliation between ‘sad’ and ‘beautiful’. Linkous, who died by suicide in 2010, wrote the song in the aftermath of his near-fatal overdose. Colin Croom of Twin Peaks adds pedal steel that winds through the track like a lament. Staples’s whispering intensity turns it into a benediction: ‘Sometimes days go speeding past, sometimes this one seems like the last.’ Her interpretation is a meditation on mortality from someone who sees the end approaching but still seeks beauty.
The emotional core of the album is “Human Mind”, the only original song, written specially by Hozier and Allison Russell for this project. ‘Even in these days I find, this far down the line, I find good in us, sometimes,’ she sings, her voice floating above that last word as if she must convince herself. Staples admitted she cried during the first recording; it is not hard to understand why. ‘I deal in loss, Daddy, I am the last, Daddy, last of us. Ain’t always easy to believe. I miss my family.’ This is a Muscle Shoals-style crescendo in which eight decades of American history descend upon a single voice.
Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” becomes a hymn to resilience. The way she gathers strength as the song progresses, how her voice cracks with emotion on the line ‘they’re going to hear from me’, how she evokes 250 years of American history in the phrasing of a single word, ‘thundercloud’, halfway through the sombre, horn-laden R&B arrangement – this is craftsmanship at the highest level.
Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got To Have Peace” is sung as if it were written yesterday. And why not? The wars Mayfield described, the leaders ‘too dumb to understand the message,’ Staples sings it in 2025 with the same urgency as in the seventies. Her work is not finished. Dr King would have been proud, but not surprised.
The album closes with Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love”, a nod to The Staple Singers’ Muscle Shoals recording sessions. It is a gentle landing after an emotionally exhausting journey, a reminder that love and connection ultimately prevail.
If criticism is possible, it is that some songs in the middle, “Hard Times” and “Godspeed”, feel slightly less urgent than the rest. Gillian Welch’s “Hard Times” is beautifully sung but lacks the emotional intensity of the highlights. Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” works better, but even here it feels as though Staples could have dug a little deeper.
But these are small remarks about an album that, in a broader sense, is a triumph. “Sad and Beautiful World” is a monument from an artist who refuses to be silent, who at 86 still believes in the power of music to reach people, to change them, to comfort them. It is an album that shows that experience, life lessons and perseverance ultimately outweigh youthful energy.
A masterpiece? Time will tell. Tens are not given lightly; you earn them only if the work withstands the test of time. But this is without doubt one of the strongest albums in Staples’s impressive second act, and an essential document from a living legend who continues to remind us what American music, in its purest form, can achieve. Mavis Staples is the last of her generation. Let us listen while we still can. (9/10) (Anti Records)
