Perseverance paying off for soul band the Suffers

"I've learned that I have to respect my voice a lot more," says singer Kamerra Franklin, who fronts the Suffers, an auspicious 10-piece soul band from Houston. "It's definitely not an instrument that I can just go to a Guitar Center and replace. I have to take a lot more care as far as the partying."

Although there's plenty to celebrate these days — Franklin's outfit is in the midst of an enviable festival run, having just performed at Pemberton and Newport Folk Festival with a date secured at Austin City Limits this fall — the Suffers have put entirely too much work into this to derail their destiny with peripheral partying.

"I never really thought that this dream was still feasible," says the 28-year-old, whose stirring vocals recall Gladys Knight at her prime. "But now that I've put an insane amount of work into this, I now feel unstoppable. And I feel as though that's a really great place to be at. I feel more empowered every day that I've been with these guys."

Franklin's been with the Suffers for four years. When she joined the outfit, she had pretty much set aside whatever musical aspirations she had. Even when she got a call from bassist Adam Castaneda about singing for the new band that he and keyboardist Patrick Kelly had formed, it was never meant to be a full-time endeavor, just bunch of friends from the scene playing music together for fun.

"You know when we first begun, we all had that old-school musicians' mentality of, 'Oh, well, you know, nobody found us, or nobody picked us up yet, so I guess this just isn't going to happen. So I'll just make music for fun on the side,' " she says. "We all had day jobs and very serious day-to-day lives back at home for about four years before we made the jump to do this full time. It was just supposed to be a 'play' band, you know, that was just kind of: 'OK, we'll get together when we have a chance and play shows here and there.'

"We were also in other bands that were doing way better than what the Suffers were doing when we first started," she adds. "So it was always kind of like an afterthought kind of band. It was never meant to be anywhere near the level of where it is now. But it just blew up as time went on."

Indeed, but it certainly didn't happen by chance. Look behind the explosion and you'll find 10 determined musicians holding the detonator. And like all great musical success stories, the tale of the Suffers — which is still unfolding, obviously — isn't a new one, but it is a familiar one of persevering in the face of adversity: When every door knocked upon is closed, keep knocking, and sooner or later, it will swing wide open.

"Everything that's happened to our band," Franklin says, "has been the result of a lot of people telling us 'no,' then us working harder, and them coming back and being like, '€˜Well, OK.' It took awhile for us to get an agent because we didn't have a record out, we didn't have any real music out — we had two songs out — and the sound had changed dramatically from the first two songs we released. And so no one was really taking us seriously.

"Also, people would say that there were too many of us," she adds. "So they didn't really want to book us or really even affiliate themselves with the band, because, of course, if there's this many people, it's not going to stand the test of time or last longer than a year or two. Four years later, all these people that didn't want us are now blowing up our phone. And so, it's really nice to be on that side of the fence.

"I did just paraphrase Mike Jones," she says, laughing. That Franklin nods to a fellow artist from Houston is not by chance. It's clear that Franklin and her bandmates all have an abundance of love for the city and scene that birthed them. And you can be sure that the feeling is most definitely mutual.

This past spring, for instance, on the night when the band performed on the "Late Show With David Letterman," the entire city rallied behind the group: a downtown Houston bar hosted a viewing party, while local hip-hop heroes Bun B from UGK, Willie D from the Geto Boys and Fat Tony all issued tweets reminding folks to tune in.

"There's so much love down there and respect down there," says Franklin, beaming with pride for her hometown. "I think us playing 'Letterman' was like every single person in Houston playing ’€˜Letterman.' I'm so happy that we were able to be that vessel for them."

The "Late Show" invite came about when the group played a week of shows last year in New York at the CMJ Music Marathon. One of those sets ended up being pretty pivotal; the final show at the Rockwood Music Hall captured the attention of one of the "Late Show" producers. Moved by what he witnessed that night, he invited the unsigned band to perform on the show. And when they did, the show's iconic host had about the same reaction as his producer. After the Suffers performed "Gwan," a track from "Make Some Room," the act's four-song EP, Letterman gleefully declared, "If you can't do this, get out of the business."

Since forming, the Suffers, who got their start playing reggae and ska tunes, have evolved into a band brimming with elements of classic soul, filtered through a fusion of other influences, with Franklin's sensational vocals serving as the centerpiece. While plenty of pundits have placed the retro soul tag on the Suffers, in several interviews, Castaneda has astutely maintained that this is just what soul sounds like now. Franklin agrees.

"I feel like there (are) bands that go toward trying to achieve that vintage sound," she says. "A lot of the bands that we get compared to have gone out of their way to emulate those older artists, and I feel as though there's nothing wrong with that at all. But when we come out of the gate, we don't aim to do any of that. We just aim to make the best music that we can."

And they're not alone. Similar to the third-wave ska revival, there's a burgeoning third-wave soul movement developing in the shadow of the classic soul resurgence of the past decade, led by acts such as Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, Bettye LaVette, the James Hunter Six and the Revelations featuring Tre Williams.

These days, the spirit of the music is being kept firmly alive by an array of kindred acts from all over the country such as the Suffers and fellow Texan Leon Bridges — whose record "Coming Home" is among the best releases of the year — along with Portland's Dirty Revival, San Francisco's Midtown Social, Denver's Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, and St. Paul and the Broken Bones, from Birmingham, Ala. And like the soul music being made in the classic era, each of these outfits has something different to offer.

"At first, I think because I'm a soul singer, it was easy to put those labels on us, but as the band evolves and we begin to really find ourselves as artists, a lot more of our down home influences in Houston are starting to come out," Franklin says of her and her bandmates' efforts to continue developing their own voice. "There's a lot more hip-hop influences, a lot more Latin and Tejano influences coming into the music. I feel as though with these next few years, people are really going to be able to see who we actually are."

Read more from Dave Herrera at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com.