An excellent follow-up to his 1971 debut, Just As I Am, Still Bill further burnishes Withers’s reputation as a deceptively understated everyman’s singer/songwriter with a poet’s soul. The primary difference is that Withers trades in the Booker T.-led group of mostly Memphis musicians for the Southern Californian equivalent in the Watts 103rd St. Rhythm Band, L.A.’s most storied band of soul music studio players.

– Oliver Wang