Mavis Staples – Sad And Beautiful World

★★★★★

ANTI-

Now 86, she should be taking it easy, assured her wars have been won. Yet, here we are in 2025, and the last member standing of The Staple Singers is dusting off her old friend Curtis Mayfield’s We Got To Have Peace, her work incomplete as long as the world continues to promote leaders too dumb to understand the message.

Staples’ solo career took a while to get going: two albums for Volt while the family group was signed to Stax were followed by irregular releases, overseen by Mayfield, Jerry Wexler or Prince, but it wasn’t until 2004 that Have A Little Faith ignited the second act. Having paid for the recordings herself, she used countless rejections as fuel until being picked up by the Chicago blues specialist Alligator Records. Three years later and signed to Anti-, We’ll Never Turn Back set the template for the next two decades: Staples; a trusty lieutenant – Ry Cooder, initially – marshalling the material and musicians; songs, whether new, recent or traditional, that she could imbue with undiminished authority.

That powerful combination remains in place for her fourteenth studio album, with Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver, Nathaniel Rateliff) stepping into a producer’s seat previously occupied by Ben Harper and Jeff Tweedy, and helping her pick songs that tell both her story and the stories she needs to tell. Cook’s contacts book came in handy, but all on a lengthy list of much younger contributors – which includes Katie Crutchfield, Justin Vernon, Rateliff and MJ Lenderman – share a knack for keeping out of sight, leaving the focus on Staples.

Solo and as part of gospel’s first family, Staples has always used her faith as a light, believing any darkness today will eventually yield to a brighter, everlasting future. 
Facing forward, then, she uses the past as a lesson to be learnt from rather than as some golden era worth revisiting. That’s spelt out on the opening track, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s Chicago, which follows a broken farmer moving in search of a better life. Though Mavis was born in Illinois, her father, Pops, grew up on a Mississippi cotton plantation before joining the exodus to the industrial north in the 1930s. “Things will be better in Chicago,” she hopes on the album’s toughest cut, duelling guitars provided by Derek Trucks and the 89-year-old Buddy Guy, who made a similar journey in the 1950s.

Autobiography weaves around social conscience throughout, as befits a singer who has stood on the front line for 60-plus years. Kevin Morby’s Beautiful Strangers, originally issued as a fundraiser for charities advocating gun control, contains asides about terrorist attacks in Paris and Florida and 
deaths in police custody, which gain further gravitas coming from someone who knew Martin Luther King Jr, the man who advised the Staples to add message songs to their gospel set list. Or, as Morby put it: “You’ve got a sweet voice, child, why don’t you use it?”

Human Mind, written for Staples by Hozier and Allison Russell, digs yet deeper. Singing of “burning hillsides, children dying by machines of war”, she reaches out to both her father – “I deal in loss, Daddy/I am the last, Daddy, last of us” – and the Father: “Find a reason, Lord, to keep on trying.” We’re left to hope she uncovers answers but the lack of closure doesn’t detract from a remarkable lyric – Mavis confesses to being moved to tears when she sang it the first time – that is delivered as a Muscle Shoals-style crescendo, with all the weight and the pain and the glory of eight and a bit decades bearing down on the singer.

Similarly, her reading of Anthem makes Leonard Cohen’s hymn to resilience and resistance feel like a bespoke gift from another writer who knew about life in the shadows. As Staples watches 2025 unfold, with growing authoritarianism, increasingly random violence, needless deaths and the grip tightening around the throat of democracy, she reaches not for retribution but for the hope that we will be able to start anew tomorrow. “There is a crack,” she sings, her voice underlining that observation. 
“That’s how the light gets in.”

It’s as that distant flickering light, illuminating the path to better times, that Staples excels. “Hard times,” she says, taking as her mantra the high point of Gillian Welch’s The Harrow & The Harvest, “ain’t gonna rule my mind.” Though it’s hard to believe Staples 
would have comprehended the demons the writer grappled with, when she brings that power to Mark Linkous’s Sad And Beautiful World – “Sometimes days just go speeding past/Sometimes this one seems like the last” – you know she would have been there in the darkness to hold his hand.

After comforting those in pain, however, Staples finally points the finger with a song as old as her career. Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes’ Satisfied Mind would be well known to her – Mahalia Jackson had sung it in 1954, Bob Dylan had messed about with it in The Band’s basement 13 years later – but its message has yet to reach the one-percenters trying to claw back what little the rest 
of the planet has. She treats it as a hymn, its simple arrangement evoking a Salvation Army band in the background… not that any 
of its targets will care.

Her generation may be fading away, but Staples is not the last to know empathy, nor – despite her concerns – will she be the
“last of us”. There’s enough strength in that powerhouse voice to suggest there are more albums to come, but her message to us is 
that there’s no time to waste, we need to do the right thing today. Don’t just hope things will work out, be more like Mavis.

Sad And Beautiful World is out November 7 on Anti-.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Tracklisting:

1. Chicago
2. Beautiful Strangers
3. Sad And Beautiful World 
4. Human Mind 
5. Hard Times
6. Godspeed
7. We Got To Have Peace
8. Satisfied Mind 
9. Anthem 
10. Everybody Needs Love