It’s well after midnight and Erykah Badu is holed up in a small apartment that is part of Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Electric Ladyland studios. It’s the eve of Badu’s record-label-imposed deadline for her newest album, New Ameryka and she’s been working overtime since returning from a trip to Israel a few days before. The posters of Hendrix on the wall give one pause to contemplate what this place would be like if Jimi had lived to record and mentor others here.
The room feels like a tour bus. It’s dimly lit and an L-shaped couch serves as Erykah’s headquarters; a butter leather lily pad from whence, like a multi-limbed goddess, Badu commands her production center, her laptop never far. With deadlines looming, she’s not going out too much either (“My t-shirt’s about to walk off me,” she says). She says she’s focused, but not stressed. Really?
“Not at all. Everybody else around me is freaking, though.” She adapts a lovely singsong voice, in benign mimicry of label cats who aren’t sittin’ where she is: “You gonna make it? tah rah rah…Why you doin’ that? tah rah tah…Is this a new track? Tah rah rah….” She’s got bigger things on her mind, like her next vocal take, coming up at about 2:30 in the morning.
No doubt it’s been a minute, save for “Honey” (which she calls “an accidental single by default”) and she explains—quite touchingly—that there might’ve been further drought but for the emergence of digital technology in her life, a fairly recent development: “I was off work for a long time. Somebody gave me a Mac as a gift. Along with that came a world of information; I was able to chat with my friends; they were like ‘Erykah come, come, we need you to come out, we’re gonna send you some tracks.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, send me some tracks?’ So Dilla would send me some tracks; Madlib; 9th Wonder, he was pressing the most; Shafiq from Sa-Ra; Kareem Riggins; Tone; 88 Keys; Georgia Anne Muldrow. These are my friends, you know? Sending me tracks.”
From there, it was just a quick tutoring session from her son, Seven. “He told me how to drag in tracks and create alternate tracks to do vocals. It was all like a big explosion in my brain; like, Oh shit!” Her face glows as she turns to the monitor, I follow her eyes… “These cats on this chat list right here? They’re doin’ it to motivate me, they’re saying: ‘Come on, we need you to come out!’ I saved them all [the text messages] cuz’they mean so much to me.”
She also appreciates that message boards don’t care who the hell she is. “OkayPlayer set up a platform for us to communicate, and we’re peers. We arguing on there, y’know? Fuck you! Well, fuck you! Well, fuck you! It’s an equal playing field. My handle is Analogue Girl, they know when I come on…I’m giving my opinion and some think it’s cool, some are averse to it but whatever, you know? We talk.”
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