Gone are Nathaniel Mayer and Nolan Strong, Jackie Wilson and Darrell Banks, The Falcons and The Ohio Untouchables. Andre Williams resides in Chicago, Bettye LaVette in New Jersey. Fortune, Lu Pine, Groovesville, Impact, Ric-Tic, D-Town, Inferno, Hot Wax, Groove City Records, and so many more are but memories; Motown moved to California decades ago. Ye who abandoned all hope for Motor City rhythm and blues, enter here: Laura Rain and the Caesars are reclaiming the storied Detroit soul music legacy from the ravages of time, neglect, and electronic dance music.

The Caesars are veterans of the Motor City’s R&B, jazz, rock, and blues scenes. For more than a decade, the classically trained Laura Rain has been singing in Detroit and Los Angeles with an absolute freedom of expression, permitted by her wondrous voice, an instrument of infinite shadings in timbre that avails itself to effortless glides between registers. Often compared to Aretha Franklin, Rains’s fire, feeling, and expressiveness are all her own. Producer, co-writer, and guitarist George Friend, another Detroiter returned home from L.A., has made his mark in multiple genres–rockabilly (Robert Gordon), R&B (The Sun Messengers), and blues (Janiva Magness)–and released a hip solo album of West Coast blues, entitled Looka Here!, in 2004. Phil Hale has played keyboards for everyone from Martha Reeves to George Clinton, Stanley Jordan, Bettye LaVette, and James Carter. Drummer Ron Pangborn, an original member of Was (Not Was), lays down beats that are perfectly fitted to the Caesars’ retro-modern soul and blues.

Clearly building their musical legacy on the shattered foundations previously built by the soulful Detroit Sound pioneers of the 60’s and 70’s, not so much the Motown sound built by Berry Gordy, as the sounds built by the likes of renown non-Motown Detroit producers Ollie McLaughlin, Ernest Burt, George McGregor, Richard Popcorn Wylie and Don Davis, all names many don’t know, but their records on labels other than Motown are very well known nationally and internationally, Laura Rain & the Caesars has arrived with a sound that fit right into that mode as if captured in a time capsule.

“If’ I Can’t Have You” is a captivating” song that can easily grow on you. Soultracks head Honcho Chris Rizic stated the song “has the feel of a song that could thrive in any of the last five decades. With the rhythm section laying down a deep groove, the song allows Laura Rain to release her expressive vocals, fully delivering both the passion and the longing that weave through the song’s lyrics”.

Tom Hyslop of Blues Music Magazine has described Laura Rain & the Caesars as “a force of nature…While clearly informed and inspired by soul and R&B styles dating, roughly speaking, from the years between 1965 and 1985.”

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