Good Love Stays -

David Midgett & The Noma Band

After composing and producing more than 400 songs for 20 artists, David Midgett—founder of Noma Records—finally steps up to the microphone himself. Good Love Stays is his debut LP: twelve tracks of Southern soul, swamp-soaked psych, and front-porch warmth, all run through the unmistakable analog heat of the Muscle Shoals tradition.

Backed by the Noma Records house band, Midgett trades the producer's chair for the spotlight without leaving his craftsman's ear behind. These are songs built the way he's built everyone else's—lean, honest, no wasted lines—but this time they're his own. A bass-baritone that sits low and easy carries you from the river-mud groove of "In the Mud" and "Walked in That Door" to the horn-driven Southern soul of "Love of a Good Woman," through the string-laced Memphis ache of "Slow Magnolia," and out to the loose, sunlit sway of "Saints Upstairs."

It's a record about the kind of love that doesn't announce itself and doesn't leave—the quiet, durable thing the title promises. Twenty artists, four hundred songs, and the man behind all of it finally telling you, in his own voice, what he's known the whole time: good love stays.