Introducing ... ARMANI SPADE
Back in the early 90s, I was on the Campus Center Board (CCB) at Albright, an organization that brought comedians and recording artists to campus and set up events for the student body. We got some great young comics, including Jay Mohr (he was great, and I remember him raving about the new Beastie Boys album), Janeane Garofalo (she was rather unpleasant, and stood outside smoking until the last possible moment she had to go onstage), and Renee Hicks (she was bald, apparently by choice). We also received tons of demos, including one that stood out to me: A Recluse by a Brooklyn-based artist named Armani Spade.
Well. To say it “stood out” is actually a dreadful understatement; it resonated with me so profoundly that I soon became an Armani Spade evangelist, playing the cassette’s hottest tracks for everyone I knew. The cassette’s three main tunes—it also includes an extended instrumental piece called “India (Meditation)” that comprises all of side A, and an instrumental version of “More About Your Eyes”—are a mélange of synthesized rhythm and melody lines, potent and poetic lyricism, and unforgettable vocals. Each song is embedded in this post—though they’re on YouTube, the only video is a still image of the cassette cover.
(Special thanks to Bill Snelling for converting the songs from cassette to CD for me, so I could share them with the world.)
Allow me to deconstruct each track here.
The best place to start is with the first song on side B, “More About Your Eyes.” The piece is a study in the tension that exists in the space between desire and attainment, that magnificent limbo from which Spade sings and raps about his amorous intentions. At 1:21, the song’s energy shifts, underscored by an ominous tone, as Spade raps, “Gettin’ next to you in latitude.” The climax follows immediately thereafter as he then wills his voice into a previously unattained tonal range and sings, “Listen to what I say! / It feels better this way / Don’t tell me to go / ‘Cause I won’t leave you no / But if I do and I got spare time / I will think about you all the while / Nothing could take my mind from you / ‘Cause you’re all I want to do.”
Once the song has reached these heights and Armani has employed a sophisticated vocal overlay, the listener is left with the pulsing swish of a heartbeat—an afterglow, if you will, befitting the emotional and romantic journey he’s just taken us on.
Though spent by the power of “Eyes,” we have no time to recover before “Could I Get A Little Closer,” which begins with a fierce warning yawp from Spade that announces his passion will not be denied. Again, the lyrics best lay bare the astuteness of this piece: “I called you up on the phone / To come to my pad, my crib, my home / To talk about the birds and the bees / The chemistry between my bed, you and me / There’s nothing else that you can say to me / ‘Cause I’m lookin’ at your body in a sexual degree.”
The chorus consists of an iteration of the title in harmonized vocal overlay, which is followed by the somewhat more direct plea, “Could I get beside you? / Could I get inside you?” The song is then dominated by an extended keyboard solo—first in a synthesized xylophone, then in a synthesized saxophone—that fully comprises the final three minutes of the piece.
Thirdly, and lastly--but most definitely not leastly--is a composition called simply “Relax,” whose refrain, “Cool cool out, cool out / Cool cool out, cool out,” will be echoing merrily through your ears for many days to come. “Relax” is the dance club hit that never was. It features a jangly riff, throbbing beat, and manic vocals that must be heard to be truly appreciated. The opening lines here, about the singer’s attempts to initiate a romantic relationship through physical gyrations, are deep and instantly grab the listener’s attention: “I remember when I was at the club / Dancin’ with a girl, tryin’ to get some / Then you walked through the door / My eyes and yours made four.” Having laid his two eyes on her two, he then proceeds to praise her physical attributes in the most flattering terms: “You’re more than a man could feed on / Skin so smooth, legs so strong.”
Into this fledgling encounter comes an apparently exotropic Cupid, looking simultaneously with one eye at Armani and with the other at Armani’s quarry. The song concludes with negligee, romance, poor dancing, barely averted fistfights, and a final exhortation to relax.
Having been so affected by this man’s music, I embarked on a more than 15-year crusade to find him, and/or more of his tuneful output. Using clues from his cassette cover (his Brooklyn address, the people he thanked, etc.), I finally tracked him down in 2009.
As it turns out, Armani Spade is just his stage name; his given name is Walde Murray. In a few brief conversations, I learnt much about how Walde became Armani. For some reason, he was surprised (but delighted) that someone wanted to talk about his music.
A Recluse was the most professionally recorded piece he did; all else that exists are snippets and unfinished songs. He can see the other songs’ potential, he said, but to someone else it might sound like nothing. “Somebody could look into Stephen King’s book and they see scratches and scribbles and things, even in a verbal sense,” he explained.
He told me that he writes “straight out, from the inside out,” eschewing any pattern or methodology. “You write it in such a way that you amaze yourself, or somebody else comes along and says, it’s not much there,” he said. “But then, something came out of it.” He likened his songwriting style to that of the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Recently, Jackson released an album of unfinished songs that illustrated the need for a good producer to “draw out” the music’s potential. “Let’s use a real bass guitarist, or a real piano-ist [he or she might say],” making magic from “unrefined work.”
Armani Spade received “great responses” to the cassette when it was released. However, he had no luck taking his tracks to radio stations and asking them to play his music. “If it had been a known star,” he observed, “it would have been played.”
Walde Murray has spent the past nine years in the US Army, which does not afford him the time or resources to continue his music dreams. While it’s important to “follow your heart,” it’s also important to make a decent living, he said. However, when he retires to the reserve, he plans to renew his pursuit of music stardom, as he is still formulating ideas and writing songs. “I’m keeping my head into the up-to-date stuff” as a way to stay in tune with modern musical sensibilities, he said.
“I need to keep my eye on the ball,” he said, “and the ball is music.”