Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to another episode of Quetch Love Supreme.
Speaker 2: I'm you know, it's court Love and with three of course,
Speaker 2: this is the ever present Team Supreme. Uh, frantically, what's happening.
Speaker 3: What's happening, what's happening, what's happening?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was about to say, you gotta tell me
Speaker 2: what's the after effect of the Little Brother documentary.
Speaker 3: Uh, it's been a lot, man.
Speaker 4: I think the first week it came out, like when
Speaker 4: we first put it out during the uh during Black Friday,
Speaker 4: I had one my homie hit me and was like, Yo, man,
Speaker 4: I haven't talked to my sister in three years, and
Speaker 4: I'm gonna give her a call after watching this. So
Speaker 4: it's been it's been stuff like that. Like it hasn't
Speaker 4: even been a lot of music shit. It's been people
Speaker 4: just been hitting me, just talking about personal shit, personal
Speaker 4: shit like yo, ill my man's like yo, I'm about to.
Speaker 3: Start my own business now being bullshit and this. You know,
Speaker 3: it's been a lot.
Speaker 4: So it's been opened up a lot of conversations that uh,
Speaker 4: I think we're Yeah, it was it was kind of
Speaker 4: overwhelming at first, just to kind of be getting all
Speaker 4: that at one time, you know what I mean. But uh,
Speaker 4: but people really enjoyed it, and they see the spirit
Speaker 4: of what we made and you know, the love and
Speaker 4: care what we made it, and so I'm just happy
Speaker 4: that people enjoying it.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say that we're kind of
Speaker 2: at the the end of the stretch, like where we
Speaker 2: must turn the record in somewhere, and it's sort of like,
Speaker 2: kind of after watching the documentary, I was like, hey,
Speaker 2: do we have to give this to.
Speaker 1: A major label?
Speaker 3: Like come on, come on, come on, come on.
Speaker 1: He preaches this forever.
Speaker 2: I was going to say that we're seriously trying to.
Speaker 2: I think we're considering, you know, taking the training wheels
Speaker 2: off and see if we can do this for depth.
Speaker 2: I mean, technically, yes, we owe def jam another record,
Speaker 2: but it's also like it's been ten years and there's
Speaker 2: a whole nother ministration there, so you know, it's not
Speaker 2: like I think they're crying, like damn it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When we were.
Speaker 2: Last there working on How I Got Over, there was
Speaker 2: an executive in the studio with us, and he was
Speaker 2: talking shit about us, thinking that Tarik was like one
Speaker 2: of the staff at Electric Ladies Studios.
Speaker 1: I don't know what they look like. I don't know
Speaker 1: the album.
Speaker 2: Just fucking hearing ship Manek's like, Yo, I'm in this
Speaker 2: studio with you.
Speaker 1: He was, Oh, I'm sorry. I thought, Oh damn, I
Speaker 1: thought he worked here.
Speaker 3: So y'all institution, Man, I love to see it. That'll
Speaker 3: be dope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'll say that you definitely planned to see
Speaker 2: in that to see if we can do this on
Speaker 2: our own bill.
Speaker 1: What's up man? All of our lives?
Speaker 5: Like, I'm great. I was just thinking about what I
Speaker 5: learned from the Little Brother documentary is do whatever the
Speaker 5: fuck you want and be.
Speaker 1: Really good at it.
Speaker 5: Like that's the best piece of advice, Like don't succume
Speaker 5: to anybody else's wants. Just do you and be true
Speaker 5: to your art, like no Ship and I we all
Speaker 5: make art here, but like to be that true to
Speaker 5: it and like honest about it is really cool. And
Speaker 5: that's what I learned, amongst other things about other certain people.
Speaker 5: That's what I learned from the Little Brother documentary.
Speaker 1: I loved it.
Speaker 2: I would love to say that you're like your JMI
Speaker 2: Jazz recording offices, Steve, but that's how that's how official
Speaker 2: it looks right now. So I don't know what's going on,
Speaker 2: Like you got your own merch now your own bags.
Speaker 3: Like, oh you saw that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're doing well JMI Recordings dot com. Yeah, little
Speaker 6: jazz label here and Yo, Steve, I want to.
Speaker 4: Tell you too, Bro, I bought I finally broke down
Speaker 4: and bought a turntable and I listened to like all
Speaker 4: like the records that you've given. Bro, they sound amazing, man,
Speaker 4: like amazing, Like they sound great on vinyl.
Speaker 3: So now y'all are doing a great job, Bro. This
Speaker 3: ship is the shit is dope. The records really great.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much. I'll send you. I'll fill you
Speaker 6: in on what you don't have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean cops, I mean the link.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: It takes money.
Speaker 5: He makes, he makes house calls. He came to Hoboken
Speaker 5: and delivered me records. That happens, Damn I have to ask.
Speaker 1: Damn. Meanwhile, Steve, I live in the same building.
Speaker 2: I find myself stealing my own product anyway, So let's
Speaker 2: get to it. I will say I love a good
Speaker 2: transformation story, the artistic metamorphosis or what we call uh
Speaker 2: departure albums. I've even taught about departure albums at NY
Speaker 2: you were a few semesters for those not hip to
Speaker 2: the term. You know, departure album is basically like the
Speaker 2: one album you can and that doesn't sound like what
Speaker 2: you represented when you first came in the door. I
Speaker 2: mean there's there's some legiti metamorphosis, like artists like and
Speaker 2: grow eventually. I guess the most famous departure album would
Speaker 2: be right going on? Well, no, I was going to
Speaker 2: say Sergeant Pepper's was the very first one, because the
Speaker 2: Beatles wanted to kill the Beatles or the idea of
Speaker 2: the mop tops and teeny boppers and never tour again,
Speaker 2: and then that backfired and actually made them more famous
Speaker 2: and then caused them to implode. But even that was
Speaker 2: inspired by a departure record, which I guess you could
Speaker 2: say pet Sounds by the Beach Boys as that, But
Speaker 2: I mean there's millions of them.
Speaker 3: There's Thinker Life of Plants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Secret Life of Plants, right going on? Kid A
Speaker 2: Grace land Light, Yeah, oh Rave Light?
Speaker 7: Uh huh?
Speaker 1: Actually was she trend hoping or was that really?
Speaker 3: You know? It was it was a departure from what
Speaker 3: came before.
Speaker 1: I'll say that, right, right, she wasn't popped.
Speaker 2: Okay, you're right, but I mean, well, awaken my love,
Speaker 2: Ata waits and heartbreaks for hip hop, Paul's benef there
Speaker 2: you go, yeah, bitch brewe dirty mind. So it's all there.
Speaker 3: Did the roots of a departure album?
Speaker 1: What phrenology or something? It's hard to say.
Speaker 2: I mean, phrenology wasn't more an excuse to do something
Speaker 2: different than I realized, Like how slow I was listening
Speaker 2: to The Roots Come Alive and like shit was like slow,
Speaker 2: but also doing the Roots Come Alive? Like I was
Speaker 2: at my physical heaviest at like four hundred plus pounds,
Speaker 2: and I had lost weight for Phrenology, and suddenly I
Speaker 2: felt like I wanted to be more energetic. So and
Speaker 2: then it became like, let's just do what we're not
Speaker 2: supposed to do. So it's sort of a departure record.
Speaker 2: But time will tell if I was just you know,
Speaker 2: not willing to face the keep the things fall apart
Speaker 2: thing alive? I don't know, but I will say that
Speaker 2: our Guest Today has been a long time favorite of
Speaker 2: mine since her two thousand and six debut, and shortly
Speaker 2: there after I was fortunate enough to, I guess a
Speaker 2: year later work on work with her on Al Green's
Speaker 2: Laid Down album, and then a year after that we
Speaker 2: worked on her sophomore album, To See, And you know,
Speaker 2: I kind of thought I had her completely figure it out,
Speaker 2: and nothing prepared me for her fourth record. I'll just
Speaker 2: say that that much quick backstory. I guess our guest
Speaker 2: and I reconnected in the summer of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: She give me a copy of the record. She did
Speaker 2: it so casually that two days went by before I
Speaker 2: remember that, OHI the record, let me peep and see
Speaker 2: what's up, And.
Speaker 1: You know, it was kind of gobsmack.
Speaker 2: And again, I'm trying to avoid typical questlove hyper bowl
Speaker 2: when it comes to my excitement for something. But you know,
Speaker 2: it's been a minute that I've listened to a complete
Speaker 2: album on repeat over again by an artist not named Salt,
Speaker 2: and I will to say that there's a lot to
Speaker 2: unpack here. Normally I want to go through the whole,
Speaker 2: you know, journey of an artist's life, but I'm so
Speaker 2: obsessed with this record. I have so many questions. I
Speaker 2: might have to do this interview backwards. But yeah, for me,
Speaker 2: Black Rainbows is one of my favorite records of the year,
Speaker 2: and I'm really really excited to have a conversation with
Speaker 2: our guest today, Krinn Belly Ray One Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 7: Welcome, Heydan, Thanks so much. Thanks for that introduction.
Speaker 2: Wait let me see, Oh god, okay, twelve minutes. We're
Speaker 2: not bad. Normally I don't even get to the guest
Speaker 2: until twenty seven minutes. All right, and it's time to go.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Karin, thank you. So right now
Speaker 2: you are in You're in Connecticut right now?
Speaker 7: Correct, right now, I'm in New York, so I may
Speaker 7: or may not be getting up to Connecticut today. It
Speaker 7: depends as loads of snow on the road. So I
Speaker 7: always try and make a show like I'm happy to
Speaker 7: be there, and if only twenty people come, then we're
Speaker 7: still going to have a good time. But we'll see
Speaker 7: what the he says. I hate cancel shows. It's so disappointing,
Speaker 7: you know. I hate to be a fan and have
Speaker 7: a council show, and I've been to so many shows
Speaker 7: where nobody else could make it. You know, then you
Speaker 7: feel like you're the lucky one hundred people who brave
Speaker 7: the storm or whatever. So yeah, hopefully we'll be up there.
Speaker 2: And when someone cancels on you, okay, let me get
Speaker 2: out my feelings anyway. Yeah, I hate when artists cancel
Speaker 2: on people. Well, first of all, I'm curious for this
Speaker 2: particular tour, how many musicians are you with because this
Speaker 2: album is so sprawling in terms of its I mean,
Speaker 2: you literally cover every damn near every genre of music.
