LADY SOVEREIGN

Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Ken Micallef

She's only 20 years old, but she's ready to rule. She has taken meetings with Jay-Z, Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Usher and deemed them “corporate.” One of England's first female grime MCs, she's been compared to Eminem for her rapid-fire technique and clever rhymes, and she hasn't even released a full-length album. She may call herself “white midget,” but Lady Sovereign (aka Louise Harman) has a giant talent.

Following her debut EP, Vertically Challenged, released in late 2005 on the Chocolate Industries label, Lady Sovereign's debut full-length CD is coming out this spring. After the London success of such grime-flashing singles as “Nine to Five”; “Random”; and the teen-pop anthem to save the hooded sweatshirt, “Hoodie,” the new record is being tipped as a groundbreaking release. The yet-to-be-titled album, on Island/Def Jam, boasts the production talents of Basement Jaxx, Medasyn and Menta, but it all begins with her freestyle beat fest.

“I prefer to go in the studio and create the beat with the producer first,” she explains from her home in London. “I always have an idea of the beat in my head, and I explain it to the producer. Then, I will freestyle over the beat. But I come up with melodies in my head and work on the actual flow before anything. It's weird; I kind of do it backwards. I don't write my lyrics down; I just let it flow off and perfect it afterwards.”

Sovereign composes on an Apple Mac G4 with a nondescript keyboard, but the real work occurs with her producers, including Medasyn. “We used an Apple Mac G4 with a MOTU 24 soundcard running Logic Audio,” he explains. “We recorded her vocals on a Neumann M 147 mic into a Summit Audio TLA-100A compressor with Waves plug-ins on her voice. I also used Universal Audio plug-ins for the Teletronix LA-2A and UREI 1176 compressors.”

The tiny MC's collaborations with Medasyn and other producers are so close-knit that it is often hard to know where Sovereign's input begins and ends. But she always cues into the recording process. “‘Random,’ for instance, started with a melody on a Roland Jupiter-4,” Medasyn says. “The way the pitch bend goes left and right made it easy to make this wild, wiggly sound. Sovereign said, ‘That is really random.’ That gave her the idea of the lyric for the song.” Meanwhile, as Sovereign got to thinking about the lyrics, Medasyn perfected the bass sound (from an old Moog Minimoog) and the beat (from Roland TR-808 samples).

Sovereign has come a long way from selling donuts to being courted by some of the world's most famous hip-hop producers. Nevertheless, she remains calm, if not entirely cool. “Jay-Z didn't even speak that much when we met,” she says. “It was that corporate. I don't even know what we are doing. He recommended some producers for me, I think, but maybe I wasn't listening. I was nervous meeting Jay-Z, and I never get nervous.”

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