... the sound scape is based on his reading of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Gamble/Huff records that defined the border between soul and funk, right down to the wah-wah guitars. The topic is our culture's most enduring: What happens when fear is steeped in racism. With help from the excellent gospel group Commissioned, Francke finds a voice that lets him ask the right questions...

What We Talk Of .. doesn't toy with amateur deep soul. Instead, it borrows quite explicitly from the soul of the early '70s: the perfect string confections of Barry White, the sophisticated horn, rhythm and vocal arrangements of Stevie Wonder and Maurice White. It's also explicit in attempting to recapture that music's social and political atmosphere. As Craig Werner writes in the liner notes, this music comes from a place "where you catch glimpses of what the seventies might have become if we'd lived up to their long-forgotten promise." Francke is not indulging nostalgia for a polyester past; he's using abandoned musical resources to make a statement about the world we live in right now. He casts his own challenge - "All this wasting of time / when we should be writing our story / we're perfecting our lines... when we could be touching the glory." He meets it, too.

Funny thing is, Francke on his previous five albums made some of the blondest music I know. His apparent influences were the Beatles and Beach Boys, Springsteen and Bob Seger. His occasional work with the greatest of all blue-eyed soulman, Mitch Ryder seemed just a Detroit boy's way of honoring roots.

Somehow there's nothing affected about what Francke does on What We Talk Of.. Among his collaborators is the fine gospel-hip-hop group, Commissioned, and his ability to sing with them is startling. This album's best song, "Skin To Skin," is a duet with Barb Payton that takes us to the heart of the matter-race mixing, at all levels.

What We Talk Of.. itself is a metaphor for the missing cross-cultural dialogue, about pain and glory and how black and white people each experience them, that doesn't exist -- I'd say, the dialogue we lost. Except in these Ashcroft days, it's not real clear we ever had it. That's not fair though. We have had it. It animated the singing of the civil rights movement and, in a less conscious way, of early rock'n'roll. It thunders in the background of Righteous Brothers and Young Rascals records. It existed in the success of Jimi Hendrix, of Ryder, and of bands you've half-forgotten or never knew: Earth Wind and Fire, Mother's Finest, Living Colour. In a perverse way, it's part of the collaboration between Dr. Dre and Eminem right now.

If you think that's off-the-wall, consider this: Stewart Francke's eyes snapped open on how to deal with race and music because he was dealing with cancer. A bone marrow transplant saved his life, so Francke established a foundation to offer help to others who needed transplants. What he learned was that African and Asian Americans have twice as much difficulty in finding a bone marrow match, because there are so few black people in the donor pool. So he began working with Detroit's African-American community to change that. From that, came an association with black musicians so intense that the blondest musician I know has now made this intensely soulful record.

What Francke did is a long way from easy. You can't get to the place he reaches on What We Talk Of.. without paying a great price. Still, it's a lot cheaper than the one you pay for not going there.

- Dave Marsh