Keeping it real

Allen Stone breaks down the music industry, soul music and staying true to creative impulses

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In the music industry, where major record labels constantly turn out new pop hits reminiscent of something we heard the week before, great music doesn’t always make successful music. In this restrictive environment, musicians often have to balance commercial aspirations with sincere desires to make original music — which is something that renowned soul singer Allen Stone isn’t struggling with.

For a musician who values honesty and authenticity as much as Stone, that conflict between commercializing forces and individual expression makes straddling the line between the genres of soul and pop a balancing act.

“The music industry is like, ‘Well, this one thing is working, so let’s all copy this whole thing. You wanna be on the radio? You gotta do a song like this.’ It was just like, ‘You gotta sound like this, and you gotta look this,’ and I was just like, nah, that’s so lame.”

The 28-year-old singer will stop by Fox Theatre on Nov. 25 while on tour across the nation in promotion for his third album Radius, which has enjoyed critical acclaim since its release last May.

Stone describes himself as a “hippie with soul” from the “backwoods” of Washington state. For Stone, this tour is an opportunity to connect with people all over the country through the shared experience of music, an attitude that goes back to his hometown roots. Like many of his idols, Stone got his start singing in church, where he learned early on how powerful the experience of music can be — a conviction on which his musical ethos is founded to this day.

“I grew up in the church, and the thing that was really special to me was the community aspect of it,” he says. “The emotion of that is so powerful.”

Searching outside of the church for music that channeled the power of gospel music, Stone discovered a love of Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway records, and began to find his own voice as a singer. The transition from gospel to Stevie was an easy one, he believes, in part because of the intimate connection between soul and Southern gospel music that gave rise to the former.

“Pop/soul music really comes out of the church. To me the reason why church music spawns soul music is because it’s the same thing. If it’s good, like Southern Baptist stylings, then they really are the same thing,” he says.

Stone also believes that despite our natural categorization of artists into genres and a classic set of sounds, the way audiences typically view soul music is limiting. Instead, Stone offers a new vision of the genre that is more inclusive and simpler than one might expect.

“That to me is the sneaky part of it, where people will classify music in a specific genre. It’s not a sound, it’s a feeling — it’s an emotion,” Stone says. “Soul music is very honest. I believe that, like, James Taylor was soul music. Nirvana was soul music. I hear soul in all types of music, even though it is without question classified as a specific genre.”

With an open mind, Stone offers a vision of the future in which soul transcends a specific sound while staying true to its roots of human expression. On the other side of the coin, Stone laments the lack of truthful emotion in contemporary soul music itself.

“There’s a lot of classified soul music goin’ on right now where, to me, there’s no soul,” he says. “It’s just a reincarnation of something that other people have already done.”

That’s one of the reasons why Stone tries to avoid defining himself as a soul artist.

“I think you either have [soul] or you don’t,” he says. “I hope I have it. I would never say that [I play soul music]. I tell people I play funk and R&B. I don’t think you can classify yourself as that. It’s an emotion you can’t attempt to capture — it’s either there or it’s not, I think.”

Stone isn’t concerned about where his music will take him and his audiences. He’s in it for the long run: to make timeless music that connects on an intimate level with future generations — to keep it real and make great, honest music.

“Money, for me, does not apply in a facet of the music that you make and whether or not it’s actually going to have an impact on the generations to come,” he says. “And that’s what I make music for. I do music because I want to make something that’s immortal — something that will make generations talk for years to come. That’s the goal: to write music that is almost [prophetic], that sticks around.”

ON THE BILL: Allen Stone. Doors at 7:30 p.m., show at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 25, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder, 720-665-2467. Tickets are $15 in advance, $17 at the door, $2 each for under 21.