Speaker 2: And you know, my obsession with it was how is
Speaker 2: she going to pull this off live? What is the
Speaker 2: makeup of the band that you're with on tour?
Speaker 7: The lineup, there's just six of us in the band.
Speaker 7: So there is Melanie Charles who's singing and she's playing
Speaker 7: flute and she's playing percushion, and I'm singing and playing guitar,
Speaker 7: electric guitar and some percussion stuff. Aaron Barnette is playing
Speaker 7: tenor saxophone. Kyle Bolden is playing electric guitar, who I
Speaker 7: absolutely love. I've wanted to work with him for a
Speaker 7: long time. He plays with Stevie Wonder and we're lucky
Speaker 7: that Stevie's in the studio right now, so it's like
Speaker 7: entice Kyle. So yeah, so's he's kind of like three people,
Speaker 7: you know. He plays just one guitar. He showed me
Speaker 7: his guitar the other day. It folds in half and
Speaker 7: packs in a backpack, you know, like some guitars. Really
Speaker 7: it has to be this and it has to be
Speaker 7: this wood that's maple and cherry and seasoned. And he's
Speaker 7: just like it folds and half, he puts it in
Speaker 7: his backpack. He's playing one guitar through the whole show
Speaker 7: the string you know, it falls forward and the strings everything.
Speaker 7: It's a portable guitar that it's playing right now and
Speaker 7: he can cover. He's playing like wailing electric guitar. He's
Speaker 7: playing like really pretty Curtis Mayfield, and he just does
Speaker 7: it all. It's just in the spring, you know. So
Speaker 7: he's amazing. And then I'm playing with Stephen Brown. He's
Speaker 7: my long time collaborator and he has a massive setup.
Speaker 7: So he has a few keyboards. He's playing bass sometimes
Speaker 7: with the with organ pedals that he has underneath the
Speaker 7: underneath the keyboards, he's playing based with his feet a
Speaker 7: lot of times, or sometimes he's playing synth bas sometimes
Speaker 7: he's playing electric bass. Look on New York Transit Queen.
Speaker 7: He gets up from the keyboards and he has a
Speaker 7: whole row on top of we've taken spring tanks, and
Speaker 7: we've taken headles, we've taken modular synths, so everything that
Speaker 7: he's doing on stage sort of all of the sends
Speaker 7: from stage are going into that rig so that he
Speaker 7: can affect it in real time, so that he can,
Speaker 7: you know, if we're singing and we wanted to get
Speaker 7: like trippy and transcendent, he can put in his delays
Speaker 7: and reverbs and backwards things and octavizers and then that's
Speaker 7: going out to front of house. So yeah, we just
Speaker 7: we just put it all on a plane yesterday. I
Speaker 7: think are over oversize or whatever. You know, we have
Speaker 7: to pay over it. She was like like, what, we
Speaker 7: can't leave any of this shit behind. You know, it's
Speaker 7: just like boxes and boxes and stuff. But it's worth
Speaker 7: it because I like to be able to make this
Speaker 7: six more expensive sound.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm also known for completely wild outtakes, and
Speaker 2: of which I don't want to get canceled, so I'll
Speaker 2: I'll say the majority of them behind, but I will
Speaker 2: say the safest one of my wild outtakes was I
Speaker 2: think maybe.
Speaker 1: This was ideally.
Speaker 2: The album I thought I was making with Electric Circus
Speaker 2: where you know, where you want to show a wide
Speaker 2: range of styles but not appear to be too you know,
Speaker 2: over eager or enthusiastic with it, like it just sounds natural.
Speaker 2: And then you know, by the third listen, I realized
Speaker 2: that like you're literally covering you're covering so much territory.
Speaker 2: Like you go from literally from this, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: some shit goes completely hardcore to you know, then you
Speaker 2: go after futurists and you do this nineties Riot Girls
Speaker 2: throwback thing, and then like with the last song before
Speaker 2: the Throne, like it's almost like like you transport it
Speaker 2: back to an Alice Coltrane kind of outtake, and the
Speaker 2: thing one is like I was hoping the song was
Speaker 2: gonna be seventeen minutes like an Alice Coltrane song, and
Speaker 2: then it cuts off and I'm like, what the fuck?
Speaker 3: But that was one of my favorite ones on the
Speaker 3: album too. That's a hard ass. That's a hard that
Speaker 3: it flows the album.
Speaker 2: That Yeah, it's goddamn and it's can you tell me
Speaker 2: just from soup to nuts how you put it together?
Speaker 2: Because in my mind it's so every song is so unique.
Speaker 2: I think if making it in real time, I wouldn't
Speaker 2: know how you had seen it as cohesive, but yet
Speaker 2: together it feels cohesive.
Speaker 1: Can can you just describe to us the process.
Speaker 7: I'm glad that it feels like one thing, and it
Speaker 7: felt like one thing to me because it was all
Speaker 7: driven by this obsession, and it was driven by this
Speaker 7: subsession with this building. I had been on a friend's board.
Speaker 7: It was like a it was a Pinterest board that
Speaker 7: she had she called Jamala John's and she's kind of
Speaker 7: a arc curator. I think in the early days of Pinterest,
Speaker 7: it wasn't just like this is a cute hairstyle, but
Speaker 7: some people were using it like a magazine, you know.
Speaker 7: So there they were using they would put up a
Speaker 7: picture and then they were just right tons and tons.
Speaker 7: And she had this board called Artists and their Creatives
Speaker 7: and their Workplaces. So she had Carra Walker arranging her silhouettes.
Speaker 7: She had a Picasso painting with light, and she had
Speaker 7: this photograph of this artist, this black artist, contemporary artist,
Speaker 7: this man, and he was sort of staring out of
Speaker 7: the frame with this peacefuls of bold expression and behind
Speaker 7: him was this weird contemporary art that I didn't understand,
Speaker 7: you know, A pile of bricks on the floor, this
Speaker 7: shaggy goat instead of legs, it had the spindles and
Speaker 7: it was going around on a circular track. And then
Speaker 7: there was a big shop for a big sign for
Speaker 7: a shop, Harold's Chicken Shop in Chicago, with like a
Speaker 7: chef chasing after a chicken with a meat leaver. And
Speaker 7: he was just looking out like he was represented by
Speaker 7: white Cuban. He was looking at the frame like, yeah,
Speaker 7: this is my art, you know. And I thought, who
Speaker 7: is this? I don't know contemporary art. Who's this man specifically,
Speaker 7: who's this black man who's not working in figurative art?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 7: It's not paintings of people, it's not drawings of people,
Speaker 7: it's not photographs. It's this stuff. And I found out
Speaker 7: he was called theaster Gates. And then when I did
Speaker 7: some research, I found out that part of his practice
Speaker 7: is saving these buildings on the South side of Chicago.
Speaker 7: You know, he lives in the South Side of Chicago.
Speaker 7: He's watched many buildings just get torn down by the city,
Speaker 7: you know, on the Stoney Island where this building is
Speaker 7: used to have big theaters, you know, really important theaters
Speaker 7: for black music, and just over the years have been
Speaker 7: torn down one by one, so I mean Chicago's architectural masterpieces.
Speaker 7: But then when you get to the south side, there's
Speaker 7: these holes, dise these gaps, and it's a kind of
Speaker 7: erasure of the history of the place and of the presence,
Speaker 7: the black presence in the place. And so he saw
Speaker 7: this bank. It's one hundred year old bank and had
Speaker 7: been slated for demolition for a long time. It's going
Speaker 7: to be pulled down by the city. The basement was underwater,
Speaker 7: but it's this beautiful bank with these columns outside, and
Speaker 7: it's like a big square sort of Greeco Roman building
Speaker 7: on Stoney Island. And he decided he was going to
Speaker 7: save it, and so he bought it for one dollar
Speaker 7: from the government, and he saved four million dollars by
Speaker 7: selling his own art to transform this bank. So it
Speaker 7: doesn't have art in anymore, it doesn't have any money in.
Speaker 7: He's saved it by filling it with art archives and
Speaker 7: historical archives. So it has twenty six thousand books that
Speaker 7: were given to the Johnson Publishing Company, to the Johnson
Speaker 7: Publishing Company who made Ebony magazine, Jet magazine, the Egro Digest,
Speaker 7: So from nineteen forty three, you know, if you wrote
Speaker 7: a book in anything to do with black space, architecture, politics, dance, entertainment,
Speaker 7: recipe books, yearbooks. If you wrote PhDs and you wanted
Speaker 7: the Johnsons to review it and include it in their publication,
Speaker 7: you would send it to the Johnson's. So twenty six
Speaker 7: thousand of these books you know, some of them we
Speaker 7: know and the familiar, some of them super rare books.
Speaker 7: It's got those. It's got all of Frankie Knuckles records.
Speaker 7: And when Frankie Nuckles passed away, his entire record collection
Speaker 7: was given to the Stony Island Arts Bank, and it
Speaker 7: also has upstairs on the second floor these problematic objects
Speaker 7: from America's past, the mammy jars, the postcards depicting racial violence,
Speaker 7: newspaper articles since the eighteen hundreds, advertising copy, signage, objects
Speaker 7: for the home, photographs that were collected by this Black
Speaker 7: and Chinese banker called Ed Williams, who would go to
Speaker 7: these yard sales and flea markets and see these objects
Speaker 7: and think, you know, who wants who's collecting these things?
Speaker 7: Who wants to continue to have these things in the home.
Speaker 7: So he would buy them to take them out of
Speaker 7: circulation and put them in boxes in his house, and
Speaker 7: once he had amassed forty thousand of these objects, his
Speaker 7: kids were out, can we get it's kind of intense
Speaker 7: to be around this stuff. Can we get this out?
Speaker 7: So he gave that, he donated it to the Rebuilt Foundation.
Speaker 7: So the Arts Bank is contemporary art on the walls,
Speaker 7: it has exhibitions. Then it's these historic objects, the Frankie Knuckles,
Speaker 7: it's all the slides from the University of Chicago, the
Speaker 7: glass slides from when people give talk, so you know,
Speaker 7: or all of history that had been photographed for the
Speaker 7: University of Chicago. And then these twenty six thousand books.
Speaker 7: So when I saw the work that THEASTA was doing,
Speaker 7: I thought, I want to get in that bank. I
Speaker 7: just want to be there. I just want to look around.
