Cool Uncle: Inside 2015’s Smartest Retro-Soul Revival

In Splash’s telling, his meeting with Caldwell seems fated. He still remembers the first time he heard about the singer. “An ex-girlfriend dumped me,” he recalls. “Her next dude, probably the following week, took her on a date. The first date — I was like, what a chump, who does this on the first date? — took her to a Bobby Caldwell concert. At that time I didn’t know his name; I only knew the music. I said who the F is Bobby Caldwell?” That ex had a profound impact on Splash’s subsequent creative output. “For years and years,” he notes, “I was making — in my mind — Bobby Caldwell songs.”

The duo recorded Cool Uncle in a series of sessions, with breaks in between to accommodate the singer’s tour schedule and the producer’s work on other projects. “I looked at it like we were own little weird garage band,” Splash says. “We came with open hearts, open minds and a bunch of weird ideas. And we started everything from scratch.” Their taste for Jack Daniels came in handy too. “Have a little taste of whiskey. Jam. Vibe. Push each other to write some better lyrics.” “Still trashy,” he adds. “But at least it’s a step above a Michelob.”

Splash quickly learned to keep the tape running at all times. “Bobby has a jazz aspect also,” he notes. “Sometimes he’ll be jamming on something, and he has the perfect groove, and then he just keeps jamming, and it might go somewhere completely different. So then I have to jump on him and be like, ‘Go back!’ And he’ll be like, ‘Go back to what?'”

Plenty of the grooves from the drink-jam-vibe stage made it onto Cool Uncle. Caldwell arrives about two minutes into the album — after a short intro and a verse and hook from Mayer Hawthorne — as silky and lovelorn as ever: “I was trying to ignore you, ’cause I had someone before you, but it didn’t work out at all.” The slick arrangement would blend easily with “Can’t Say Goodbye,” from the singer’s debut album. A DJ could also make a seamless transition from 1980’s “Open Your Eyes” to Cool Uncle’s “Break Away.” Jessie Ware makes an able sparring partner for Caldwell on this track. Next to her purrs, he sounds more anguished than usual.

One of the album’s best songs is actually a more modern outlier: “Lonely” suggests an impressive genre mash — lounge rock mixed by someone with an ear for the heft of contemporary hip-hop. According to Caldwell, he was “noodling around” in the studio the day the track came together. “I picked up this guitar and came up with this open tuning” that reminded him of the Police. (There are also echoes of “Shook,” by the indie-rock band Yuck.) But the beat is lightly programmed, and the bass has some of the detonating qualities favored in rap. Caldwell is pushy here, willing to give but also ready to take: “Tell me, are you lonely? Do you need someone tonight? Tell me the only one that ever treats you right.”