Blasting out of the gates with a roaring version of the Fabulous Peps’ “Detroit Michigan,”—and a cover portrait photographed by our own Christy Kane—the sepia-toned enigma that is Andre Williams has come to lay down the law. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better tune for him to try his hand at, especially when he starts exercising artistic license by name-checking Motor City legends like Nolan Strong and Gino Parks, deservedly placing them alongside their more well known peers Smokey Robinson and Mary Wells. Let it be known, Andre never forgets. And that’s saying nothing of his duets with Ronnie Spector on Ike & Tina’s “I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and Rudy Ray Moore on “I Ain’t Guilty,” an exercise in Coasters-style ridiculousness wherein Rudy assumes the role of “Judge Dickhead” and Andre the unfairly (natch!) accused. It’s high drama in the R&B courtroom, to say the absolute least.

But Williams’ strong point has always been his own songwriting, and as usual, there’s a lot of it here. “Get off your ass!!” Williams screams desperately in “Soul Brother In Heaven and Hell,” after quietly intoning “If you stick it in, you gotta pull it out, everybody knows what life is all about.” His lyrics center around anecdotes so simple that without perfect enunciation they’d sound stupid, but Williams’ talent for passionate storytelling and observation elevates them to darkly hilarious universal truth. After all, this is coming from the man who once told me “If you know you’re out of gunpowder and you know the Indians are on the other side of the mountain, don’t go to the other side of the mountain!!”

Producers Billy Miller and Matt Verta-Ray deserve serious accolades for truly producing Andre, in every sense of the word. You can practically hear him sweating.

“The Lie,” “Your Stuff Ain’t the Same,” “Bigger Than Need or Greed,” “Burning the Roses.” These are songs that find Andre exploding at an artistic peak that has seemingly been burning for the better part of fifty years. And just one of his ideas, as Tina Turner once said, “will crack your head wide open!”