Speaker 7: I want to And we managed to connect with him.
Speaker 7: I was on tour, he came to the show. He
Speaker 7: met up with me afterwards, and I was just like, Ah,
Speaker 7: I'm so excited to meet you. Because you're a visual artist,
Speaker 7: because you also have a band called the Black Months
Speaker 7: of Mississippi, because you're a saramacist, which I love ceramics,
Speaker 7: because he trained in Japan, and because he's collecting these
Speaker 7: objects and because he's saving all these buildings in the
Speaker 7: South side of Chicago. He has a social practice. I
Speaker 7: just I was really excited to meet him, and I said,
Speaker 7: I really wish you'd come to the bank, but I'm
Speaker 7: leaving town at like eight am tomorrow morning. And he said,
Speaker 7: I'm also leaving town tomorrow because I'm going to President
Speaker 7: Obama's fiftieth birthday party. And I was like, Oh, okay,
Speaker 7: this is this is this guy is. So we opened
Speaker 7: the bank early for us and I went to it,
Speaker 7: and once I opened those doors, I've just sort of
Speaker 7: blown away by the building, the side of the building,
Speaker 7: the library, the double height cube, the just the amount
Speaker 7: of you know, every single drawer you opened it just
Speaker 7: like songs from slavery times, newspapers, curling newspapers from eighteen forties,
Speaker 7: print adverts from the thirties, tins of beauty products, you know,
Speaker 7: just stuff and stuff and every corner and every just
Speaker 7: the arrangement of it. And the ASTA said, oh, you
Speaker 7: know you have to you have to do a show
Speaker 7: in it, and straight away I sort of flashed on
Speaker 7: the music that I had made to this point and
Speaker 7: felt like this is a new vessel. Nothing that I
Speaker 7: have made sort of fits in this space. It's a
Speaker 7: different kind of response that's needed. But then when I left,
Speaker 7: all I could think about was the things that I
Speaker 7: had seen. You know, he had this sculpture in the corner,
Speaker 7: and I said, oh, who did that? He said, it's
Speaker 7: one of mine. And it looked like it had been
Speaker 7: made from wood that had maybe had the paint stripped off.
Speaker 7: There was a certain amount of violence to it. And
Speaker 7: I said, oh, you know, what is it? And he said,
Speaker 7: it's a sculpture I made. It's from the floorboards from
Speaker 7: an abandoned police station in Chicago. And as soon as
Speaker 7: he said that, I immediately was thinking about the floorboards.
Speaker 7: What are the floorboards seen? You know, so often in
Speaker 7: history the objects are the witnesses to what's happened. They're
Speaker 7: the things that can't speak, but they're the things that
Speaker 7: see everything. The floor in the police station, the telephone
Speaker 7: in the police station, the car, the rearview mirror. They
Speaker 7: are the things that really are holding the truth. And
Speaker 7: so when I was on tour, you know, I mean,
Speaker 7: my head was in the tour, but at the same time,
Speaker 7: I'd be lying on my tour bos bed and I'd
Speaker 7: be just writing poems about things that I've seen. You know,
Speaker 7: I wrote this poem called you who have walked These
Speaker 7: floors in fear. I was thinking about this floorboard. It
Speaker 7: was after the death of Sandra Bland, So I was
Speaker 7: thinking about, you know, who knows truth? In some cases
Speaker 7: it's a person. In some cases that person is unwilling
Speaker 7: to to to express what has really happened in the situation.
Speaker 7: But all that not all the physical objects they know.
Speaker 7: And I just thought, I want to get back to
Speaker 7: that bank. I want to open murderers. I want to
Speaker 7: touch more stuff. And every time I touched something, I
Speaker 7: felt like it was it's old stuff, but it's fisiing
Speaker 7: with a kind of contemporary, real life things happening in
Speaker 7: the Molecule's story. So really with the writing of the record,
Speaker 7: you know, I went back for a two week residency.
Speaker 7: Was stayed in the South Side of Chicago. I mean,
Speaker 7: I'm from the UK, but you guys know Chicago, Chicago
Speaker 7: has its huge challenges, you know. Yeah, so so that
Speaker 7: was an eye opener. You know, we didn't have a
Speaker 7: car there, and we said, oh, we'll just you know,
Speaker 7: we're staying so nearby, we'll just walk around. They're like,
Speaker 7: oh no, you can't walk around. You can't walk around,
Speaker 7: you know. So we walked to the place where we
Speaker 7: hide the car, and on a bus shelter there was
Speaker 7: an advert for for what you could do if you
Speaker 7: wanted to needed to give up your child in the
Speaker 7: first thirty days of it life, you know, it was
Speaker 7: a list of things. It said, all you need to
Speaker 7: do is wrap it in a clean towel. It has
Speaker 7: to be in the first thirty days of its life.
Speaker 7: You could take it to a fire station where you
Speaker 7: could drop it at this particular school or that particular hospital.
Speaker 7: You can give information or you can have no questions asked.
Speaker 7: And it was particularly poignant that it was a bushshelter
Speaker 7: because of course that's where so many children that couldn't
Speaker 7: be looked after have been left by parents that couldn't
Speaker 7: look after the children. So, you know, just sort of walking,
Speaker 7: I thought, this is what this area, this is what
Speaker 7: this area is. And I thought about the importance of
Speaker 7: a building like this which talks about the history of
Speaker 7: the area and just about the history of the people
Speaker 7: and how the situation is as it is now and
Speaker 7: it hasn't always been the way it is, and it
Speaker 7: won't always be the way it is. But how art
Speaker 7: is a place of it's a new space, it's a
Speaker 7: physical space. It's a place where people have the opportunity
Speaker 7: to imagine something different. So I was ever two weeks.
Speaker 7: I wrote some songs there, I was, I was home,
Speaker 7: I was back and forth. I mean, this record was
Speaker 7: sort of seven years coming together, you know. So sometimes
Speaker 7: I was making music in the place we set up
Speaker 7: a studio and one of the buildings next the bank,
Speaker 7: and all the songs on the record are inspired inspired
Speaker 7: by particular objects in the bank or groups of objects
Speaker 7: or events in the bank. And that to me wasn't
Speaker 7: my sort of golden thread when I was making it.
Speaker 7: And then to me, whatever the style was, it didn't matter.
Speaker 7: It just whatever the music was, it just kind of
Speaker 7: bounced off the objects. So it's all about the objects,
Speaker 7: and that the tight remit was it has to be
Speaker 7: in response to these objects. And it just became my obsession.
Speaker 7: I felt like everywhere I looked there was a story
Speaker 7: or a photo or something about Chicago, something about the
Speaker 7: South Side.
Speaker 2: What comes to you first? Do the words come first
Speaker 2: or does the music come first? Because there's some songs
Speaker 2: in which he will follow me with his eyes, which
Speaker 2: like specifically melodically, and your words are depending on whatever
Speaker 2: chords being played. And it's not a circular song that
Speaker 2: it's looping. It's just kind of gone linear into and
Speaker 2: it wors into a whole nother song by the end
Speaker 2: of it. So like what comes first for you? Like
Speaker 2: are the words hitting you first and then you find
Speaker 2: music to it? Or does the music come first?
Speaker 7: I think in that situation, and he will follow you
Speaker 7: with his eyes. I had found this tin of a
Speaker 7: beauty product. It was by this company called Valmar, and
Speaker 7: it was set up in Chicago in nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 7: And all the illustrations I found to be really beautiful,
Speaker 7: really elegant, and they were done by this artist, this
Speaker 7: black artist called Charles Dawson who came. He was a
Speaker 7: very well known artist in his time, and they were
Speaker 7: elegant and they were beautiful, and there was also all
Speaker 7: this romance surrounding Valmore. You know the copy in the adverts.
Speaker 7: So if you saw an advert for valve Or it
Speaker 7: might see things like his eyes will follow you across
Speaker 7: the room, or the perfume. The perfumes were called things
Speaker 7: like follow me boy, or look me over everything had
Speaker 7: this romance and this glamour. So I was kind of interested,
Speaker 7: what's this beauty? You know, what's his company? And I
Speaker 7: found out that it was sold door to door, you know,
Speaker 7: so like Avon, they were knock on the door with
Speaker 7: this big basket of stuff. And I found that there
Speaker 7: was targeted mostly at black men and women of course
Speaker 7: the era. Looking through the products, there's lots of perfumes,
Speaker 7: there's lots of moisturizers and shampoos and stuff, but there's
Speaker 7: a lot of hair straightening products, skin lightning products, you know,
Speaker 7: white rose cold cream, and you know, worked straight away
Speaker 7: the adverts to say things like, don't you want to
Speaker 7: help yourself to love unhappiness? You know, all of this
Speaker 7: is just away from you if you don't just take
Speaker 7: if you take your skin a few shades.
Speaker 1: Lighter, that's right, they ran at the end.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I was going to say, because upon first listening,
Speaker 2: I was like, I was like, Wow, this might be
Speaker 2: her best vocal performance because and then the second time
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, maybe she's singing in a character.
Speaker 2: And then I realized by the end, I mean, I
Speaker 2: don't know if it's if it's more of an angry
Speaker 2: rent or more just a defiant thing about it. But
Speaker 2: I realized that that must be the start. I didn't
Speaker 2: know the history behind the song, but I love the
Speaker 2: way that you singing character in the beginning, And yeah.
Speaker 7: I wanted to get into that sort of fifty space,
Speaker 7: and I was thinking about fifties medicated domestic femininity in America. Okay,
Speaker 7: so you've got all the things you meant to need.
Speaker 7: You've got your vacuum cleaner, and you've got your washing machine,
Speaker 7: you've got your refrigerator. So as a woman, your life
Speaker 7: is not difficult anymore. You know, you've got these appliances
Speaker 7: and you shouldn't complain, and you're in the home, and
Speaker 7: if things feel difficult, there's always a tople that you
Speaker 7: can take from the doctors, just to take the edge
Speaker 7: of things. And then but then, you know, imagining someone
Speaker 7: coming to your door with these products, there's a kind
Speaker 7: of femininity is already this narrow, and then for black
Speaker 7: women it's it's even more narrow because the beauty is
Speaker 7: white aligned at this point. You know, so you've got
Speaker 7: to do all the women's stuff, and then you've got
Speaker 7: to do the stuff to make your natural self augmented
Speaker 7: to be accepted, and so in the first half of
Speaker 7: the song, the person is definitely under the spell of
Speaker 7: how more I did that. I wrote that song in
Speaker 7: the in the bank, and I just played I played
Speaker 7: it on guitar, you know, I sort of do my
Speaker 7: best on my guitar, like I'm not a trained guitar rist.
