Earth, Sun, Moon
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
As grounded or otherworldly as she wants to be, R&B singer/producer Erykah Badu and producer/mixer Mike “Chav” Chavarria balance the extreme with the practical on New Amerykah
Calling out a guest who has arrived at Electric Lady to hear her latest release, New Amerykah, Erykah Badu insists, “No one hears my music until they talk to me first.”
Typically bold, direct and personably magnetic, Erykah Badu is hip-hop goddess, soulful earth mother and mystical avant-garde soothsayer all rolled into one. Badu's status as hip-hop's reigning neo-soul ambassador is based on several multiplatinum-selling albums; her sleek, bass-heavy productions; a recognizable honey-and-salt vocal style often compared to jazz legend Billie Holiday; and, to a lesser degree, her former relationship with Outkast's André 3000 (who fathered her child, Seven).
Camping out in her own personal lair at the Greenwich Village recording complex built by guitarist/composer Jimi Hendrix in 1970, Badu keeps the lights low and her Apple MacBook Pro powered up as she works on all phases of New Amerykah's launch: CD cover art adorns the walls; pages of a proposed magazine, The Freaq, fill several small tables; and mystically inclined drawings of unknown purpose cover a lava lamp. Badu readily reveals her working processes for New Amerykah (Universal/Motown, 2008), as dozens of tracks from producers as disparate as Madlib, 9th Wonder, Shafiq Husayn (Sa-Ra), J Dilla and Karriem Riggins are arrayed on her laptop's screen via her favorite software: Apple GarageBand.
“Everything that the producers e-mailed me I put into GarageBand,” Badu says, spooning green tea ice cream into her mouth. “Then we would try to duplicate it at Electric Lady. I did vocals on my laptop, babies crying and everything. I also EQ'd the tracks using effects like GarageBand's Vocal Reflection.”
SO 10 YEARS AGO
Assisted by mixer/producer Mike “Chav” Chavarria (J Dilla, Eminem, Snoop Dog), Badu recorded vocals and basic tracks at Luminous Sound Recording in Dallas. But the bulk of New Amerykah is based on the producers' raw 2-tracks, which were e-mailed to Badu, dumped into GarageBand, then embellished by her and Chav at Electric Lady (in Pro Tools). Adding live bass, guitar, flutes, percussion and keyboards, plus a wealth of freaky effects and plug-ins, the pair produced a surreal magnum opus of hip-hop. The first single, “Honey,” is a poor indicator of the depths and heights scaled on New Amerykah. The album's fluid bass rhythms (courtesy of Steve “Thundercat” Bruner) recall the low-down subterfuge of D'Angelo's masterpiece, Voodoo; Badu's layered vocal harmonies (recorded to a Studer A820 ½-inch, using RMG tape) are at times frighteningly bizarre; the music is diverse and exploratory; altogether, the overwhelming underground nature of the record recalls a mad mash of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, Sly and the Family Stone's Fresh and Quasimoto's The Further Adventures of Lord Quas. Badu doesn't mince words regarding New Amerykah's intended message.
“It's a play on my name, and it's very different and new for me,” she explains, settling into a large purple couch. “In 1997, a 25-year-old Erykah Badu came out as an artist, pregnant, a mother-to-be. We used to bring cassettes home as our listening from the studio. No one had a cell phone, only a couple people with these great big contraptions. The Internet was not our form of communication; we still had the library. We were creating from sand and scrap. So quickly it's turned into this technological society. I can send the album to millions of fans from Antarctica to Mexico City with one push of the button. The way our children think and the things they see? It's new, and it's happened so quick. And I am in the middle of that. Me on the platform with a microphone — that is how I envision New Amerykah.”
The album is scheduled to appear in two parts during 2008: part one, New Amerykah, a self-described “political purging,” and part two (to be released as a USB stick within a jewel case), the occultist-sounding Return of the Ankh. Badu reveals her astrological sign (Pisces, Moon in Aquarius) and her fondness for adding the bell-like peals of tuning forks to her records, furthering her cosmic-conscious approach.
“I always use tuning forks,” Badu says. “According to the message I am trying to get and studying the frequency of sound, each tuning fork has a certain vibrational energy that is conducive to a feeling or a color or a smell. They're related to different chakras in the body, too. Some may make you feel good or sexy or conscious of what you're saying. Depending on the song and the frequency I am trying to get over to the people, I use the tuning forks, and I also played talking drum.”
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