Rudy Love & The Encore: New sound with old soul
Photo Courtesy of Midtopia
Wichita’s Rudy Love & The Encore’s new album, 11, is—as the title implies—11 striking songs of soul, funk, R&B, and hip hop sure to make you move, groove, and utterly lose your mind. As anyone who’s seen this six-piece band live can attest, they are a group that acknowledges its history, while also being rooted in forward thinking. As to the former, the very name of the band pays homage to frontman Rudy Love Jr.’s father, the legendary Rudy Love Sr., and as to the latter, this new album is being released via Buy Before You Stream—an initiative that gives fans access to purchase exclusive vinyls directly from artists before released on streaming platforms.
This means that, rather than waiting on that copy of a record you as a fan want to hold in your hands because you know that buying physical media sees far more money going into the pockets of an artist than the pittance they’ll receive from streaming, you not only get to support them, but you get to hear this music before the rest of the world. While it’s not the first album in Rudy Love & The Encore’s 12-year history, there’s something about it that makes it different, says Love.
“This one’s really special in that it’s really a tribute to this band, specifically” Love explains. There have been many different iterations of this group, he says, calling it more of a collective than it is a band, but this particular lineup at this point in time has taken songs that have heretofore only been live and committed them to recordings for the first time.
Photo Courtesy of Midtopia
“It’s new and old music so, if it feels like it has an old soul, it’s because it does,” continues the frontman.
At the moment, Rudy Love & The Encore is comprised of Rudy Love Jr. on vocals and keys, Marrque Nunley on drums, Rachelle Love on percussion, Mariel Jacoda on vocals, Sherdeill (DJ) Breathett on bass, and Willy Simms on guitar. And while each member gets a chance to shine on this album, Love also sees 11 as an introduction to Jacoda as co-lead vocalist.
When you see Rudy Love & The Encore, you’ll see Jacoda sing back up for the first few songs. When she steps up and takes lead, jaws hit the floor. Jacoda had been with the band when they were in Los Angeles, and Love jokes that he “somehow tricked her into moving into Kansas” to be with the group. With her back as part of The Encore, it now feels like the band is complete.
“This is the beginning of something really special, the music we’re working on now,” Love says. “It really puts me more in the background because we’re all taking leads at the same time and it’s gonna be something really special.”
A surprising addition to the six member Rudy Love & The Encore lineup is Los Angeles rapper D Smoke on “Flex.” Love met the rapper as part of a gathering of the Inglewood collective known as Woodworks and it led to Love keeping an eye on that group for the next decade. So, when Midtopia put on last year’s Elsewhere Festival in Wichita, Love reached out and asked the rapper if he’d like to be part of it.
While they didn’t perform together, when “Flex” was performed live on the stage at Wave, Love sent it out to D Smoke a couple of months later saying, “Hey, it would be so cool if you could jump on this, but again, I know it’s a long shot.”
“He just was like, ‘Yeah, I’m down,’” marvels Love. “He asked me a couple questions about the song—said, ‘What is this about to you? What does this mean to you?’ Then, he sent a rough copy of it with the lyrics, and I couldn’t believe it.”
Love had left a space open for a little bit of an instrumental piece right before Smoke’s verse was supposed to come in, and he decided to just rap over the whole thing. It’s an amazing guest spot, and it feels like D Smoke is part of everything, rather than just a visitor, and demonstrates that each step Rudy Love & The Encore take is just a little further than before. Love jokes that while it can feel more tripping forward sometimes than actual steps, it always feels like there’s momentum.
Photo Courtesy of Midtopia
“The Encore is a small part of something that feels so much bigger to us,” Love reflects. “It feels like our entire world or our entire city is shifting into this beautiful space where creatives are creating more and being more bold.”
Part of that is Midtopia, the organization behind Buy Before You Stream. Midtopia is a “multidisciplinary collaboration” that “seeks to establish sustainable and equitable opportunities for independent artists and music workers via concepts for contributive partnerships and alternative business models that harness the connected, collaborative power of interdependence.” Think of it as DIY, but on a grander scale than hand-screened t-shirts and shows in a basement.
“Midtopia—It’s just a bunch of really creative thinkers,” Love reflects, pointing to Midtopia COO Adam Hartke as a longtime friend who truly believed in Love at the beginning when not many people did, and also the brains behind Buy Before You Stream.
Hartke explains that Buy Before You Stream was conceived by Midtopia staff and artists about two years ago as a way to establish better, more direct pathways of access for fans and artists they love.
The push is not to necessarily say, “Hey, streaming is evil and we want to go away from streaming,” says the Midtopia COO, but more a way of releasing music that fits with the rest of the Midtopia ethos.
Photo Courtesy of Midtopia
“It is one additional pathway helping artists chip away at the overall goal of creating sustainable careers as artists,” Hartke explains. “It leverages direct fan connections so artists can have more control over their communications and their artistic endeavors. Everything we do is focused on removing barriers and empowering artists—this is one step in that direction.”
Hartke’s biggest hope for this new way of releasing music is that artists are able to have direct access to the people who love their music, without gatekeepers, without the need to spend tons of money on ads that go into the ether with little tangible results.
“Social media is virtually useless these days, so it’s a very grassroots effort, employing a lot of old school tactics, but that’s what it takes to build the community of support we seek,” says Hartke. That said, he continues on to say the overall challenges for independent artists and music workers are monumental and never-ending in this current industry.
“In the grand scheme of things, most music fans who buy vinyl and merchandise ‘get it,’ so the challenge with this strategy is relatively low compared to the mountain that lies ahead,” concludes Hartke, and Love agrees.
“It’s more that it’s something special for fans who care enough to say, ‘I want something physical to hold onto from this band, and in doing so, I get to support that band,’” Love continues. “I loved the idea and said we would love to be one of the first people to be a part of it. Fast forward—here we are.”
Love says that now, it seems like the only way he ever wants to release music because it seems more in line with the traditions he had as a kid, watching his family drop tracks.
“This is just so much more fun to pick up a physical copy.”
Rudy Love & The Encore’s album, 11, is set to release on July 11.
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