Speaker 7: But I wanted to make it sort of you know,
Speaker 7: fifties and dream like, like those kind of chords that
Speaker 7: would be in you know, those movies that start whether
Speaker 7: the car's winding around the side of a mountain or whatever,
Speaker 7: the open top car and it's like there's a glamour
Speaker 7: and then halfway through. I wanted to have this kind
Speaker 7: of sonic arresting, you know. So when I first wrote that,
Speaker 7: that was just like me playing one string.
Speaker 8: Dumb, dumb, dumb, you know, my plum red lipstick, my
Speaker 8: black hair, kinkin my black skin, gleaming.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 7: I wanted it to be, as you say, sort of defiant.
Speaker 7: You know, I don't it says at the end, I
Speaker 7: don't want to leave myself behind, vanishing into a girl
Speaker 7: I don't recognize and went after you know, because the
Speaker 7: record took me a long time. So one time I
Speaker 7: was listening to vocals, I feel like I could bring
Speaker 7: more character into this, you know.
Speaker 9: I was thinking of like her as a kid, you know,
Speaker 9: with her incredbled diction and poise and the movement of
Speaker 9: the words and everything so dramatic and elegant and control
Speaker 9: that I.
Speaker 7: Went to bring some men.
Speaker 1: And so in my excitement, I was making h.
Speaker 2: A quiet sleep playlist the David the album came out,
Speaker 2: and so not even thinking about it, I just rushed
Speaker 2: that on the list first.
Speaker 1: It went to sleep.
Speaker 7: Anyway up.
Speaker 1: It was like, what the hell of Mira? And I
Speaker 1: was like huh.
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, I forgot that sometimes coders
Speaker 2: and because you know, in my mind when you're listening
Speaker 2: to it, I'm thinking like, okay, might have a new
Speaker 2: ID track, and that's the next song. I didn't realize
Speaker 2: it was the same song until that person told me, like, dog,
Speaker 2: you woke us up in the middle of the night, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it was it wasn't.
Speaker 7: There, It wasn't what you thought. Yeah, it's the worst
Speaker 7: record for DJs. But I just think my stuf's a
Speaker 7: bit like that anyway, sort of like it's bumpy, like
Speaker 7: you're just getting into one thing and then there's another thing.
Speaker 7: And I don't know if that's my background. It's like
Speaker 7: I was a classically trained violinist and then I was
Speaker 7: in an indie band when I was fifteen. That was
Speaker 7: the music that I loved, you know. I had grown
Speaker 7: up with soul music, but India was like my thing
Speaker 7: that I found, you know, Rucasol and L seven and
Speaker 7: Belly and and I liked. I guess I liked, you know,
Speaker 7: women in that music. I like seeing women play guitars.
Speaker 7: And I don't know if they weren't shaving their armpits
Speaker 7: or they weren't having to wear certain things. They're just
Speaker 7: wearing T shirts and the jeans and they're just doing
Speaker 7: the thing, and there was a lot of freedom in that.
Speaker 2: Of course, I understand that a lot of your albums
Speaker 2: are also confessional diaries because of lost love and what
Speaker 2: you've gone through in mourning and all that stuff. But
Speaker 2: would you say that this album is more closer to
Speaker 2: your creative heart then say what your debut record was.
Speaker 7: Yes, I think this is really close to my creative heart.
Speaker 7: And the irony is that I thought it was always
Speaker 7: a side project, you know, when I made it, I
Speaker 7: was like, it's not going to be my name's not
Speaker 7: going to be on it. It's an independent record, it's
Speaker 7: not going to be a major label.
Speaker 1: Weren't you. No, Mariah's sort of do you know the
Speaker 1: history of the Chick record?
Speaker 7: No, I mean, and not until you mentioned you mentioned
Speaker 7: it the other day, but I still, I mean, I
Speaker 7: haven't heard that record. You sent me some pictures and
Speaker 7: I thought, wow, she looks different, but yeah, I think
Speaker 7: she's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Mariah did the same thing, like she was this
Speaker 2: recording her real record, but just to have some fun,
Speaker 2: you would, you know, play around, fuck around, doing dinner
Speaker 2: breaks and all that stuff, and then they had enough
Speaker 2: material to make a record. But it was always just
Speaker 2: supposed to be like a joke amongst the band makes
Speaker 2: and you know, and I still maintained that that's Mariah
Speaker 2: Carry's best record because she doesn't care about the outward
Speaker 2: gaze of critics and the record label and keep keeping
Speaker 2: the machinery going, because you know, all the time artists
Speaker 2: tell me, like, especially like in the first ten years
Speaker 2: of my career, it was like, man, y'all gotta label
Speaker 2: that supports y'all. Like and at first, I was like
Speaker 2: a little insulted. He's like, yeah, man, because y'all could
Speaker 2: just do any o shit in your label. Never drop y'all.
Speaker 2: Like I was like, what was that supposed to be?
Speaker 2: You know, like, you know, like y'all don't care about
Speaker 2: hit singles and making money and because success, I'm like
Speaker 2: what the fuck? I was like, No, I just don't
Speaker 2: know what an effective hook.
Speaker 1: Kids.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm doing too much inside baseball. But
Speaker 2: you gotta let me know what was your inspiration behind Earthlings?
Speaker 2: Because I'm obsessed with the effic futurism and all that stuff,
Speaker 2: and like I am too.
Speaker 7: You know. I feel my dad had Funk you know,
Speaker 7: like p Funk Records when I was little, and Parliament Records,
Speaker 7: and I'd look on the back and see these weird cartoons,
Speaker 7: you know, if like the women in the booby tops
Speaker 7: and the booty shirts and this, and there was all
Speaker 7: these stuff about space, and I remember just thinking like
Speaker 7: what is this? And definitely when I was a teenager,
Speaker 7: I just sort of thought I sort of thought of
Speaker 7: it as kind of a bit silly or escapist. And
Speaker 7: it was only when I got into my well, probably
Speaker 7: you know, ten fifteen years ago that the penny dropped,
Speaker 7: you know, and the expansive thing of if someone wants
Speaker 7: a pigeonhole as being from here, you have to be
Speaker 7: within the system of what it means to be black
Speaker 7: in America, and like Sunral, the only way to explain
Speaker 7: its actually, I'm not from here, or you think I'm
Speaker 7: from here? Do you think I'm like that? Now, I'm
Speaker 7: not even from this planet, you know. And I loved
Speaker 7: that when I went back to that music, the idea
Speaker 7: that there's another space and alternative space that lives outside
Speaker 7: of catalysm and white supremacy, and that this band is
Speaker 7: from there and they're going to take you there and
Speaker 7: all you have to do is get on board the mothership.
Speaker 7: And so the philosophy of it, which I had missed
Speaker 7: because I was too busy just sort of enjoying the
Speaker 7: groove of the music, you know, that was right there.
Speaker 7: And so I mean, there's a really good affort futuristic
Speaker 7: film showing in the bank when I was there, and
Speaker 7: you know, I was thinking saying all these things together
Speaker 7: that the main thing was the inspiration behind that was
Speaker 7: the these different searches for utopia that I read about
Speaker 7: in the bank. You know, there was a conversation bouncing
Speaker 7: back and forwards between the black thinkers from I guess that,
Speaker 7: you know, eighteen tens onwards the classic two positions. You
Speaker 7: could call it a Martin Luther King versus early Malcolm X,
Speaker 7: you know, integrationist versus separatist position. You know, we find
Speaker 7: ourselves to be here outside of Africa, in this country,
Speaker 7: in these places which are intolerant of us. What do
Speaker 7: we do? Do we find allies and make a new community.
Speaker 7: Do we become part of everyone, we all each other's
Speaker 7: brothers and sisters like a Martin Luther King position? Or
Speaker 7: is there do we recognize the aggression and turn inwards
Speaker 7: and turn away from the place where we find ourselves
Speaker 7: to be. And whether it's a Marcus Garvey going back
Speaker 7: to Africa, or whether it's a more of a spiritual
Speaker 7: separatist community where you're still in America, but you have
Speaker 7: your own commune and you have your own rules and laws,
Speaker 7: or whether it's a community of that's exclusive in terms
Speaker 7: of who you're socialized with.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 7: So I would see these ideas going back and forth
Speaker 7: in the bank all the way through history, people trying
Speaker 7: to work it out. How do we live now outside
Speaker 7: of Africa in this place which is not entirely welcoming.
Speaker 7: And so I've thought a lot about these utopias that
Speaker 7: have been attempted. You know that all black towns of
Speaker 7: the West, and those of them that were successful, and
Speaker 7: those of those that weren't successful or were like a
Speaker 7: green wood that was eventually firebombed, you know, the first
Speaker 7: incidence of fire bombing on American soil. So I thought
Speaker 7: about those, like, what is it to yearn for utopia?
Speaker 7: Try for perfection? It always will fail. And yet that's
Speaker 7: the direction, that's what all communities are looking for. Peace, love, freedom.
Speaker 7: And I was blown away by Missus Johnson using the
Speaker 7: Ebony fashion fair, and the Black panthers would say to her,
Speaker 7: why are you bringing it clothes? You know this is
Speaker 7: a bourgeoise thing. You're bringing clothes from France to put
Speaker 7: on the back of black models to parade around the
Speaker 7: town halls and the city halls for local black maids
Speaker 7: to see. Like what you're doing. Apart from the fact
Speaker 7: they were raising millions of dollars for the historical black
Speaker 7: universities and colleges, Missus Johnson was saying, it's important for
Speaker 7: people to see themselves reflected on this cat walk. It's
Speaker 7: important for women to see this elegance, see this dream,
Speaker 7: see this art, see this creativity. It's like, what do
Speaker 7: we want on the other side of the struggle? Struggles
Speaker 7: meant to end at some point, and then you're meant
Speaker 7: to be, you know, eating pineapple in the sun, digging
Speaker 7: your garden to live and finding work, but also time
Speaker 7: to enjoy yourself. You know, that's the world we're trying
Speaker 7: to build. We're not constantly so much in a struggle
Speaker 7: that we're imagining will never end. And so I guess
Speaker 7: the song Earth Things is about a non human person
Speaker 7: sort of looking in on us and seeing how easy
Speaker 7: it would be to reset our world, which causes a
Speaker 7: super naive position. But that was the position that I
Speaker 7: took from looking at these attempts at utopious of the effort,
Speaker 7: the attempt, the hope, the audacity of it is the
Speaker 7: only place to start.
