via BroBible
You’ve heard Charlie Bereal’s guitar without ever knowing his name. The Grammy-nominated session player and producer laced classics for Aaliyah, Missy Elliott and Mýa, worked with Jay-Z, Kanye and Raphael Saadiq, and recently signed to Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records for his album “Walk With the Father.”
When he came on BroBible Side Quests, I asked him my favorite question: the five most influential albums of his life. For a guy raised in the church and steeped in soul, the first four make all the sense in the world. The fifth does not. But the way he explains it tells you exactly how his ear works.
Here’s the list.
1. Marvin Gaye, Anthology
Bereal half-apologized for opening with a compilation, then decided it counted. “I would listen to the whole thing. It was an album as a CD,” he said. And yes, before you ask, “What’s Going On” is in there.
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2. Tony! Toni! Toné!, House of Music
The group’s 1996 farewell, and a foundational record for a young Bereal, who would later end up playing alongside its leader, Raphael Saadiq, in the flesh. Full-circle stuff.
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3. D’Angelo, Voodoo
No shock from a guy who was in the room for some of D’Angelo’s most legendary sessions. When I told him how much culture the 2000 masterpiece shaped, he didn’t argue. Let’s just say it’s the kind of record a lot of people’s kids owe their existence to.
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4. L.A. Mass Choir, Come As You Are
The gospel pick, and the one that flips a switch. “This is the other side of me that started really dissecting this,” Bereal said. The 1992 choir record is where the church kid turned into a student of how records are actually built.
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5. Coldplay, X&Y
And there it is. A soul-and-gospel guitarist’s list, and it lands on Coldplay’s 2005 arena-rock opus. But listen to why.
“They were a band, and I didn’t understand, why is it sounding like this?” Bereal said. “I realized, okay, this is real instruments, and the guitar player with the effects, the way he was recording it, the piano acoustics, the way the mic sounded, the dryness of the songs, just how it’s recorded.”
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“I’m a fan of Sonics,” Bereal tells me.
Every record here is Bereal chasing the same thing, not just the song, but how it was captured, mic’d and pressed to tape. Marvin Gaye, Tony! Toni! Toné!, D’Angelo, a Los Angeles gospel choir and Coldplay have almost nothing in common on paper. To Bereal’s ear, they’re all the same pursuit.
See Charlie run through the full list, and break it down on guitar, on the latest episode of BroBible Side Quests, on YouTube below: