The 1970s File Feature
Can This Be Real
Can This Be Real: Natural Four and the Curtis Mayfield Curtom Legacy Natural Four were a vocal harmony group from Oakland, California, who had been recording…
01 The Story
Can This Be Real: Natural Four and the Curtis Mayfield Curtom Legacy
Natural Four were a vocal harmony group from Oakland, California, who had been recording since the early 1970s before finding their most significant commercial home at Curtom Records, the Chicago-based label founded and operated by Curtis Mayfield. Their 1974 recording "Can This Be Real" became their best-known work, a polished piece of soul balladry that reflected both the group's vocal strengths and the distinctive aesthetic sensibility that Mayfield had developed at Curtom Records following his departure from The Impressions and the enormous critical and commercial success of his early solo career.
Curtom Records operated with a philosophy that Curtis Mayfield had developed across his years as a performer and songwriter: that soul music could aspire to sophistication, social consciousness, and emotional depth without sacrificing commercial accessibility. The label had released some of the most significant soul recordings of the early 1970s, including Mayfield's own Superfly soundtrack, which had redefined what a film score could accomplish while simultaneously functioning as a major commercial release. By 1974, Curtom had established itself as a label with genuine artistic credibility, and Natural Four's association with it carried the implicit endorsement of that reputation.
"Can This Be Real" was recorded with the production values characteristic of the Curtom approach during this period, featuring a rich, layered arrangement that supported the group's harmonic blend without overshadowing it. The song's composition reflects the mid-1970s soul tradition of crafting ballads that could work simultaneously as love songs and as expressions of more generalized wonder and gratitude. The arrangement deployed strings and brass in a manner that gave the record an orchestral warmth while the rhythm section provided enough rhythmic grounding to keep it from feeling overly formal. This balance between sophistication and directness was central to the Curtom aesthetic and ran through Natural Four's recording of it.
The group's vocal performances on the recording demonstrate the depth of their harmonic training and their ability to blend while still allowing individual voices to register. Four-part vocal harmony in the soul tradition requires each member to subordinate individual expressiveness to the collective blend while retaining enough personality to prevent the blend from sounding mechanical, and Natural Four achieved this balance with evident skill. The recording sits comfortably within the tradition of the great soul vocal groups of the previous decade while bringing enough contemporary polish to locate it firmly in the early 1970s sound.
Natural Four's career at Curtom represented an alignment of group talent with label philosophy that produced their most focused and commercially coherent work. Curtis Mayfield's influence as a label founder permeated the artistic environment at Curtom even on recordings he did not produce directly, shaping the sonic standards and the emotional approach that characterized the label's output. The group benefited from this environment both in terms of the production resources available to them and in terms of the artistic direction that guided their recording choices.
The soul market of 1974 was a competitive environment in which vocal groups faced significant pressure from solo artists who were dominating both the critical conversation and the commercial charts. Artists like Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder were producing work of extraordinary quality and commercial power during this period, and vocal groups had to offer something distinctive to compete effectively. Natural Four's strategy was to emphasize their harmonic sophistication and to choose material, like "Can This Be Real," that showcased vocal blend as an expressive resource rather than simply a demonstration of technique.
The song has maintained a presence in discussions of early 1970s soul balladry and in the broader conversation about the Curtom Records legacy. As collectors and music historians have revisited the Curtom catalog in the decades since its peak period, recordings like "Can This Be Real" have been appreciated both for their intrinsic musical qualities and as examples of how a label's artistic philosophy shapes the work of every act it records. The record reflects the best qualities of its era: genuine vocal skill, sophisticated production, and emotional directness deployed in the service of material with real melodic appeal. Its place in the Curtom legacy secures it a position in the larger history of early 1970s soul that its commercial performance during its release period only partially indicated.
02 Song Meaning
Astonishment as Devotion: The Emotional World of Can This Be Real
"Can This Be Real" is organized around a particular quality of romantic feeling, the sense that what one is experiencing with another person exceeds anything one previously thought possible, that the reality of the relationship is more extraordinary than anything imagination had suggested love could be. The rhetorical question of the title is not an expression of doubt but of wonder, a way of naming an experience so good that the ordinary categories of expectation cannot contain it. This use of incredulous joy as a lyrical device was a well-established strategy in soul balladry, and Natural Four bring it to life with the kind of vocal investment that makes the sentiment feel genuinely experienced rather than simply performed.
The emotional register of the song sits at the intersection of gratitude and astonishment. The narrator has found something they perhaps did not believe was available to them, and the discovery of it has produced a kind of happiness that keeps generating the question of its own reality. This is a psychologically recognizable experience, the way that great good fortune can initially feel provisional, as if it might dissolve under too close an examination, and the song's exploration of that feeling gives it a complexity that elevates it above simpler declarations of romantic happiness.
The harmonic approach Natural Four takes to the song reinforces its emotional content. Four voices coming together in agreement on a question, all asking in unison whether what they are experiencing is real, creates a communal quality to what is nominally a very personal statement. The Curtom Records aesthetic supported this kind of communal emotional expression, drawing on the gospel tradition in which individual experience becomes representative experience, in which one person's testimony articulates something that the entire congregation recognizes as true. When Natural Four asks "can this be real," they are inviting the listener to recognize in the question something of their own experience.
Within the context of early 1970s soul, the song reflects a moment in the genre's history when love ballads were being taken seriously as artistic statements rather than merely commercial products. The influence of artists like Curtis Mayfield, whose own recordings in this period combined sophisticated emotional introspection with social awareness, had raised the standard for what soul music was expected to accomplish. Even a love song, in this environment, was expected to do more than state a feeling; it was expected to illuminate it, to add something to the listener's understanding of what romantic love actually involves. "Can This Be Real" meets this standard through its focus on the quality of wonder that genuine love can produce, rather than simply asserting that love is wonderful.
The song's enduring appeal within the Curtom catalog reflects the quality of the emotional insight at its core. The question it poses is one that does not have an expiration date, the experience of finding something so good that one cannot quite believe it is real persists across generations and cultural contexts. By expressing that experience with vocal skill and harmonic sophistication, Natural Four created a recording that rewards repeated listening and that has maintained its emotional power across the decades since its release.
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