Speaker 2: Or I'm curious to how the outside of America, like
Speaker 2: the British press, has received this record, And you know,
Speaker 2: I think it's really curious that you and interesting that
Speaker 2: you chose Chicago as your base creative hub. You know,
Speaker 2: I think, if anything, even Americans and myself I might
Speaker 2: be guilty of this as well. Like there's so much
Speaker 2: propaganda talk about Chicago, like right now, you know, the
Speaker 2: hashtag what about Chicago is a kind of go to.
Speaker 1: Right wing yeah term of.
Speaker 2: You know, they're so violent and uncultured over there that
Speaker 2: most people I know are definitely afraid to even visit
Speaker 2: Chicago just because of what they heard, you know, propaganda wise.
Speaker 1: But is there not any place in the UK.
Speaker 2: That has their own rich cultural stories that you could
Speaker 2: have pulled from? Because I find it very interesting that
Speaker 2: that you had to come, you know, five thousand miles
Speaker 2: across the Pound, you know, to find this wealth of inspiration.
Speaker 7: I think it's a really good point. I think the
Speaker 7: holders of archive is a really interesting thing in America
Speaker 7: versus the UK. So I'd say American history and archive
Speaker 7: seems to be I mean, you have obviously the Smithsonian,
Speaker 7: which is a reasonably new museum that holds all this
Speaker 7: black history and archive. But it seems like a lot
Speaker 7: of black archive in this country is held by private
Speaker 7: individuals or private foundations that have come from corporations. America
Speaker 7: is still in its move of you know, you've got
Speaker 7: the Mellon Foundation, you've got the Ford Foundation, organizations that
Speaker 7: made lots of wealth through capitalism that are now sort
Speaker 7: of giving back, and it shows their brains and it
Speaker 7: sort of legitimizes them to a certain extent, and they
Speaker 7: it shows that they are invested in people's history and
Speaker 7: holding history. I think in the UK that period certainly
Speaker 7: happened during the Industrial Revolution, where we had massively wealthy
Speaker 7: industrialists in the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, and
Speaker 7: they then invested in people in our you know, they
Speaker 7: made their own towns, they had fair comparatively fair places
Speaker 7: and safe places for workers. But then the state took
Speaker 7: over in looking after history and archive, which is probably
Speaker 7: the right place for these things if the state is interested.
Speaker 7: But at the moment the conservative government that we have now,
Speaker 7: which is more of a right wing government, there just
Speaker 7: hasn't been the investment in black stories and black archives.
Speaker 7: So there are black archives that aren't open to the
Speaker 7: public and that you would need maybe a research a
Speaker 7: qualification or sort of invitation to go and look at.
Speaker 7: But also so much of the work is not valued
Speaker 7: or lost or it's lost. I mean, I think specifically
Speaker 7: of the wind rush incident, that happened a few years
Speaker 7: ago where people like my dad's generation. The black people
Speaker 7: in England are either from Africa and have come in
Speaker 7: the last ten twenty thirty forty years, or their Caribbeans,
Speaker 7: and they were invited by the government after the Second
Speaker 7: World War because so many men had died, so the
Speaker 7: UK needed people on the trains, people on the buses,
Speaker 7: they needed women in the hospitals as nurses, so an
Speaker 7: invitation went out to the colonies, you know, they're still
Speaker 7: owned by Britain, like Saint KITT's where my dad's from,
Speaker 7: you know, please come and help the motherland. And these
Speaker 7: people felt like England was their home. You know, my
Speaker 7: dad knew more about the counties and rivers of England,
Speaker 7: you know then he even knew about Saint Kitts. It
Speaker 7: was taught. This information was taught in tandem. So the
Speaker 7: Caribbeans came, and a lot of them came as children.
Speaker 7: You know, they had that passport and you would think
Speaker 7: the government's held records on who was in the country
Speaker 7: and who wasn't. But a few years ago there was
Speaker 7: this big scandal where Caribbeans were leaving their country that
Speaker 7: they'd lived in for fifty years sixty years moved for
Speaker 7: a family wedding, trying to get back in the country,
Speaker 7: and the UK said, sorry, we don't have any record
Speaker 7: of you.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 7: And it turned out they'd just lost all these people's passports.
Speaker 7: People had come to UK's children. So you've got people
Speaker 7: who are trying to get cancer care and they say, oh,
Speaker 7: you're not registered to live here. They say, I've lived
Speaker 7: here for fifty years, I've been married here, have raised
Speaker 7: my children, I've got grandchildren in the UK. They say, sorry,
Speaker 7: you have to go back to Jamaica. So I think
Speaker 7: the UK government is not good at holding even the
Speaker 7: the citizenship and passports of these black people that they
Speaker 7: just lost. There was just no other explanation. It was
Speaker 7: just like sorry, we last year passports. But I don't
Speaker 7: think there was even a wide public apology. So I
Speaker 7: think in terms of the Black stories, I think they
Speaker 7: live in literature. You know, I live in Leeds with
Speaker 7: people Tree Press, that's the biggest publisher of Caribbean literature
Speaker 7: outside the Caribbean, so I know these Caribbean stories. I
Speaker 7: think what I felt in encountering the bank was just
Speaker 7: this is me with my own lens and my own
Speaker 7: prejudices as a woman from the UK, as someone who
Speaker 7: has African heritage through my dad's Caribbean side, but also
Speaker 7: you know, my mum is white as well, like all
Speaker 7: these I was just arriving as myself viewing all this
Speaker 7: historical stuff. So the record is definitely not me trying
Speaker 7: to tell an American story. It's just me responding to
Speaker 7: all this stuff like this is what the stuff did
Speaker 7: to me. That's what the record is, rather than I'm
Speaker 7: now some kind of you know, historian or journalist on
Speaker 7: the American story.
Speaker 2: Oh no, Look, just to hear an artist with a
Speaker 2: point of view is fucking refreshing, refreshing because what we're
Speaker 2: doing with now, well, yeah, what the fuck?
Speaker 3: Well I want to ask you.
Speaker 4: You've collaborated with uh been frequent, collaborated with very good friends,
Speaker 4: my parents and Amber Strolder.
Speaker 3: What is it like collaborating with them? How do y'all
Speaker 3: start seing ideas?
Speaker 1: What is it like?
Speaker 7: I got introduced to Paris and Amber through Esperanza Spaulding.
Speaker 7: I was working on my third record, and you know,
Speaker 7: speaking of record companies, my third record was the one
Speaker 7: with all the pressure on. It was like first record,
Speaker 7: big success, so grateful. My second album was a kind
Speaker 7: of response to that. You know, everybody was saying, oh,
Speaker 7: you've been an indie band, but you've made this pop
Speaker 7: soul record, and I thought, right, I'm going to play
Speaker 7: more guitar on this record. But also, you know, halfway
Speaker 7: through that record, I lost my husband and so there
Speaker 7: was this big break. And when I started again and
Speaker 7: I made the record that, you know, the label would say,
Speaker 7: You've made the record you needed to make, but it
Speaker 7: wasn't full of you know, smash hit sunshine songs. And
Speaker 7: so the third record I really felt from the label
Speaker 7: was like, okay, right, let's get back in it. You're
Speaker 7: just a sort of sleeping giant, you know, like you've
Speaker 7: got this, you've had this big hits, these and this
Speaker 7: is the record where you're going to sort of come back.
Speaker 7: And so that was really really difficult for me. And
Speaker 7: I was working one time in Los Angeles with a
Speaker 7: very very well known producer and artist who of course
Speaker 7: I won't know, and he was very busy. He was
Speaker 7: working with several artists at the same time, which sometimes
Speaker 7: people do, right, so it's like, oh, hi, thanks for
Speaker 7: coming right, let's work on this song for forty minutes
Speaker 7: and then like, yeah, if you got some ideas, you
Speaker 7: call like Jerome my assistant, right, he's going to be
Speaker 7: in the room with you. I'm going down the hall
Speaker 7: because you know, five other people are in the studio
Speaker 7: complex and I'm just like sprinkling my sort of genius
Speaker 7: hip power everywhere. So I don't know, I just I
Speaker 7: wish I had that ability to sort of perform under
Speaker 7: that kind of setup, but I just don't. So it's
Speaker 7: like the inspiration just kind of left me. And I
Speaker 7: left the session and I can't remember how So responds
Speaker 7: that will. We met up and I was like, She's like,
Speaker 7: how's it going with superstar producer that everyone else has
Speaker 7: had massive hits with? And I said, Oh, it's going terribly.
Speaker 7: You know, it makes you feel like you're you're the
Speaker 7: one that's kind of flunking, you know, they're they're the
Speaker 7: superstar and the other one. And she just said, have
Speaker 7: you met these guys? And she brought out the CD
Speaker 7: of the EP Kings King and I was like, God,
Speaker 7: I said, someone just played me this two days ago.
Speaker 7: It's so amazing. She said, I loved them. I went
Speaker 7: to school with them. You should work with them. She picks.
Speaker 7: You should work with them tonight. I'm calling them right now.
Speaker 7: You should go will go around tonight. And she picked
Speaker 7: up the phone and she's like, hey, Paris, you know
Speaker 7: with Kreine. I was like, I don't know if they
Speaker 7: I don't know if they ever heard of me, And
Speaker 7: they knew me. And we went over to the house
Speaker 7: and I just instantly loved them because aside from being
Speaker 7: the musical geniuses that they are, they just have this
Speaker 7: like still well you know them, still calm, beautiful presence.
Speaker 7: And we just sat and we just had a jam.
Speaker 7: My s friends was playing bass, Paris was playing keyboards,
Speaker 7: me and Ambo was singing, and I just thought, oh,
Speaker 7: I've sort of found a harbor here. You know, this
Speaker 7: is so different to being in the room with all
Speaker 7: these dudes, you know, like I've been told they're a songwriter,
Speaker 7: but they're just tapping out the beats, like where's your tune?
