Charles Bradley

If you’re looking for a story that best summarizes the last year in the life of Charles Bradley, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one than the night he and his band showed up in Utopia, Texas to play an outdoor show in the middle of a thunderstorm. “It was just raining, raining, raining,” Bradley recalls. “I walked out onstage, and there were about 800 people there – maybe more – all of them just standing out there in the rain and the mud.” The band settled in and fought their hardest against the elements, but – for a moment, anyway – it seemed that nature was too much for even the mighty Charles Bradley. About halfway through the show, the power went out, leaving both the band and the drenched fans in total darkness.