Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings will celebrate the 20th anniversary of their second album Naturally with a remastered reissue of the late singer’s 2005 soul classic.
Out May 2nd via Daptone Records, the 2-LP vinyl edition of Naturally will pair the original album with a bonus record featuring instrumental versions of all 10 tracks.
While Naturally wasn’t Jones and the band’s first album — it followed their 2002 debut LP Dap Dippin’ — it was the one that put them on the musical map, and their first to feature Dap-Kings tenor saxophonist Neal Sugarman.
“Naturally was a breakthrough record for not only Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings but Daptone Records on a whole,” Sugarman tells Rolling Stone in a statement, adding that the album also “launched the band’s incredible 20-year touring career where Sharon Jones and the Band would go on to electrify stages and audiences around the world. The album also caught the ear of producers like Mark Ronson and others who would go on to tap the Dap-Kings to help record so many records From Al Green to Amy Winehouse.”
Naturally was also the first album recorded at Daptone Records’ Bushwick, Brooklyn studio dubbed “the House of Soul,” with Jones herself tackling much of the electrical wiring on the hand-built, two-story studio.
Dap-Kings producer, songwriter, and bassist Gabriel Roth (a.k.a. Bosco Mann) reminisced to Rolling Stone, “The release of Naturally set a lot in motion for us. We’d done some touring before that, but after the record dropped we were on the road all the time, playing bigger and bigger clubs, theaters, festivals, TV shows.”
He continued, “The show was getting really good. The band was red hot and Sharon had found her groove. Night after night we were blowing people away with these wild sweaty shows. Word was spreading. Sharon had become the matriarch of the label, fueling so much energy in the band, the label, and the whole burgeoning soul scene in Brooklyn and beyond.”
The Naturally reissue will be released as a standard black vinyl as well as two variants: An indie retail exclusive on opaque orange color vinyl and the Daptone shop exclusive on clear vinyl with orange splatter. Preorder the 20th anniversary edition now.
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings would ultimately record six albums together, with the final LP — 2017’s Soul of a Woman — arriving after Jones’ November 2016 death following a three-year cancer battle.
