The song Stanley was inspired by a real person named Stanley...an inmate in a state prison that I corresponded with for several years. I played the song for Stanley over the telephone.. several times. He is no longer in my life. I don't know where he is or what he is doing now, but I suspect that he is incarcerated again... somewhere.
The song first appeared on an album called G CD Global 2, a 2 disc collection of music from GLBT artists from 14 countries, produced by Greg Hudson of Woobie Bear Music. The cut was recorded by my friend Josh Durham at his home studio and is a solo acoustic version, just me and the guitar and some harmony vocals. It may still be available at www.woobiestore.com.
One evening in Nashville, when my producer friend and fellow songwriter Freddy Freeman and I were discussing tracks for my first, serious solo album (later to be named Trouble Is..) Freddy decided , as a joke I think, to put a hip hop beat to the folk rhythm and before we knew it, Stanley had a whole new feel and beat to it. Long before it was finished as a track for my album Trouble Is, I asked Kendall Kelly if he would like to use it on his new project Truth Changes and he did some re-arranging of the original tracks and sang the lead vocal on it for that album. I was very proud. Perhaps a year or so later, in 2011, Freddy and I recorded my version of the "hip hop" track and released it on Trouble Is... This year Kendall has re-vamped Truth Changes and re-released it with Stanley still on it. I had been making music videos with a local production company, but.. they didn't want to touch Stanley, because we all worked at a local state prison, and they deemed the track "too controversial" for their company to handle. In the meantime, Kendall took a stage version of a mini-musical of Stanley on the road. It featured many of his original tunes in an expanded version of the Stanley story... We fully intended to rewrite and revise this musical, but.. have yet to get around to it. I decided, after seeing some of Kendall's creative music videos that he was the man to produce my Stanley video. It was a long time in the making, but... I am very pleased with how it came out. It did indeed stir up quite some controversy where I work.
I am concerned about how the video will be received by my friends, fans and family...and Kendall and I were very sensitive about how graphic the video would be, but...I have finally decided to let it be what it is and reveal about me what it does and to accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
I am working on a dvd compilation of the music videos from Trouble Is... and the decision to include Stanley on it was a hard one to make, but... it is there in all it's "glory" because, in the end, I couldn't bring myself to leave it out. It is a beautiful video, painstakingly produced and it reveals a part of Charles K. Brown that is real and has a story and a message that may be rarely seen but felt and understood by many. I hope that my friends, fans and family will be open-minded and tolerant of the song/video's distinctive and sensitive portrayal of what may be a different kind of love story, but, ultimately a love story nonetheless. There are no plans at present for a sequel, but..I'm hoping that Kendall has a video for his own version of the song in the back of his mind. He says he does.... we shall see. I am proud to have the video featured on RightOutTV...it's a good place for it and I hope it gains an audience there. Thanks to Sugarbeach for providing an outlet for GLBT artists/musicians/songwriters/performers. Big Bear Hugs from
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Charles K Brown talks about his new video - Stanley
