Bio : Brother Wallace
A true force of nature, Brother Wallace was born to make music that ignites pure joy, even in the darkest of moments. Since getting his start playing piano and singing in church, the Georgia-bred artist has followed his lifelong passion down an extraordinary path that spans from sharing the stage with gospel legend Kirk Franklin to performing at historic venues like Madison Square Garden. Over the past few years, he’s teamed up with The Heavy guitarist Dan Taylor in dreaming up a body of work built on his high-octane brand of soul music and true-to-life storytelling—after years as a music teacher for grades K-12. Newly signed to ATO Records, Wallace is now set to make his debut with Electric Love: a one-of-a-kind album revealing the life-affirming impact of his powerhouse vocals and timeless yet daring artistry.
Produced and co-written by Taylor,recorded at Real World Studios in England (the famed facility founded by pop luminary Peter Gabriel), and engineered and mixed by Bob Mackenzie (James Blake, The 1975, King Krule, SAULT) and Jim Abbiss (Adele, Arctic Monkeys) Electric Love makes for a formidable introduction to Wallace—a preternaturally talented musician who grew up in the rural town of West Point, started singing in church as a small child, and began his formal training in piano at just six-years-old. After a chance meeting with The Heavy over a decade ago, he forged a particularly strong musical bond with Taylor, then joined him in a multi-year-long process of working on songs remotely and exploring their most audacious musical impulses. “At first we weren’t even thinking about creating an album,” says Wallace. “We were just having a good time making music together, and at some point we realized we had all these songs that felt like they should be properly recorded.”
Struck by the sheer potency of Wallace’s songwriting—as well as the clarity of his artistic vision—Taylor enlisted The Heavy bassist Spencer Page and drummer Chris Ellul in a series of sessions aimed at harnessing that thrilling vitality in recorded form. “I remember him sending me a song early on and I just burst into tears—I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and what it could become,” says Taylor. “When we got into the studio I was conscious of trying to capture something as in-the-moment as possible, and I was amazed at how he could smash the vocal out. The pace was just relentless.” In assembling the 13-song album, Wallace showed the full expanse of his transcendent musicality and mined inspiration from a dynamic mix of influences (e.g., Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Southern soul icon Johnnie Taylor)—ultimately infusing an exhilarating energy into Electric Love’s deeply poignant tales of heartache and desperation and hard-won redemption.
In a perfect snapshot of the LP’s unbridled emotionality and fantastically gritty sound, Electric Love opens on its rhapsodic lead single “Who’s That.” With its groove-driven fusion of R&B and uptempo soul, the immensely catchy track unfolds in hard-hitting drums, swaggering horns, and hypnotic guitar riffs as Wallace inhabits the role of an unwitting character who’s caught his woman out on the town with another man. “I wanted to tell the story of a heartbreak without making it a sad song,” says Wallace. “The stance it’s taking is more like, ‘I’m all right, I’m not hurt—I caught you and now I’m moving on.’ There’s something almost triumphant about it.”
Another exultant moment on Electric Love, the album’s title track arrives as a dance-ready anthem for shaking off negativity in a world of constant chaos. Equal parts playful, revelatory, and gloriously cathartic, the Motown-esque number surges forward with an unstoppable momentum fueled by Wallace’s singular prowess as a piano player. “It’s a real game-changer when you’ve got someone with a left hand that’s holding down the bottom end like that,” Taylor points out. “You can feel where the rhythm fits and how the song can move, almost like he’s driving the band from his left hand. I’d never worked with a pianist like that before in my life.”
One of the more introspective tracks on Electric Love, “Gone With The Wind” brings Wallace’s sublime vocals to a lived-in reflection on protecting your peace of mind. “I started writing that song when I was driving home from work one day, feeling like I needed to let the world go and take some time out for myself,” he explains. Opening on a rollicking piano riff, “Gone With The Wind” hums with a soul-soothing sweetness thanks partly to its heavenly background harmonies, supplied by a group of young vocalists from Wallace’s hometown. “I’d trained them as singers back home, and when they added their parts to the song it felt like they were carrying me away as they were singing,” he says. “It was like a beautiful journey that I didn’t want to end.”
While Electric Love radiates a wildly irrepressible spirit, Wallace never shies away from delving into the more difficult aspects of the human condition. On “You’re The Man,” the album takes on a moody ferocity as he offers up an unflinching but compassionate portrait of tragic hubris. “That song comes from someone I know personally getting caught up in a treacherous life and thinking they could somehow escape the consequences—but then of course they ended up in trouble,” he says. Meanwhile, on “No God In This Town,” Wallace delivers a sorrowful slow-burner penned by Taylor after a harrowing experience on tour. “The last time we were playing in San Francisco I got completely lost and ended up finding a homeless man who’d died in the street,” he recalls. “I can’t even describe the feeling that it gave me, but over time it became a song about searching for some kind of answer and finally realizing you’re never going to find it where you are now.”
Although Electric Love often explodes with a larger-than-life sound, a number of songs lean toward an elegant minimalism that illuminates the exquisite force of Wallace’s vocal work (case in point: “Any Day Now,” a quietly stunning track on which he’s solely accompanied by strings and sparse guitar tones). “It’s so easy nowadays to add layers and layers and make everything as enormous as possible, just because there’s the technology available to do that,” says Taylor. “But when you’ve got a voice like his, I think the best approach is to let everything else be in service of it.” Not only an innately gifted singer, Wallace has devoted much of his life to honing the supreme vocal command and phenomenal range showcased on Electric Love. To that end, he landed the role of director for his church’s 100-member choir at 14-years-old, and soon began composing original songs for the choir to sing. After studying psychology in college, he carved out a distinct career at the intersection of music and education, serving as band director and choral director for a number of schools while releasing a series of gospel albums. As he immersed himself in the making of Electric Love, Wallace tapped into his gospel roots as well as his eclectic musical upbringing. “I grew up listening to a lot of R&B, blues, gospel, a little bit of pop,” he says. “My older brother was sort of my musical guru, and he was constantly playing me records by artists like Prince and Parliament-Funkadelic—definitely a lot deeper than what most kids my age were listening to.”
Closing out with the full-tilt celebration of “Let’s Get Together,” Electric Love endlessly spotlights the radical open-heartedness at the core of Wallace’s artistry—an element closely tied to his mission of helping others to reconnect with their humanity. “From what I’ve observed from the people around me, especially through working with kids, I know how easy it can be to cut yourself off from feeling anything,” he says. “We’ve become so accustomed to looking at the world through the lens of Instagram or TikTok or whatever else, and it’s made it so we don’t have to actually experience real life. The main thing I wanted to do with this album was tell stories that resonate with people on a deep level, to be as real and authentic as possible, and to always let the music lead the way.”