Neville on "Yellow Moon," an acclaimed 1989 album by the Neville Brothers.
"Often, facades are there to hide a simple part of our personalities," says Daniel Lanois, a music producer who worked with Mr. Neville, 53, is a burly man whose huge upper arms, amateur tattoos and forbidding expression are seemingly at odds with his tremulous, startlingly pure voice and incongruously soft, high giggle. "Like I always say, I'm singing for the people I knew that didn't have a song - because that could of been me, you know?" "Everything I've done and seen gave me something to feel, something to sing about," he says, sitting in a living room that's probably bigger than the entire house where he used to live. And in the middle of it all, looking undersized and worn, is the spray-painted record.Ĭlearly, it will take more than a few years of good fortune for Aaron Neville to forget his days of no money, of jail time and drug addiction. Its walls are lined with real gold records. Ronstadt and the funk rhythm-and-blues records he made with the Neville Brothers. To the left of the marble entryway is a full-fledged trophy room, its shelves bearing the Grammy Awards he won for the lush pop songs he recorded with Ms. These days, after hit duets with Linda Ronstadt and a flourishing solo career that includes a new album, "The Grand Tour" (A&M ), he owns a brand-new, grandiose two-story brick house on the 18th fairway of a private golf course east of the city. Neville hasn't lived in that house for about six years. Neville received neither money nor the gold plaque for that hit instead, a friend took a copy of the single, spray-painted it gold and put it in a simple frame. Amid the religious paraphernalia and publicity photos on display in his cramped, cluttered wooden "shotgun" house was a gold record for his 1966 soul ballad "Tell It Like It Is." But Mr. For years, Aaron Neville had a single badge of success on the walls of his tiny house in New Orleans's Uptown district.
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