Being a soul man with deep knowledge of the music, Billy Price always sprinkles his album with a fine selection of songs from artists who inspired him as a teenager in New Jersey.

For “Person of Interest,” the first album in five years from the Pittsburgh legend, he was with the guys in an LA studio working on a cover of The O’Jays’ song “Sunshine.”

“I was singing it,” Price says, “and eventually I just said, ‘You know what, I'm never gonna sing this as good as Eddie Levert. I’m not even going to try.’”

We all know that from the mouth of Price, it would have been great either way. The result, though, is that “Person of Interest” drops as the first album in his 50-plus year career of all original material.

Price, a Pittsburgh music institution since 1971, is in the midst of a late-career renaissance that includes “This Time For Real” his Blues Music Award-winning album with Otis Clay, and two subsequent acclaimed albums, “Reckoning” and “Dog Eat Dog,” recorded with Kid Andersen at his Greaseland Studios in San Jose.

Rather than go for a third at Greaseland, Price ventured back to the West Coast. This time, he laid down tracks at Ultratone Studios in Studio City, Calif. with Tony Braunagel, the Grammy-winning producer and drummer best known for his work with the Phantom Blues Band, Taj Mahal, Coco Montoya and Danielle Nicole, among many others.

They first met in 2017 at the Big Blues Bender in Las Vegas prior to the Greaseland albums and talked about working together. More recently, they ran into each other at a benefit concert in Clarksdale, Miss.

“I had done two albums with Kid and I would have been happy to do more,” Price says. “I think ‘Dog Eat Dog’ is a tremendously good album, so I didn't think, ‘Oh, it's time for a change,’ I thought ‘It would be fun to change.’”

Price sent Braunagel a collection of 25 to 30 demos that he’d been working on during the pandemic with keyboardist and co-writer Jim Britton.

“Tony, probably because of the way he habitually works with people, was pitching a lot of songs to me that some of his songwriting friends wrote, and they were really good songs,” Price says. “But I was pushing back and saying, ‘Can you take a really close listen to the songs in that folder, because I think there are a lot of good songs there, and I would like to do most, if not all, the songs that I had a hand in writing.’ He didn't really fully engage until he fully engaged, and then when he did, he was on board with that idea.”

The charts that Britton wrote were handed to a group of world-class players with a long list of credentials, including three members of the Phantom Blues Band (keyboardist Jim Pugh, bassist Larry Fulcher and guitarist Johnny Schell — also the engineer), guitarists Shane Theriot (Daryl Hall, The Neville Brothers, Dr. John) and Josh Sklair (Etta James, Cher, Roy Orbison), bassist Reggie McBride (Stevie Wonder), trumpeter Mark Pender (Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny) and percussionist Lenny Castro (Rolling Stones).

Needless to say, it was a smooth set of sessions and they knocked out three or four songs per day.

“There's not a single guy who was on those sessions where I had the feeling they were just phoning it in,” Price says. “They were all really engaging and trying to make the songs as great as they possibly could. I was happy with every single person that was on that recording.”

And that includes himself. At 74, most singers are a mere shadow of their former selves. Price, who balanced his career as a part-time musician with a day job in communications at Carnegie Mellon University, hasn’t lost that smooth delivery while gaining even more richness in his voice.

“My voice was in great shape out there,” he says. “It's been somewhat erratic over the past few years and unpredictable. But for whatever reason, it was in good shape in Los Angeles and I felt like I was able to do pretty much anything I wanted to do without struggling. Part of it might be because, you know, here I am in this room with these ringers and there's some pressure on me to convey to them that I'm pretty good.”

Price delivers 13 swinging R&B/soul songs on the timeless topics of love, romance and duplicity. The title track leans on a term that’s become common on the news.

“I was driving back from Charlotte, North Carolina,” he says, “and I was listening to the radio, something on the news where they said such and such ‘is not a suspect at this time, but they're a person of interest.’ So, I texted Jimmy, ‘What about a cheating song where a guy suspects somebody of doing something with his wife, but he's not gonna come out and say that he suspects that. He's just gonna say he's got his eye on them. They're a person of interest.’ So we wrote this kind of a soul/blues type of thing, with a spoken part that we were just dying laughing about.”

One of the slow-burning tracks is “Change Your Mind,” with a title evoking “Can I Change My Mind?,” a standout from the “Live Stock” album with Roy Buchanan in the early ‘70s, and a vibe reminiscent on “Please Don’t Turn Me Away,” a song he did with Buchanan on “That’s What I Am Here For.”

