NEW SIGNING: CANDI STATON
We couldn’t be more excited to announce that four-time Grammy® Award-nominated singer and R&B legend Candi Staton is the newest addition to Maximal Music Sync’s roster!
Candi Staton has sweetly strutted between several musical genres over the course of her celebrated career. However, danceable music has always been her main groove, as her iconic tracks “Young Hearts Run Free” and the multi-platinum “You Got the Love” attest. The former is a liberating self-preservation anthem that peaked at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard R&B Singles chart in 1976 (No. 2 on the UK Pop chart). The latter is an inspiring chant that has, through various remixes, hit the British Top 10 Pop Singles chart in 1991, 1997 and again in 2006 – an amazing feat. Staton has just released her 30th album, Unstoppable, a new retro R&B album out via Nashville’s Thirty Tigers label.
The Hanceville, Alabama native got her professional start as a teenager singing with The Jewel Gospel Trio that recorded for Nashboro Records and toured with Sam Cooke and Mahalia Jackson in the 1950s. Eventually, she launched her R&B career at Birmingham’s 27/28 Club, where she won a gig opening for R&B star Clarence Carter, who snagged her a record deal with Rick Hall’s Fame Records label in 1968. Over the next five years, she cut a string of Top Ten southern soul hits such as Grammy-nominated renditions of “Stand by Your Man” and “In the Ghetto.” Staton was crowned the First Lady of Southern Soul just as she was leaving Fame for Warner Bros. and tossed off her tiara to become a disco princess with smash club hits such as 1976’s million-seller “Young Hearts Run Free”, “Nights on Broadway”, “Honest I Do”, “Victim”, and “When You Wake Up Tomorrow.”
By 1983, Staton had beaten an alcohol addiction, joined a church, and left Pop music. For the next two decades, she recorded gospel music exclusively, including the Top Ten Grammy-nominated projects, Make Me an Instrument (1983) and Sing A Song (1986) LPs. Her gospel classics include “Love Lifted Me,” “Mama,” “The First Face I Want to See,” and “Sin Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”
In 2004, Staton returned to the Pop music scene to promote Honest Jons’ Candi Staton compilation of her 1969-1973 Fame recordings. It sold over 100,000 units and reached the Pop charts in England, France, the Netherlands, Japan, and Germany. Since then, Staton has released two critically acclaimed Americana albums, His Hands (2006) and Who’s Hurting Now? (2009). The latter won the Academie du Jazz in Paris’s Best Soul CD of the year in 2010. In 2014, Staton released Life Happens, which debuted at #10 on Billboard’s Top Blues Albums chart and earned her appearances on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” The album boasted the radio hit “I Ain’t Easy to Love”, featuring Jason Isbell and John Paul White of The Civil Wars. Rolling Stone magazine hailed it as one of the 25 best country recordings of 2014
As 2018 closes, Staton is promoting her soulfully empowering, upbeat album of anthems, Unstoppable. The production was steered by Mark Nevers, who produced Staton’s critically acclaimed His Hands and Who’s Hurting Now? albums. Staton’s son, Marcus Williams, a seasoned drummer, co-produced the project. “This is one of my favorite albums,” she confesses. “Even though we tackle some serious issues on it, it’s still upbeat and inspirational.”