Speaker 7: Like tell me when your tracks finished, I can put
Speaker 7: my superstar beats to it. And I'd be like, haven't
Speaker 7: We're just starting from scratch. I thought, you know, I
Speaker 7: kind of naive going into those those settings. So it
Speaker 7: was just a dream to it with them and worked
Speaker 7: together with on my third record, and then yeah, for
Speaker 7: this one, I would just drift in. So Red Red
Speaker 7: Horse came about at their place. You know, Paris is
Speaker 7: just like an amazing producer. You know what she hears
Speaker 7: and the lines and the weaves and the denseness of
Speaker 7: the production, you know, the amount of tracks and all
Speaker 7: the things that's going on, one thing feeding another and
Speaker 7: other lines, and so it's just kind of like a
Speaker 7: dream space. And we just got this beat going and
Speaker 7: Pass was playing forwards. I was playing bass since bass.
Speaker 7: I had my I remember I had my little baby.
Speaker 7: I'd just had a baby, and she was strapped onto
Speaker 7: me and it was like playing. So it felt really
Speaker 7: kind of like it was working. You know, it's like
Speaker 7: here I am and my kids asleep and I'm doing
Speaker 7: this song. And then yeah, the Red Horse came out
Speaker 7: of that where. Because I'd read so much of the
Speaker 7: Bank and so much was in my head, I find
Speaker 7: it really easy to what came out was was the
Speaker 7: tales of the things that I'd read about, or i'd
Speaker 7: seen a photograph. I've seen this photograph of this young
Speaker 7: black girl who was going west with a white family,
Speaker 7: and I just couldn't work out what she was doing.
Speaker 7: She's ten, eleven, twelve, and it turned out, I mean,
Speaker 7: she was an enslaved girl, but she was going to
Speaker 7: be the nanny for this baby. And I was sort
Speaker 7: of thinking, you know, who's looking after this child, this
Speaker 7: black child in the you know, going to this west
Speaker 7: town in the west there's been newly established, and what's
Speaker 7: going to happen to her when they don't need her anymore?
Speaker 7: And you know, I couldn't find any more information in
Speaker 7: this book, and so I just imagined for her a
Speaker 7: stranger riding into town on a red horse. But it
Speaker 7: all it sort of came out when I was there,
Speaker 7: because they just make this amazing dream space. So yeah,
Speaker 7: I mean, I love I love working with Parasonal.
Speaker 3: I was really happy to see our Glabrary.
Speaker 1: I want to know more about your your childhood and
Speaker 1: your upbringing. Where were you born.
Speaker 7: I was born in Leeds and that's where I still live.
Speaker 7: So Leeds is two hundred miles north of London and
Speaker 7: it's two hundred miles south of Edinburgh. Like at the
Speaker 7: bottom of our street where we live, there's an old
Speaker 7: way post and it says, you know, London this way
Speaker 7: two hundred miles you know, Edinburgh this.
Speaker 1: Way right on the border.
Speaker 7: We're right between, yeah, the capital of Scotland and the
Speaker 7: capital of England. So as much as I feel, you know,
Speaker 7: I feel myself to you know, be English, but the
Speaker 7: north is really different to the South. It's not as wealthy,
Speaker 7: it's more it was industrial, but then the industry sort
Speaker 7: of went away, so there's that kind of a feeling.
Speaker 7: I mean, Leeds is a big university town, you know, Scots.
Speaker 7: I think more than one hundred thousand students between the
Speaker 7: different universities, so it's a big place where people come
Speaker 7: to learn, lots of thinkers come, but then lots of
Speaker 7: people leave at the end of it, right because like
Speaker 7: they go to London, they go, they go somewhere else
Speaker 7: where the jobs are. So it's a creative place, but
Speaker 7: sometimes it's hard to get things going because there's not
Speaker 7: necessarily people don't necessarily come and stay. They kind of
Speaker 7: passed through.
Speaker 1: Well, you have three siblings.
Speaker 7: Correct or they're three of us. Yeah, there's two sisters.
Speaker 7: So my sister, my middle sister works in politics and
Speaker 7: she worked in social justice, and then my younger sister
Speaker 7: acts and then yeah, then there's me too.
Speaker 2: So he described the household, Like, how were your parents
Speaker 2: artistically inclined or musically inclined or anything.
Speaker 7: I think my mom really liked singing. My mum used
Speaker 7: to sing around the house all the time, so she
Speaker 7: and she would sing at church. And then my dad
Speaker 7: collected music, so that was his thing. He had just
Speaker 7: sort of piles of records. He was really fastidious. There
Speaker 7: was a really good record shop in these called Jumbo
Speaker 7: Records that would import us records, so my parents would
Speaker 7: go there all the time. They met on the dance floor,
Speaker 7: you know, when they were teenagers. And my dad's family
Speaker 7: is from Saint Kitts and the Caribbean. But yeah, he's
Speaker 7: a big collector of music, and so I think sometimes
Speaker 7: I would just look through these forty five you know,
Speaker 7: they were just in paper. They didn't have any covers,
Speaker 7: so you could just maybe get a bit of an
Speaker 7: idea from the name on the label, but mostly you
Speaker 7: had to actually put the record on, you know, and
Speaker 7: just like put the needle on. And so he had
Speaker 7: his pile, and then I had my pile out of
Speaker 7: his pile of things that I liked to listen to
Speaker 7: that I kind of kept separately. So I don't know
Speaker 7: what it was, and you know, I just I grew
Speaker 7: up with music definitely, But then I got into music
Speaker 7: at school, but not even if my parents played instruments.
Speaker 7: I started playing violin at school and I really really
Speaker 7: loved that, and at first I found it easy. I mean,
Speaker 7: later on I found it really hard, because I do
Speaker 7: find reading music really hard. But I liked the thing
Speaker 7: of listening and picking up stuff. I really liked being
Speaker 7: in orchestras. You know, I was often the only person
Speaker 7: of color in the whole orchestra that was or at
Speaker 7: ballet or whatever it was. But I think our parents
Speaker 7: and especially my mum just encourage us to do express,
Speaker 7: express ourselves things. So we did, you know, we did
Speaker 7: do ballet, We did play instruments, We did go to
Speaker 7: watch concerts and went to theater when we could. I mean,
Speaker 7: my mum was cleaning houses when I was younger, and
Speaker 7: then she started she started working with kids from school
Speaker 7: from the school that was at you know, reading to
Speaker 7: them in the lessons, the kids who were struggling. Then
Speaker 7: she did some qualification so that she could be a
Speaker 7: learning mentor in the school. And my dad, my dad's
Speaker 7: kind of visically had a shop, kind of picture framing
Speaker 7: and candles and clocks shop. But he was always you know,
Speaker 7: he's got a big math's brain, which is the opposite
Speaker 7: of my brain. So he would teach. There was a
Speaker 7: school for kids who didn't get on well at school,
Speaker 7: and it was mostly Black and Asian children in England.
Speaker 7: That's like Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black children. And that
Speaker 7: was in the sort of concentration of black area, Chapeltown,
Speaker 7: where his family came. So he would teach these kids,
Speaker 7: you know, he'd teach the maths mostly math's a bit
Speaker 7: of English. But so all the boys and girls in
Speaker 7: our school that were maybe had a reputation of being
Speaker 7: more sort of tough or like they didn't get on
Speaker 7: with the teachers. They didn't get on with the teachers
Speaker 7: at our school. They would know me because my dad
Speaker 7: would teach them maths, you know, and they'd be like,
Speaker 7: mister Bailey, he's so strict. Yeah, So it was. I
Speaker 7: liked growing up there. It had a big Caribbean community leagues.
Speaker 7: I mean it still does, so I would be I
Speaker 7: guess I grew up between these two worlds. Where we
Speaker 7: lived was a white area and a big Jewish area
Speaker 7: as well, my high school was a big jewsh high school,
Speaker 7: lots of the Jewish teachers and children, so when it
Speaker 7: was Jewish holidays, like a third of the kids wouldn't
Speaker 7: be there, so our calendar was kind of worked around
Speaker 7: the Jewish holiday. And then my grandparents lived in the
Speaker 7: Caribbean area of Leeds, so I would always be like
Speaker 7: between these two worlds. Do I fit in these worlds?
Speaker 7: I do. I do fit in them, but I feel different,
Speaker 7: you know, in both places. I feel a bit of different.
Speaker 7: You know. It's like I'm black, but I'm sort of
Speaker 7: not black in the same way my cousins are. And
Speaker 7: then I'm definitely not white, but I am my mum's daughter,
Speaker 7: you know. So it's always just like finding identity. And
Speaker 7: I think I think that's why I really pulled towards
Speaker 7: I don't know, Indie sort of you know, riot girl,
Speaker 7: like all of that stuff, you know, feeling like I
Speaker 7: feel like an outsider. I have something to say. I
Speaker 7: am underweight, I'm riding to school on a bike balancing
Speaker 7: my violin. I'm a nerd. But I'm also not from
Speaker 7: a wealthy background, so I'm fitting in, you know, like
Speaker 7: a lot of my peers might not be going to
Speaker 7: play in the orchestra or reading Jane Austin and you know,
Speaker 7: Charlotte Bronte, but at the same time, that's just what
Speaker 7: I'm doing. So yeah, I felt like an outsider.
Speaker 1: I guess were you born in the early eighties.
Speaker 7: I believe I was born in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: Okay, So who did you gravity towards musically? Like who
Speaker 2: was the first like moment of I.
