If anyone's talking about a soul singer this week, they're most likely talking about Whitney Houston--unless they're talking about Bobby Brown, of course, and we all know that can't be for the right reasons. But I'd like to talk about a different soul singer, and believe me, it's not at all impertinent to the tragedy of Whitney Houston. I use the the term soul singer instead of R&B singer. I hope you'll go along with it. R&B has such negative connotations for me--a bunch of plastic and prettified product pushed in the '80s and '90s, it evokes nothing so much as mewling vocal gymnastics and sterile verses on the vexations of love. Or what they call love. I have my doubts.
Anyway, who I'd like to talk about is Lauryn Hill. I don't know all the details of what happened to her after she took home the award that Whitney Houston has taken home more times than any other female vocalist. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) came along at a time when soul-singing was a wasteland much more deserving of that other name, R&B, which is what people usually gave it anyway. I was one of The Miseducation's purchasers that year, and one of its avid listeners. It was a dominant soundtrack to my first year in the Navy, just as D'Angelo's Brown Sugar (1995) had been a dominant soundtrack to my first, aborted attempt at college just a couple years earlier. These albums were throwbacks in all the best senses--they had the soul and sophisticated instrumentation of the '70s, the right lyrical concerns, songwriting that probed for personal and idiosyncratic meaning, most often finding it. They were all of that, at a time when all of that was likely to stand out.

Just a few years later came a third album in this vein, Remy Shand's The Way I Feel (2002), and even though it was by a white Canadian, of all the damned species, it was, if anything, better than the previous two I mention. But it doesn't matter which was best, because they were all great, and, really, once you get to a certain plateau, there's no such thing as better anyway. But it was probably my favorite, and it arrived in 2002, making Hill's album equidistant from both D'Angelo's and Shand's--the latter of which arrived just prior to the end of my hitch in the Navy, and my return to college.
So you can see how I've come to collect these three LPs into a kind of trilogy--because of where they fell in my own miseducation (which is the only kind of education worth acquiring; for further evidence of this, just see The Education of Henry Adams, whose title is echoed by Hill's). But even if those hadn't been formative and important years for me, I'd make the albums into a trilogy anyway, for the sheer excellence they exude. If the ghost of Marvin Gaye lives anywhere, it lives here. But there's another thing that unites them, and that is that their creators have all been absent, or at least silent, in the years since. And we're not talking about a few years, either. D'Angelo has made one album in the last 17 years, in 2000, which his fans would probably prefer he not made at all; Lauryn Hill has released no album of new material; and neither has Remy Shand.

You can swim for yourself through the rumors of what happened to Hill and D'Angelo and Shand in these years. You will read about love-sickness and drugs and artistic blockages of varying provenance. D'Angelo and Hill, for their own parts, have new albums scheduled to drop this year, while Shand has became a figure of such inexplicable reclusiveness that there's actually a Twitter page called "Where is Remy Shand?" (It's short on answers.) Their disappearances are baffling and beguiling reminders that death isn't the only tragic disappearance, even if it is the most definitively final. But right up until the day it occurs, the questing spirit acquires the wisdom that songs are made of.