Music: Summer Concerts

The Rev. Al Green finds his soul again

   More: What to hear this summer | Relive the shows with instant CDs | An unlikely sage of the concert stage

No wonder the Rev. Al Green sounds so happy. These are boom times for the soul legend, who turned 58 two weeks ago and plays Stubb's on Sunday.

For years, all but the most hardcore fans had written him off as a once-stellar soul man who had lost the common (read: pop) touch after years of singing gospel and running a church.

But Green's 2003 album, "I Can't Stop" (Blue Note) -- his first secular album in nearly a decade -- was a critical smash, yielding some of his later career's richest, most well-regarded music.

Though some fans were torn about his last local live appearance at the Austin City Limits Music Fest -- some missed the dynamism of old, while others thought he was great -- his recent tour has drawn respectable crowds, from old school Green-heads to newer fans to families.

"This new resurgence is very exhilarating," Green says from his home in Memphis. Green's speaking voice and singing voice both carry the same thrum, and he's as likely in conversation to digress the way he'll go into a dramatic melismas while singing "Let's Stay Together" or "Love and Happiness."

Though he's been playing bigger venues on this tour, Green says he doesn't miss playing in clubs, mostly because the reverend has been obligated to rock the 550-seat Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis since 1976. It's also the place Green claims many of his musical ideas are worked out (which describes how nearly all of Southern soul music was created).

"The church is the platform for what we are about to do, and what we have been doing," Green says. "It is the mill where you grind the wheat."

After ditching soul for full-time gospel in the 1980s, Green says his return to secular music was tough sledding. It was particularly difficult for a man whose early work is considered some of the most seductive, carnal pop of all time.

"It was very conflicting at the time," Green says. "I rented this little chalet in the Great Smoky Mountains and prayed about it. Did some fasting, man, sat on the back porch.

"And God said, 'Al, sing the songs. I made the song, the songs are a gift. When you sing 'you're gonna have good times' you're not talking about war, you're talking about good times.' "

Maybe the changing nature of Green's audience has something to do with it. Today's youth are more likely to get down to something far more explicit than "Let's Stay Together," while families are legion at festivals such as Austin City Limits. "There's nothing wrong with the guy, the wife, the three kids, the dog hearing this music," Green says.

As for the critical hosannas heaped on "I Can't Stop," Green says that he and Mitchell, now 76, remained friends for years, but they never could get it together on a gospel album. "We attempted it back on A&M, but it just never really kinda jelled." (Their 1985 collaboration "Going Away" didn't jell with the public, either.)

But that relationship sure has jelled this time around. When everything's firing, Green's talent is still extraordinary to behold. After all, soul is what he was born to sing, and he knows how to make those sounds and sustain that mood as well as or better than anyone alive.

"This music may not be about taking some girl to the Holiday Inn," Green says. "It may be a little deeper than that."