Got to Have It
By Jacksoul (Sony); streaming at jacksoul.com
Missing from CBC Music's new list of the Top 100 Canadian pop songs ever recorded is Jacksoul's turn of the century hit Can't Stop, a strummed, gently sweeping cut in which the late singer Haydain Neale both declares and questions the relentlessness of his love – "Can anybody feel me at all?"
Many did feel Neale, the elegant and soulful singer who died young in 2009 of lung cancer. From the vaults now comes Got to Have It, a demo recorded in 2007 that has been refashioned in the current retro-disco style, with its Studio 54 beat, bass-popping statements and a guitar-treble manner invented by Nile Rodgers.
Given its borrowed vintage, the seventies pop-culture reference "you silly rabbit" is less embarrassing than it otherwise should be, on a funky tune about got-to-have-it booty and a pursuit of love by a man who will not be denied. Five years after his death, Neale still can't stop.
Brad Wheeler