Sleeping beauty

From the moment Mr. Brown begins, Sleepy Brown confidently asserts that he is the modern definition of soul, a cipher for burnished sexuality and Southern urbanity. “Women want, men want to be/Oh so clean, from my head to my feet/I’m out here hustling on these streets/Ain’t nobody bad like me,” he sings in a seductive whisper on “I’m Soul.”

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Sleepy Brown’s image is one of refined cool, a mix of old-school chivalry and up-to-date hip-hop swagger. He looks perpetually relaxed. Even during a rehearsal for a recent showcase at Compound nightclub in Midtown, he was iced-out in a tie-dyed blue shirt bearing a psychedelic picture of Jesus Christ; a pair of blue jeans slung low, chain hanging from a side pocket; and a pair of shades wrapped around his bald head. He and his backup band confidently strode through several recent singles, including an awesomely blown-out homage to cruising, “Me, My Baby & My Cadillac.”

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The only time Brown lost his cool was when he sat down for an interview. He seemed nervous and distracted, and fiddled with his BlackBerry pager.

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“I’m really a quiet dude, man. I really don’t say too much of nothing. I’m a little bit shy,” Brown says during a follow-up interview several days later.

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The contrast between Brown’s slum-beautiful visage and his quiet, introverted nature is only one of several contradictions in his life. Born Patrick Brown and raised in Atlanta’s Ben Hill neighborhood, he is a founding member of Organized Noize, a production team that also includes Rico Wade and Ray Murray. (“We’re like a three-headed monster,” Brown says.) The trio is responsible for uniting the Dungeon Family, a collective of musicians named after Wade’s basement recording studio. They mentored OutKast (particularly on its first two albums) and Goodie Mob; co-produced TLC’s 11-times platinum CrazySexyCool; and made hits for Ludacris (“Saturday”), En Vogue (“Don’t Let Go”) and many others.

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But when Brown prepared his debut album, For the Grown and Sexy, his then-record company DreamWorks was bought and liquidated by Interscope Records. “We didn’t see eye-to-eye on the project,” Brown says of Interscope. “So we decided to split.” The album was shelved, but not before he released “I Can’t Wait,” a sumptuous single co-starring OutKast and a sequel to “The Way You Move,” the group’s No. 1 hit with Brown. He eventually landed at Purple Ribbon, a new imprint launched by OutKast’s Big Boi and distributed by Virgin/EMI.

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Brown has participated in other soul albums in the past. There is Society of Soul, a project formed by Organized Noize and several local musicians, and its 1995 album Brainchild. He also led Sleepy’s Theme, a band that released The Vinyl Room in 1998. Both of those releases were critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful.

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Sadly, Mr. Brown may suffer the same fate. Its fantastic first single, “Margarita,” didn’t make much impact on urban radio. A glimmer of hope, however, can be found in the careers of Anthony Hamilton and Lyfe Jennings, two esoteric urban singers who managed to find a wide audience after several months of dedicated touring and word-of-mouth publicity. “I’m going to work it until it’s dead,” Brown says of Mr. Brown.

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Part of the problem is that Brown’s vision of soul is slightly different from the norm. Most R&B artists rely on hip-hop beats led by keyboards and synthesizers. The bass, drums and guitars are carefully tucked away in the background, allowing the keyboard notes to dominate the instrumentation. The resulting thin yet warm tones compare unfavorably with Brown’s swanky and swaggering tracks, which incorporate orchestral strings and prominent bass lines. He’s a student of hip-hop, too — his music usually sounds like a perpetually looping sample, but it has more depth than the tinny sounds you hear on R&B radio.

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Much of Brown’s sensibility comes from his father, Jimmy Brown, the bandleader for ’70s funk powerhouse Brick (whose hits include the classic 1976 album Good High). Sleepy even sings like him, and alternates a wintry falsetto with a sing-shout. He frequently looks back to the past for musical cues. True, it’s become hip for urban artists to claim Marvin Gaye, Prince, Stevie Wonder and other black auteur musicians as influences. For others, it’s just an impossible peak from another era. Brown actually tries to scale those heights, albeit on his own terms.

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“Marvin Gaye’s I Want You was definitely an inspiration,” he says. But he acknowledges that Mr. Brown is about love. “It’s all about the good times of love. ... I think the albums that Marvin did were more about what was going on at the time and him trying to set up a concept album.” Even if Mr. Brown doesn’t aspire to the personal angst and conceptual brilliance of Gaye’s early ’70s output, it tries to replicate its sound and transport you to the place when you first heard them. “I just want to talk about the good times. I don’t want to talk about nothing bad,” Brown says.

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Forget all the pretensions, however. Mr. Brown is just a straight-up love album, just better than the others on the market. As Sleepy Brown puts it, “I really wanted to dedicate this to the ladies. ... I love women.”