"One day my aunt went to the record store without me and came home with a number of records, including this one. I loved it. It wasn't a jazz record, but it wasn't a soul record either. Chaka Khan undersang everything. She wasn't up to her usual wailing tricks. The most notable presence on Ask Rufus was Clare Fischer, the uncle of the drummer, André Fischer, and a legendary string arranger in his own right. Orchestral work in black music is nothing new—Philadelphia created an entire genre based on adding orchestral arrangements to songs. But there's something about the beauty of darkness that Clare Fischer adds to these records that's just haunting. This was also a Sunday record in my house. My parents were going to do an extended trip to Louisiana and Miami, gone five weeks. When they told me how long they'd be away, the string breakdown of "Egyptian Song" came on. It's a soundtrack moment, a perfect illustration of childhood sadness, lush and spare and at the same time, creepy. And then the story got sadder, at least for me. In Louisiana, Aunt Karen met a man at a restaurant. It blossomed into romance and they decided to get married. When the grown-ups got back from that trip, my parents gave us another talk: We're not going back out on the road again, no, but Karen's leaving. She took the record with her."