A studio document of songs the band has carried through living rooms, dive bars and amphitheaters since 2014 — finally cut to tape at Midtopia and pressed to vinyl through Buy Before You Stream.
Frontman Rudy Love Jr. grew up inside one of American music's quietest legacies. His father, the late Rudy Love Sr., wrote songs for Little Richard at seventeen, recorded with Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone, and watched his work get sampled by Jay-Z and covered by Eric Clapton — most of it without his name on the cheque.
That history is the inheritance The Encore is rewriting. The six-piece moved home from Los Angeles to Wichita to record on its own terms — pressing vinyl first through Buy Before You Stream, putting the artist back in front of the platform.
I'll never forget the first time I saw my family's music on sale, and we didn't even have a copy ourselves. It was a wake-up call about how the system works.
The result, 11, is what Rudy calls "new and old music" — a record built to acknowledge everything they came from, while pulling forward into hip-hop, R&B and electronic textures their elders never got to use.
It is, in his words, "old soul, brand new".
A new sound with old soul.
11 years in the making — soul, funk, R&B and hip-hop, all at once.
Carries forward a rich musical legacy — work sampled and recorded by icons from Jay-Z to Little Richard to Eric Clapton.
An ensemble with deep roots — performing together throughout their lives.
Rudy Love Jr. is also the songwriter and bandleader of two other working ensembles — each pulling on a different corner of the family songbook.