It's a true sign of the times that members of the old-school-leaning R&B band Mint Condition made much of their new album, "e-Life," the new-fashioned way: via e-mail. "I'd send a track to Rick to put some bass on it, and then to O'Dell to add some guitar, and so on," singer/drummer/keyboardist Stokley Williams explained. "It's the way a lot of music gets done these days."
Indeed, plenty of recordings are made through digital transfer in this day and age, but usually it's out of long-distance necessity. In the case of Mint, all five members still live close to one another around St. Paul, where they started playing together while attending Central High School in the mid-'80s. They broke out a few years later with help from Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and the 1992 top 10 hit "Breakin' My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)."
Instead of geographic demands, the electronic collaboration has more to do with personal demands. Four of the five members are dads now, and many of them have other music projects on the side, including the Afro-Cuban jazz plaything Joto and the all-star R&B group the Truth. "We've always been a group of many different personalities and backgrounds," bassist/singer Rick Kinchen said.
Their last album, 2005's well-received "Livin' the Luxury Brown," topped the Billboard independent album chart and ensured that Mint could live out its career however its members saw fit. "We're on another level now independently, so we don't have to submit to the kind of commercialism the way we did before," Williams said. "Of course, we're always going to strive for more."
Enter "e-Life," an album that sounds modern without sacrificing too much of their classic songwriting styles. Some of the new tracks have a strong digital-era sound. And even some of the more traditional sounding songs have modern themes, such as the slow-funk romp "Wish I Could Love You (Pimp Juice)," which is about "sex-texting" (sexual text-messaging).
"Some of the songs are about dating or being in relationships in this electronic age, and how technology has changed even romance," Williams explained.
The album's first single "Baby Boy, Baby Girl," is a celebration of fatherhood that was inspired when Kinchen's 8-year-old daughter asked him to log off his computer and play with her. Its most personal track is "Gratitude," which has verses from Kinchen and Williams about their respective fathers' influences on their lives. Williams' dad is widely known Macalester College professor and community leader Mahmoud El-Kati, while Kinchen said his late father was "a different kind of guy."
"He was hard on us, not in any kind of physical way but not always in the best kind of way," he said. "But I think he's what made me a hard worker."
