LaTasha Lee’s interpretations of soulful classics earn her Hawaii fans

It was a hot afternoon in Austin, Texas, but LaTasha Lee sounded as cool on the phone as she does in her music videos where she’s singing pop chart oldies, jazz classics and originals with mesmerizing appeal.

Lee is making her third visit to Hawaii, with a performance on Maui Friday and at the Crossroads at Hawaiian Brian’s on Saturday. She described the visit as “a blessing.”

“I have a following here in Texas and all of that, but the main ones who are really accepting me are you guys (in Hawaii) and I’m truly blessed by that,” Lee said.

“Hawaii is beautiful,” she continued. “I’m very adventurous, and I love to try new things. The last time I was there, I was able to take a hike, and I’m interested in taking some more hikes this time and getting to see some beautiful views.”

Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, Lee, 31, has been singing most of her life. She grew up listening to the great soul and jazz singers of an earlier era — she mentions Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding as some of her favorites. Her career as a recording artist began when she met writer/musician/producer Salih Williams. Williams signed her to his production company, Carnival Beats, in 2006, and they began developing what has become a unique blend of smooth soul and raw emotion, old school and contemporary urban/pop.

In 2013 Lee released her first album and a series of 17 music videos on YouTube. It’s been straight up for her since then.

“We try to keep the integrity of the old-school, classic soul music,” Lee said, describing how she and Williams put her music together. “We’re always together, and we’re always talking about the way a song should go. It’s always me and him — we’ll sit and try to put (an arrangement) together. If it makes sense we do it and hope that people will love it.”

Their arrangements span the musical spectrum from pop classics to reggae. The Afro-Caribbean rhythms of the song “HeartBreak” make it a perfect fit for Hawaii’s island music radio stations.

“We actually did that song before we went to Hawaii for the first time,” Lee said. “That was really cool that they liked it.”

“HeartBreak” is one of the originals that she and Williams share composers’ credits on, but Lee is also known for her skill as an interpreter of other artists’ hits. On some of them she and Williams stay relatively close to the original. On others they don’t: Lee’s remake of Sam Cooke’s 1959 hit “Only Sixteen” uses contemporary hip-hop narration to update Cooke’s song.

She incorporates the unmistakable guitar riff from “My Girl” in one of her own pieces.

“That’s Salih, that’s his idea for sure,” Lee said of the nod to the Temptations. “We want to pay homage to those classic soul singers, and in order for us to connect in such a way, we want to bring some of that stuff back: This is where it came from; this is where music came from.”

Williams is the laid-back guitarist seen in many of her videos, most shot in rural South Texas.

Lee likes being beyond the city limits. “It’s more organic and more natural for me to be out in the country,” she said. “If you’re in the city, for sure it’s a lot of traffic, so I always try to stay away from the city and get on the outskirts ’cause that’s where I find peace of mind. A lot of country, a lot of open road and cows and horses.”

And yes, in the music video for “HeartBreaker,” when Lee jumps off a dock into the water at a Texan park, she really did need help climbing back up.

“That was for real, I really needed help,” she said, laughing at the memory. “I didn’t want to jump in in the first place. I thought there might have been some alligators in there, but I needed help. I was pretty heavy. ‘Can you help me out?’”

Sometimes Lee sees something in a song that others don’t. Take country superstar Tammy Wynette’s 1968 hit “Stand by Your Man,” with its call for women to give the man in their life “something warm to come to” even after he’s done “things that you don’t understand.” Those lyrics have struck a sour note with some women over the years, among them a high profile first lady who mocked Wynette’s hit until her own man’s behavior put her in the position of having to choose between her ambition and her pride. Wynette has explained that the song suggests that women consider overlooking their man’s faults if they truly love him.

Lee sees the song as being more about having a good man than about a woman being a doormat.

“If you have a good man — which I do — your loyalty is to your man. Some women wouldn’t take some things, and some women are willing to, but it’s all about the love that you have,” Lee explained.

She and Williams wrote an extra verse that’s heard in her version of the song. It includes references to a man “hanging with the boys all night” and concludes with the observation that “after all, he’s still your man.”

“Some people weren’t too pleased with me adding an additional verse, but I wanted to make it my own,” she said. “And because I am a black lady, I wanted to put in my own little feeling or soul and all that to it. I hope that I did it justice.”

Lee and Williams are working on her next album, which they plan to release as a physical CD — maybe even on vinyl. Williams explained while Lee was coming to the phone that the success of her initial recordings “caught us off guard. We didn’t expect (them) to kick off like it did.” Lee’s 2014 album, “LaTasha Lee & the Black Ties,” is pretty much an online-only product, although a limited number of physical CDs will be available at her shows here.

Summing it up, Lee said again that she feels blessed that so many share her appreciation of “old school” music.

“A lot of people are about the current music today. A lot of it — to me — has gone away from what it used to be, so to find people who actually are in love with soul music, with reggae music, with something that’s not mainstream is the way to go for me,” she said. “I’m very blessed to have those fans and to have goals and actually share something with somebody that I love.”