Sons of Soul

Sons of Soul is the third album by American R&B band Tony! Toni! Toné!, released on June 22, 1993, by Wing Records and Mercury Records. It follows the success of their 1990 album The Revival, which had extended their popularity beyond R&B audiences and into the mainstream.

The band originally held recording sessions for Sons of Soul at several studios in California, including Westlake Recording Studios in Hollywood and Paradise Recording Studio in Sacramento. When they became jaded with the various people frequenting those studios, Tony! Toni! Toné! moved their sessions to Caribbean Sound Basin in Trinidad, where they ultimately wrote and recorded most of the album. It was produced entirely by the group, who worked with various session musicians and utilized both vintage and contemporary recording equipment.

Sons of Soul was recorded as an homage to Tony! Toni! Toné!'s musical influences—classic soul artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Its music incorporated live instrumentation, funk, and hip hop elements such as samples and scratches. Lead singer and bassist Raphael Wiggins handled most of the songwriting, which was characterized by quirky, flirtatious lyrics and reverent ballads.

A commercial success, Sons of Soul charted for 43 weeks on the Billboard 200 and earned a double platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). With the album, Tony! Toni! Toné! became one of the most popular R&B acts during the genre's commercial resurgence in the early 1990s. It was also a widespread critical success, ranking as one of 1993's best records in many critics' year-end lists.

Inspired by live instrumentation, turntablism, and classic soul music, Tony! Toni! Toné! recorded and produced their second album, The Revival, mostly themselves and released it in 1990 to commercial success. The record broadened the group's exposure to fans beyond their initial R&B audience. However, they became ambivalent about their newfound mainstream success and their music being labeled "retro" by critics. In an interview for People magazine, lead singer and bassist Raphael Wiggins expressed his dissatisfaction with the music industry, saying that "every record company wants to get a group and put 'em in a Benz with a car phone and a beeper, show them dressing in three different outfits, put them in a video shot on a beach with lots of swinging bikinis. You won't ever see us on a beach. We're just down-to-earth, funky, like-to-play guys." Before considering a follow-up album, the band recorded several songs for film soundtracks, including "Me and You" for Boyz n the Hood (1991), "House Party (I Don't Know What You Come to Do)" for House Party 2 (1991), and "Waiting on You" for Poetic Justice (1993).

Having fulfilled their creative intentions with The Revival, Tony! Toni! Toné! wanted to pay homage to their musical influences with Sons of Soul. In a 1993 interview for The New York Times, Wiggins elaborated on their direction for the album, stating "We're paying homage to a lot of older artists who paved the way for us artists like the Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone, Earth, Wind and Fire. They're the people who inspired us when we were growing up, people like Aretha Franklin, James Brown. We feel we're the sons of everything and all those people who came before us." He also explained the album's title as a declaration of them being descendants of those artists, "not in a grandiose sense, but from the standpoint that we really are the musical offspring of all that's come before us ... paying homage to our past, but creating in a contemporary environment."

The group began recording Sons of Soul in 1993. They initially held sessions at several recording studios in California, including Air L.A. Studios, Paramount Recording Studios, and Westlake Recording Studios in Hollywood, Pajama Studios in Oakland, J.Jam Recording in Oakland Hills, and Paradise Recording Studio in Sacramento, where Raphael Wiggins resided at the time. Wiggins, his brother guitarist D'wayne Wiggins, and drummer Timothy Christian Riley each played several instruments for the album. Raphael and D'wayne came up with ideas for songs by playing guitar and a drum machine, and working them into compositions with Riley and Carl Wheeler, an unofficial member and in-studio keyboardist for the group. They also created drum loops at their homes, with Raphael using an Akai MPC60 and D'wayne using an E-mu SP-12, and the group improvised their respective instrumental parts for songs at the studio to a certain loop.

They also worked with various session musicians, including string arranger Benjamin Wright, saxophonists Gerald Albright and Lenny Pickett, trumpeter Ray Brown, arranger Clare Fischer, and audio engineer Gerry Brown. Brown engineered the group's previous albums, and later their subsequent output, including Raphael Wiggins' solo albums after Tony! Toni! Toné! Brown recommended for him to use a dynamic microphone when recording his vocals to thicken them with more bass, a practice Wiggins continued throughout his career. Wiggins sought after former Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks to sing on "Leavin'", but Kendricks died prior to the sessions. They also worked with two horn sections, The Fat Lip Horns and The SNL Horns, the horn section of the Saturday Night Live Band. Raphael and D'wayne Wiggins sang impromptu musical ideas to the SNL players, who in turn modelled their horn parts after their singing.