Eddie Chacon and the Fruits of Contemplation
Once a music journeyman stuck in the shadow of a number-one hit, Eddie Chacon decided to let it all go. Years of silence took him to the album of his life.
Creative aspirations are stories of false starts and dead ends, small victories and long tunnel of doubts. For many, it’s a slow, messy process that rarely ever translates into a grand design. Eddie Chacon, the quiet, grizzled aesthete whose comeback album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, uses the intimacy of soul as a parenthesis for meditation, is a testament to that life-consuming pursuit. Returning to music after decades out of the public eye, Chacon is also proof that, with enough patience, a place of inner clarity can rise once the dust of ambition has settled. And it is a most fertile ground for creativity.
Eddie Chacon had been a music star, once. He was the Eddie of Charles & Eddie, the New York-based duo who found international fame in 1992 with “Would I Lie To You?”, a brisk neo-soul serenade featuring, as one YouTube commenter puts it, “the best ‘oh yeah’ ever on a record”. This single would be the high of a career marked by a few lows, and more music trivia than a late-night binge on Discogs.
A kid from Castro Valley, Northern California, Eddie Chacon encountered music mythology early in his life. As a teenager in the ‘70s, he played garage punk with future Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin and the late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, older neighborhood kids who would grow into rock legends. From there, his dreams of stardom turned into a whirlwind ride through the corridors of the music biz.
At the age of 17, Eddie Chacon moved to Los Angeles, where he got his start as an in-house songwriter for CBS. In 1987, he got a record deal out of a funky cover of The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love”, but the single flopped and a subsequent album was shelved. Eddie Chacon kept toiling away across genres, labels and cities. In Los Angeles, he landed a few writing credits with R&B and pop acts of the late ‘80s. In Miami, he signed on Skyyline, the dance label of 2 Live Crew honcho Luther Campbell, and ended up working as a second engineer on the group's brazenly controversial As Nasty As They Wanna Be. In New York, he reportedly worked with Stetsasonic’s rapper Daddy-O and exhausted himself through smoke-filled sessions with Beastie Boys’ producers The Dust Brothers. Still, no breakthrough was in sight. His debut album, Sugaree, recorded under the name Edward Anthony Luis during his stint in Miami, came and went in the summer of 1989, a blind spot in an already elusive discography.
New York would be the place where Eddie Chacon, reaching 30, found his match. He met Charles Pettigrew, a Philadelphia-born singer who had also journeyed through the ‘80s as a versatile prospect with a sweet falsetto. The Charles & Eddie origin story was perfect: two strangers in the New York City Subway, who just happen to be label mates at Capitol Records, start chatting out of their common love for Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man. Their nascent collaboration turned into a formal duo until the miracle manifested. In the summer of 1992, their single “Would I Lie To You?” skyrocketed in the international charts. A number one in the UK and Germany, a Top 5 hit in France, Australia, Canada and a dozen of other countries, the song was—still is—irresistible, four minutes of daring charm and joyous harmonies, with just enough wit in its fidelity to soul standards to become a timeless classic on its own.
A duo of R&B admirers with a taste for all things pop, Charles & Eddie released two albums, Duophonic and 1995’s Chocolate Milk. With their slick patine, both records are enjoyable, but they couldn’t deliver another chart-topper. The pair called it quit, with no hard feelings, once all momentum faded. By the late ‘90s, Chacon was back to square one, another one-hit wonder with no plans. In 2001, as the duo was planning to compose new songs, Charles Pettigrew passed away, at age 36. He never told his partner he was dying from cancer.
Going through a self-avowed identity crisis, Eddie Chacon gradually stepped away from music, save for one last experimentation in 2008. With his wife, wardrobe stylist Sissy Sainte-Marie, he formed an electronic duo, The Polyamorous Affair. Next to her, Chacon was an elegant presence, but the soulful persona of the Charles & Eddie years felt gone forever. Trading mediums, Eddie Chacon had already started toying around with a camera offered by a friend, sensing a path forward. He built a portfolio as an in-demand photographer, venturing into fashion and arts. Then one day, around 2011, he turned off the lights in his recording studio, and never came back.
In hindsight, there was always a mystery to Eddie Chacon. In the video for “Would I Lie to You?”, he is stoic, a statuesque profile with a cross-shaped necklace and silky long black hair. On camera, he can seem pensive, passing by in a self-conscious stroll. You can almost glimpse an inner world through his staged persona. 28 years after the fame, this world was unveiled, last summer, via an album—Pleasure, Joy and Happiness—whose title, as much as its eight songs, beams with the quiet clarity of a man finally at peace with himself.