“The studio album is mostly a pile of crap, but that one song isn't bad,” Price says. “So, I was thinking ‘There's a resonance with Buchanan here.’”

When he suggested to Braunagel that they dedicate the song to Buchanan and bring in a special guest for the solo, the producer recommended Joe Bonamassa, who was influenced by the late guitarist.

“Tony texted Bonamassa and he replied in two minutes and said, ‘Sure, would love to do it,’” Price says.

But then the popular guitar hero went on tour and was hard to pin down, even after he got back. Ultimately, a box of Cuban cigars did the trick and Bonamassa delivered the stinging solo.

“It sounds like him but it also has a couple of the Buchanan tricks and the signature sorts of things that Buchanan would do,” Price says.

One of the more clever tracks comes second on the album with “Song I Never Heard Before,” a blues shuffle that addresses a staleness in both a relationship and the music scene.

When asked about it, Price goes on a bit of a roll.

“What I had in the back of my mind,” he says, “was that I'm kind of sick of all these, like, tribute bands and all this other stuff. And the other thing I sometimes think about is that a lot of times the audiences that I play for are more interested in recreating some period of time in their past when they were happier than they are now. And I'm not that interested in that kind of stuff, you know.

“I'm sure every artist has this ambivalence about wanting to do the things that they're doing right now and realizing that the audience wants to also hear the hit songs that they are familiar with. And I'm the same way when I go hear an artist. I’ll go and listen for certain songs that I wanna hear, so I'm not above any of this. But there's some ambivalence there.

He continues, “I really can't stand to see people of my generation saying nonsense like, ‘We saw all the great concerts in our day. [There will] never be anything as great as the soul music from the ‘60s.’ And, yeah, the soul music from the ‘60s is great, but it's not like there's not great music being created and produced now. You're just not listening. Those are the ideas that were bouncing around in my head when I wrote that song.”

If “Mercy,” one of the emotional centerpieces of the record, sounds familiar to longtime fans, it’s because it was part of the Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band set back in the ’80s when he was packing the Decade and Graffiti. Price was reminded of the song, which never made onto the final KRB album “Free At Last,” when a superfan brought him a live recording she made at one of the shows.

“My manager at that time,” he says, “was this guy who managed The Hooters and he tried to turn Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band somewhat into The Hooters, which was never gonna work. So when I would do these kinds of deep, gospel, preachy songs, he would always say ‘Eh, nah, not so much,’ and so I think he was responsible for rejecting that song, ‘Mercy,’ from that album.’

‘When I heard [the live recording], I said, ‘Oh my God, why did I never record this song?’ When I played it for Tony, he was knocked out, so I think we produced a really, really good version of that song.”

“Crying at the Stoplight” sets up the promise of a good story, and Price doesn’t disappoint with this blues vignette about an incidental encounter on the street when he was living in Baltimore.

“I was at a stoplight,” he says, “and I looked over and I saw this woman crying next to me, and I was really in songwriting mode at that time. And right after we left the stoplight, I thought, ‘Oh, I could turn that into a song.’ So, when I introduce it live, I tell that story and I say, ‘This is what artists do: they exploit human misery for financial gain.’ I think the key line, because I can relate, is ‘Did somebody hurt her like somebody hurt me?’”

Price stops short of hyping “Person of Interest” as his best album ever, as artists often do with the new one, because he loves the Greaseland records as well. But, he knows that he came back east with a winner.

He heard it from Pugh.

“This is the third album in a row that Jim has played keyboards on and he's also the executive director of Little Village, which is the label that we ended up on," Price says. “Jim's the kind of guy who’s known for being grumpy, sarcastic and jaded. I saw him at the BMAs in Memphis, hanging out, and he said, ‘I'm really surprised. I really like your album.’ I said, ‘What do you mean you're surprised? You're surprised you could like an album by Billy Price?’ He said, ‘No, I don't like anything, but I like your album.”

The album is available now on Spotify. The physical version will be released Friday, June 7. The Billy Price Band will perform it in full at the release show that night at the open-air Syria Shrine Center in Cheswick with background vocalists Anne Celedonia and Addi Twigg, a three-piece horn section, guests Norman Nardini and Gabe Stillman as well as opening band Billy the Kid & the Regulators. It begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20; showclix.com.

First Published: May 30, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: May 30, 2024, 7:58 p.m.