Jamil Rashad, who performs under the name Boulevards, loves the word brother. For him it’s a greeting, a spoken handshake, a verbal high five with his listener. “Growing up, I would see my father interacting with other African American men, using that word as a greeting. What’s up, brother? Brother, let me talk to you. That’s what they said a lot in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but you don’t hear it as much now. It’s such a great word.” That word inspired a new song simply called “Brother!” a slow-motion funk groove with the gravity of the blues, the ebullience of gospel, and the socially conscious sentiments of Sly Stone singing “Stand!” or James Brown saying it loud, “I’m black and I’m proud.” It’s a song that draws on pop history but speaks to our troubled present. “It’s smooth,” says the Raleigh, North Carolina, artist, “but it’s rough around the edges. Smooth but raw—that’s what Boulevards is.”

When it came time to find a title for his new EP—about race and reckoning in America, about broken hearts and self-inflicted suffering—Rashad couldn’t get those two syllables out of his head. That word became his way of getting your attention and addressing his songs to you specifically, and he added an exclamation point to make his message sound all the more urgent and excited. “I wanted people to listen to these songs and think, He’s speaking directly to me. When you’re a fan of music, you want that feeling. You want the performer to talk to you.”

Brother! represents a pivotal moment for Rashad. It’s his first release for the New West Records imprint Normaltown Records, for one thing. It’s also his first time working with Blake Rhein, guitarist for the midwestern soul revival outfit Durand Jones & the Indications. More than any of that, however, it’s a culmination of several years of writing and playing and touring and recording as Boulevards. During that time he has earned a reputation as an eclectic synthesist of sounds and styles as well as an electric performer whose set at the 2015 Hopscotch Festival cemented his status as one of North Carolina’s most thrilling young artists. He followed it up with a string of adventurous albums that drew on old soul and funk sounds but sounded fresh. 

“I had to make those other records to get to this point,” he says, noting that Brother! signals a shift toward a heavier, funkier, but no less idiosyncratic sound. It’s not a reinvention, but something like an expansion of what Rashad can say and do as Boulevards. To help make his ideas a reality, he reached out to Rhein on social media after being impressed with the Chicago-based instrumentalist’s mastery of different musical forms. The pandemic made it impossible to travel or work together in person, but they traded ideas and recordings over email. “He understands the funk,” says Rashad, “and he’s a music nerd like me. He immediately understood the sound I was going for and what I wanted to do, and he pushed me to do some things that I’ve never really done on a record.”

The songs they created draw on the albums Rashad heard growing up. His father was a radio DJ at 88.9 WSHA in Raleigh, which meant there were always records spinning at home: early Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Rick James, Curtis Mayfield, and Shuggie Otis, among others. “My dad put me on to that music, and I’ve always been attracted to those artists. Not just the sounds, but the styles—how those Black men dressed, how they presented themselves onstage, how they posed in photos, the whole aesthetic. That’s who I was inspired by, but I wanted to make it my own, make it Boulevards.”

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