Eddie Chacon is now 57, the hair trimmed and grayer, the profile sharper, and a voice that time has gently frayed. “I pictured Eddie as this guy looking down from his Spanish casita in Los Feliz, waiting for the right time to come back and make his statement” said producer John Carroll Kirby to the New York Times. Kirby, an Angeleno with a beach-life swagger, has collaborated with soul impressionists like Solange, Blood Orange and Frank Ocean. He met Eddie Chacon through a mutual friend in 2018. In a twist of fate mirroring the Charles & Eddie chance meeting years earlier in New York, the two sat in a car, somewhere in L.A., and discussed soul music, Trouble Man included. But Kirby wasn’t interested in Motown replica. As he later explained, the vision he had for Eddie Chacon centered on a Yoda-like principle: “Don’t try to be soul. You’ve got soul.”
The producer guided Eddie Chacon towards the strange and soothing sound of the album. Layered with vintage keyboards, deep delays, minimal drum patterns and quirky pan flutes, John Carroll Kirby’s compositions keep a childlike naivete. Soul music is the DNA, but Kirby doesn’t aim for reverence and exactitude. This is not the feel-good musicianship of the Charles & Eddie years. It’s something else, a sound that restitutes fragments of music memories without spelling out their origins. Comfy melodies and hush textures are skillfully woven, but each song preserves the loose promise of early-morning ideas and long-lost demos. The instruments vibrate like they have been left dormant, fixed in dust, and just recently awoke to a sudden flood of inspiration. With light-touch production tweaks—Kirby advised Chacon to skip the formality of the studio booth, recording instead with an hand-held microphone—the producer channels the intimacy that the singer needed to finally let the words out.
One have to wonder what an artist has to say after a decade of silence, but the beauty of Pleasure, Joy and Happiness actually lies in everything it leaves untold. Throughout the album, words are sparse, brief manifestations of a deeper soul-searching. “My lyrics have always been written like a stream of consciousness”, Eddie Chancon recently said, “so I’m always surprised at the content of my songs.” The outcome, it turns out, is reduced to an essence, the emotions raw and primal. The fleeting lyrics of “Papa” juxtapose childhood feelings with old man regrets. Talking to an estranged father, Eddie Chacon murmurs the words with an aching innocence, like they came to him in one of these dreams that leave a trail of unspeakable sorrow in their wake. The lines feel so delicate, a transcript might bruise them.
For the video of the title track, Eddie Chacon used footage of alpacas chilling in the New Zealand countryside, making it possibly the best escapist video of the pandemic era. The song is a collection of mental notes to be picked in a card deck for daily inspiration (Day 4: “Find a way to find a way”). The music is Zen calm, but Eddie Chacon’s serenity radiates from a tormented core. In the shadow of his voice, there is a world of conflicts and remorse that never really comes into focus, but infuses into every intonation. This is an album called Pleasure, Joy and Happiness where songs are named “Hurt”, “Trouble” and “Wicked World”. And yet, the record is strangely invigorating, a moment of contemplation imbued with hard-earned wisdom. “Above Below” the album’s closer, encapsulates this paradox: the verses hint at clouds of frustration in Eddie Chacon’s mind, but the heavenly hook sounds like he might find the secret of life.
The word “control” is one of the patterns in Eddie Chacon’s writing. He talks about control in three of the eight songs, down to that final one, just enough times to reckon with its futility. “Life goes the way it wants”, he says in “Trouble”, the first line of the album’s first verse. This is where Pleasure, Joy and Happiness reveals an underlying philosophy, plain and approachable. To put it crudely, this is an album that says that it’s okay. It’s okay to stumble through. It’s okay to let go, move on and try something else. It’s okay to say nothing and observe. Past mistakes and unfulfilled dreams can be left behind as one—both stay within. They might always come back to haunt or transcend you.
The album’s unassuming triumph cannot be detached from the long road that preceded it. Colored by Eddie Chacon’s tumultuous ride and long-withheld confidences, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness offers a moment of grace. The grace of allowing oneself to wander, to embrace the whims of life, even when the surrounding world, or our own doubt, disguise them as failures. In that sense, the album gets close to a spiritual experience, one of silence, stillness and contemplation drawing a path towards self-acceptance. Name it wisdom or happiness—this inner force can be dormant, it still grows, until life itself lets it shine through. The lesson here is uplifting. Through years of trials and detours, Eddie Chacon searched for his calling and his truth. He found them all when he stopped looking.