Speaker 7: Mean, I guess Michael Jackson was the biggest thing in
Speaker 7: our world. Just that's the age that I had. Yeah,
Speaker 7: could avoid him, and so I remember there was a
Speaker 7: concert in Leeds. We used to live near this park
Speaker 7: called Ruante Park and there was a big park that
Speaker 7: used to have concerts, so like Madonna played there or
Speaker 7: you know, but but Michael Jackson played there, and I
Speaker 7: remember it was like a sort of pilgrimage to go
Speaker 7: to this concert, Like we couldn't afford tickets for the concert,
Speaker 7: but I remember it was it was a bank holiday
Speaker 7: in August that we went to the concert. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 7: Mychael Jackson's stuff was so interesting because obviously there was
Speaker 7: the music itself, then there was all the mystery around
Speaker 7: the man. But remember how they used to film the
Speaker 7: concerts is I feel like nearly half of the concept
Speaker 7: wasn't showing him, it was showing the audience. So it
Speaker 7: was just showing these people having these responses to him,
Speaker 7: And I remember feeling that feeling that they had this
Speaker 7: kind of like melting sort of spiritual feeling. I mean,
Speaker 7: I think the music has what that music is doing
Speaker 7: in sort of jazz and harmony because I'm not trained,
Speaker 7: I just don't understand what it's doing, but it still
Speaker 7: does the same thing to my brain where it's like
Speaker 7: I don't know what's happening here, and this thing is
Speaker 7: transitioning into this thing, and there's this lushness and then
Speaker 7: there's this tension and then it goes away. And so
Speaker 7: his music had that complex of beauty, but it was
Speaker 7: being absorbed by all of us, including you know, five
Speaker 7: year olds, ten year olds, and so I think, I mean,
Speaker 7: aside from of course, all the separate things about Michael
Speaker 7: Jackson which we learned about in that time when those
Speaker 7: those issues weren't swirling, I just yeah, I just Michael
Speaker 7: Jackson's music was kind of the pinnacle. But I grewup
Speaker 7: with Stevie Wonder as well, because it's what my parents liked.
Speaker 7: I really liked Secret Life of Plants. That was the
Speaker 7: record I remember having. I remember touching the braille. I
Speaker 7: remember the sort of weirdness and mystery of it, and
Speaker 7: the way the synth sounded, and the photograph of him
Speaker 7: inside and the way you could see, you know, you
Speaker 7: can see his eyes. And so I sort of loved Stevie.
Speaker 7: I thought, oh, like, I just felt in my heart
Speaker 7: like I want to meet Stevie. I'm sure that all
Speaker 7: kids feel that, right, So but then when I did
Speaker 7: get to meet it, I was like, this is like
Speaker 7: my dream that I had, and here I you know,
Speaker 7: I wrote Stevie Wonder a letter and as a teenager
Speaker 7: saying about how much I love I never dreamed you'd leave.
Speaker 7: I never dreamed you'd leave in summer. I remember writing
Speaker 7: this passionate letter about it. And then I thought, why
Speaker 7: am I writing a letter. I should be writing it
Speaker 7: in Braille, And you know, I never got around to.
Speaker 1: I was about to say he learned braille.
Speaker 7: Just yeah, yeah, he is a you know, he obviously
Speaker 7: reached brail.
Speaker 2: There's there's a funny story where, uh, you know, producer NARDA.
Speaker 2: Michael Walden. He produced Whitney Houston's I Want to I
Speaker 2: Will I Know, and I Want to Dance with Somebody,
Speaker 2: And he also did like starships, like nothing's going to
Speaker 2: stop us now or not. Like he was like Clive
Speaker 2: Davis's go to guy. But he tells the story that
Speaker 2: he was so inspired after seeing Stevie do fingertips when
Speaker 2: he was a kid.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in the mid sixties.
Speaker 2: Was a kind of solar eclipse in which you know,
Speaker 2: they warned parents, do not let your child look in
Speaker 2: the sun or else you're going to go blind. And
Speaker 2: you know, they were giving out free glasses and you're
Speaker 2: supposed to wear glasses all day and whatever. And Narda
Speaker 2: was like, if I take these glasses off, then I
Speaker 2: too can be a genius like Stevie wonder He told
Speaker 2: me about the first time he got in trouble with
Speaker 2: his mom, like she said, like you know, like yeah,
Speaker 2: punished him, but yeah, he was he wanted to be
Speaker 2: blind like Stevie Wonders so that he could be a genius.
Speaker 2: Do you do you remember the first concert that you went.
Speaker 7: To, the first concert I went to. I mean, I
Speaker 7: think I didn't go to concerts when I was little because,
Speaker 7: like I said, well, my parents got divorced, so you know,
Speaker 7: we didn't have a car, we didn't have a telephone,
Speaker 7: we didn't my mum was cleaned houses and then she
Speaker 7: worked at this school, so we didn't have to spare
Speaker 7: money at all. You know. We used to get our
Speaker 7: clothes in a binliner from unless it was Christmas or birthdays,
Speaker 7: but we used to get our clothes from people from church,
Speaker 7: you know, with their names still selling it, you know,
Speaker 7: and yeah, I love this, like if they had trainers,
Speaker 7: we always had the trainers then Nick's not the Nikes
Speaker 7: and all of that sort of stuff, you know, right,
Speaker 7: But so we didn't we didn't go to gigs when
Speaker 7: we were little, but I remember I probably went to
Speaker 7: something like I probably would have gone to the Cockpit,
Speaker 7: which was a sort of indie venue, and I would
Speaker 7: have gone to see a band like some small bands
Speaker 7: like Shed seven or the Charlatan's, the band called the
Speaker 7: Charlatans that I really like. I definitely got.
Speaker 2: I've heard the Charlatans. Yeah you saw them in their
Speaker 2: early stages.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I saw them. I mean I think there's still
Speaker 7: been Yeah, they've been going a little while, but obviously
Speaker 7: that I was still still going ahead. But yeah, I
Speaker 7: remember seeing a band called Kaniki, which had a female's
Speaker 7: lead singer, and I remember seeing Belly, who I thought
Speaker 7: were amazing. So yeah, just but so before i'd gone
Speaker 7: to gigs, I was doing gigs, you know, like it
Speaker 7: was it's just a thing because it was the nineties
Speaker 7: and everybody I knew was that abound, and I was.
Speaker 7: I had I was part of this church group and
Speaker 7: we had a youth leader who was called Simon Hall,
Speaker 7: and he was really into music. He was kind of
Speaker 7: like a like a music snob, you know. So one
Speaker 7: time I turn up at church and he's like, here's
Speaker 7: a guitar, and I was just, you know, I couldn't
Speaker 7: believe it. And so I had to pay him back
Speaker 7: like ten pounds every month, you know, like I'd said,
Speaker 7: I've got my seven pounds, Oh thank you, and you
Speaker 7: know sometimes you just said, oh, just buy me a pizza,
Speaker 7: you know, and but I might, you know, I managed
Speaker 7: to pay back, and he is, you know, still a
Speaker 7: dear friend of mine. But that that was really great.
Speaker 7: And I used to play my guitar through the stereo
Speaker 7: because I didn't have an amp, and but I just loved.
Speaker 7: I loved learning songs. I sort of could learn songs wrong.
Speaker 7: I liked Lena Fiedbe, I liked Buuck. You know, so
Speaker 7: I try and learn a B York song but not
Speaker 7: quite get the chords right. But then I had some
Speaker 7: chords I liked, and then I could write a different
Speaker 7: song over And I liked that time of music for
Speaker 7: especially for women. It was really confessional. I loved Julian
Speaker 7: Hatfield and she had this song called My Sister. The
Speaker 7: song was like, I hate my sister. She's such a bitch.
Speaker 7: She acts like she doesn't even know that I exist.
Speaker 7: But I'd give her anything to let her know I care.
Speaker 7: But I'm only talking to myself because she's not there.
Speaker 7: I remember thinking, you can write a song about that.
Speaker 7: You can write a song about how you feel about
Speaker 7: your siblings. You can write a song about your walk
Speaker 7: to school. You can write a song about how a
Speaker 7: boy laughed at your hair, like you know. So, it's
Speaker 7: just it was different to pop music, which was more
Speaker 7: like universal. Everyone's included, you know, big messages, and this
Speaker 7: was just the every day. And that was my entry
Speaker 7: into songwriting because I thought, oh, you can write about anything.
Speaker 2: Hey, are you aware of Nandy Bushell. So she's she's
Speaker 2: a kid from the UK. She is notable when she
Speaker 2: was like six or seven years old playing the drums
Speaker 2: on Instagram.
Speaker 1: Since then, I.
Speaker 7: Think I've seen a play. I think one time we
Speaker 7: were borting Leny Kravitz and she came on the sound
Speaker 7: check and she played. I didn't know she was from
Speaker 7: the UK, and I didn't remember her name, but I've
Speaker 7: seen her. She's played with Dave Grohl, right.
Speaker 2: And yes, yeah, it's scary for her now. So she's
Speaker 2: entering her teens now and already like you know, first
Speaker 2: it was just the drums and singing, but then now
Speaker 2: she's like on her saxophone kick, like she plays saxophone
Speaker 2: now and keyboards. Like it's the way that she's developing.
Speaker 2: Like it's it's really interesting to see, like who kind
Speaker 2: of rises to the occasion, like when they start off
Speaker 2: as I'm not saying novelty, but like when you're six
Speaker 2: and seven, like your parents are sort of like being
Speaker 2: backstage parents and that sort of thing. And I was
Speaker 2: kind of wondering, like, Okay, well she keep at it,
Speaker 2: you know, at at nine, ten and eleven, now that
Speaker 2: she's getting up there, like she's her chops are like
Speaker 2: she's not relying on the novelty of like, hey, you
Speaker 2: know cute black girl from the UK and I complete
Speaker 2: drums a little, like she's really.
Speaker 1: Kicking ass and getting more into songwriting and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. It's such a rapid piece that, you know,
Speaker 1: it's mind blowing to me.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to know if you were aware of her,
Speaker 2: how did you start the band and were you guys
Speaker 2: at all like seriously trying to pursue a record deal
Speaker 2: or was it just like, hey, we're a local band.
Speaker 7: We really were trying to get somewhere. I think I
Speaker 7: was very serious when I was a kid. And also
Speaker 7: the band that i'd seen, Kiniki, they were only teenagers
Speaker 7: when they got signed, like they got signed out of
Speaker 7: high school. So I just kind of thought, like it
Speaker 7: is possible, you know, it was possible for it to happen.
Speaker 7: And so my band was my best friend who was
Speaker 7: called Jennifer Pugh, and she me and her used to
Speaker 7: play violins together, so we used to make these tapes
Speaker 7: together of like I don't know if she's singing or
Speaker 7: I'm singing, We're made of a story or like a
Speaker 7: keyboard thing about made a song about monsters, you know,
Speaker 7: like when you're ten or whatever. And then that just
Speaker 7: kind of kept going. And so when I started guitar,
Speaker 7: she started guitar, she got really good and she was
Speaker 7: so she was the lead guitarist, you know, she had
Speaker 7: proper lessons. And then we had a friend who was
Speaker 7: just a bad ass, and she has called Joanne Wilson.
