Singer Robert Fowler carries a musical theatre background into the song Talk

Robert Fowler has released a new ballad called "Talk", which SoulTracks featured as a First Listen on August 27.

The song is a plea from a man to a partner to open the lines of communication between them. Howard Dukes, writing the piece, describes the request as simple to express and hard to act on, with the first move being to tell the other person that silence is not an answer.

Fowler has worked across most of the performing disciplines. He is a dancer, an actor on stage and screen, a singer and a songwriter, and it is the voice that brought him to the outlet's attention rather than any of the rest of it.

What SoulTracks connects most directly is the singing and the theatre work. Fowler performed in musicals including Dreamgirls, and the review traces his crisp phrasing and the theatrical quality of his delivery back to that training, which is a different discipline from the looser, more improvised approach much contemporary soul singing takes.

He is also a member of Broadway Inspirational Voices, a performance group made up of Broadway performers who use their singing to raise awareness and support causes, which is another route through which stage technique has shaped what he does on record.

"Talk" sits squarely in traditional rnb and soul balladry, closer to the arrangements of stage singing than to anything currently on radio, and joins the release calendar as a single rather than part of an announced album.