Speaker 7: She played bass, and she had she'd learned a bit
Speaker 7: of flute, she'd learned a bit piano. She didn't really
Speaker 7: know the bass, so we used to have to teach it,
Speaker 7: like you know two two two two two two three
Speaker 7: through three three three three one one mightn't you know,
Speaker 7: but she she picked it up and she just looked
Speaker 7: the part. And it was those days, you know, we
Speaker 7: can smoke indoors and like, so she had just like
Speaker 7: have a cigarette and she had this bleach blonde hair.
Speaker 7: She she was like a regular, real life bad girl.
Speaker 7: And then my boyfriend at the time played drums. He
Speaker 7: was two years older than me and he was in
Speaker 7: a band. And I remember one time his band were
Speaker 7: playing at this pub called Joseph Well, I know it
Speaker 7: was the Duchess. It was the Duchess and that was
Speaker 7: famous to us because Nirvanna had played there, so we're
Speaker 7: like the duchess. And that was in those days. You
Speaker 7: could go to a pub even though you were underage.
Speaker 7: As long as she didn't drink, you could be there.
Speaker 7: So you could be there at sort of sixteen seventeen
Speaker 7: as long as you didn't go anywhere in the bar.
Speaker 7: And he called me and he said, our support act
Speaker 7: is not can't can't do our show next week? Do
Speaker 7: you guys want to play? And well, you know, we've
Speaker 7: got three songs. We have to get together and write,
Speaker 7: you know, three more songs so we can see we
Speaker 7: can be in the support band. But I just loved it.
Speaker 7: And I remember being on stage. I love the transition
Speaker 7: of like you write the songs in your bedroom, you're
Speaker 7: practicing someone's living room, you take the equipment with you
Speaker 7: on the bus, you walk into the pub. You know,
Speaker 7: for us, it was like three girls and we're all
Speaker 7: kind of like petite with our instruments, so we just
Speaker 7: like these guys. And then but then you get on
Speaker 7: stage and then and the music was, you know, as
Speaker 7: distorted guitars, And I loved the fact that people weren't
Speaker 7: expecting it of us. That's one thing I loved that.
Speaker 7: I also really loved just being there and thinking, oh,
Speaker 7: you know, I had this idea in my room, and
Speaker 7: now here I am playing it on stage. And you know,
Speaker 7: when you first do shows like that, it's your parents
Speaker 7: and your friend's parents and everyone's saying, oh, that was lovely.
Speaker 7: And then but I remember the first time we did
Speaker 7: a gig where a person I didn't know came up
Speaker 7: to me and they were like, god, that was and
Speaker 7: I thought, like, whose dad is this? But it was
Speaker 7: no one's dad. It was just a guy. And I
Speaker 7: really liked when you were play in a pub and
Speaker 7: people would be drinking at the barn and they just look
Speaker 7: over and then one by one, you know, they would
Speaker 7: come into the room, and then by the end there'd
Speaker 7: be more people there. Then started and I just really
Speaker 7: liked the feeling of it, the excitement, the fear of it,
Speaker 7: and so I just carried on and yeah, we really
Speaker 7: wanted to make it. We had a deal offered from
Speaker 7: road Runner Records, who were a metal label, but we
Speaker 7: were going to be the first indie signing, and the
Speaker 7: manager that we had at a time ended up in
Speaker 7: prison because he was kind of like a dodgy tax guy.
Speaker 7: And he was the son of a very very well
Speaker 7: known music manager. But anyway, you know, he took us
Speaker 7: out for lunch to a fancy hotel. You know, we
Speaker 7: never we hadn't eaten places like that. He pay and
Speaker 7: it was all going really well. But our bass player,
Speaker 7: who was the you know, the cool girl in the band,
Speaker 7: she she got pregnant. And I remember telling him. I
Speaker 7: was like, you know, Joanne's pregnant, but that's great, right,
Speaker 7: because we'll be able to be on stage she'll have
Speaker 7: a bump. And then so I remember the next time
Speaker 7: we tried to call the phone, he didn't answer the phone.
Speaker 7: And then the next time we tried to call, he
Speaker 7: didn't answer the phone. Then the next time we tried
Speaker 7: to call it This is before email or anything, you know,
Speaker 7: so you've got Yeah, that was the end, and I
Speaker 7: never saw him again. I saw that. It was like
Speaker 7: literally went to.
Speaker 5: Prison forgot that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, But I mean that's not why I didn't answer
Speaker 7: the phone. I think he just the idea of like
Speaker 7: a pregnant teen bass player wasn't as cool as it
Speaker 7: was to us. Then I had to go back to university.
Speaker 7: I was in my second year and had to go
Speaker 7: into the third year kind of like tail between my legs.
Speaker 7: I'd been like, yes, you know, we're on our way.
Speaker 7: You know, I had to come back and pick up
Speaker 7: all the bits of literature that no one wanted to do,
Speaker 7: you know, medieval literature. And I finished my course and
Speaker 7: then I waitressed, and then I worked on the jewelry
Speaker 7: counter at this fancy department store, just kind of waiting
Speaker 7: to see what happened with my band. And in the meantime,
Speaker 7: we got another manager and he was like, you know,
Speaker 7: you're writing all the songs, you are standing out. Why
Speaker 7: did you come to London and write some songs with
Speaker 7: these different people and just sort of see what happens.
Speaker 7: And I felt really divided because it was all my
Speaker 7: best friends, you know at the time, but my best
Speaker 7: friend who had a baby, she'd left and we had
Speaker 7: a different person. Then the drummer had left, who got
Speaker 7: a different drummer, so it wasn't really the same bad
Speaker 7: and I just thought, yeah, I'm going to try that.
Speaker 7: I'm gonna try this, and those songs became the songs
Speaker 7: that I had from my first record.
Speaker 2: So what was what was that first year like to
Speaker 2: just come out the box and instantly I almost feel
Speaker 2: like it's harder to top the charts in the UK
Speaker 2: than it is America. Like I know, for everyone, making
Speaker 2: it in America is the dream, but I'm way more
Speaker 2: impressed because I feel like the hurdles are harder and
Speaker 2: higher to even make some sort of dent or impression
Speaker 2: in the UK, because I almost feel like if you're
Speaker 2: hit in the UK, you can work forever because they're
Speaker 2: not as disposable as we are in the States, like
Speaker 2: I know right now, like who's old Boy with One Eye?
Speaker 1: Fante Old Boy with one Eye?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like even when Betty Watt was supposed to be
Speaker 2: the second coming of something and I just found out
Speaker 2: he he's in jail, like I didn't even know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the two records he had, the Trap
Speaker 4: Queen and he had yeah, he had like one of them.
Speaker 2: He had a moment in which I found out like
Speaker 2: he was going to be a thing, at least a
Speaker 2: second or third album or fourth you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. But to me, like your album
Speaker 2: Chop topped the charts in the UK, what was that
Speaker 2: feeling like for you?
Speaker 7: It was such a surprise. I remember getting a phone call.
Speaker 7: I was in Switzerland, because I guess Europe so small, right,
Speaker 7: So you do your bit of promotion in the UK,
Speaker 7: then you go to France, then you go to Italy,
Speaker 7: then you go to Spain, then you go to Germany,
Speaker 7: then you go to Holland then and you can do
Speaker 7: all that in about two weeks because it's so small.
Speaker 7: And so I remember being in Switzerland's I got a
Speaker 7: phone call that said, like, the album's gone to number one,
Speaker 7: and I just look like, what you know? I just
Speaker 7: because I still didn't know anybody knew about me. And
Speaker 7: it was of course in the days when you had
Speaker 7: to physically go to a record shop and buy a record,
Speaker 7: So I was like, how how has this happened? And
Speaker 7: but I had got a lot of support from the
Speaker 7: BBC really early on. So in two thousand and five
Speaker 7: I had put out Like a Star as a just
Speaker 7: an EP. It was like a limited edition EP, but
Speaker 7: the BBC had kind of picked up on it and
Speaker 7: they put me on this TV show. It was Got
Speaker 7: Later with Jules Holland and I remember last week yeah
Speaker 7: yeah really yeah, so good. We just did one a
Speaker 7: few weeks ago. But I mean, he's such a big
Speaker 7: supporter of music, and it's a fully live show. It's
Speaker 7: five or six bands in a round, you know, and
Speaker 7: you just you just watch everyone do their thing. You'll
Speaker 7: get one or two goes at it. I remember I
Speaker 7: was seeing the showcase in London and maybe the first
Speaker 7: first Thursday, one hundred people came, and then second Thursday,
Speaker 7: like two hundred people came, and the third Thursday like
Speaker 7: people couldn't get in. And then on the fourth Thursday,
Speaker 7: I'd done Jules Holland like earlier on in the day
Speaker 7: before I went to it, so it felt like it
Speaker 7: had really gone from nobody knows about me too, like
Speaker 7: I just got to play on the first ever TV show,
Speaker 7: you know. I remember once getting into a hotel room
Speaker 7: and I put on the radio through the TV and
Speaker 7: like a Star was playing and I was looking at
Speaker 7: it thinking is my CD player plugged in here? And
Speaker 7: then I realized it's on the radio, the actual radio.
Speaker 7: Someone else is playing it. So it was just new
Speaker 7: to me. And then everything was so fast, like, oh,
Speaker 7: Stevie Wonder's on the phone, what, like we're playing a
Speaker 7: show in America. Oh Prince has come to the show,
Speaker 7: Like you've just met Mary j Blige and she has
Speaker 7: heard of you. You know. It's just like I went
Speaker 7: to read out the nominations and the Grammys and I thought,
Speaker 7: this is amazing. I'm getting to read out the nominations
Speaker 7: and then just in Timberlake was saying, you know, song
Speaker 7: of the Record of the Year and put your records
Speaker 7: on what you know? To me, the nominations were the Grammys,
Speaker 7: Like it was that was the biggest excitement for me.
Speaker 7: Is just like hearing my name read out in a
Speaker 7: few categories, you know. So so yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: Answer one question for me.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't want to interrupt you, but since
Speaker 2: you mentioned that, I got to ask, so, since you
Speaker 2: were on the Joni letters, do you receive an actual Grammy?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so I get it.
Speaker 2: See, there's there's so much goalpost moving when it comes
Speaker 2: to you.
Speaker 1: Who can get one? Who can't get one? Yeah, because I'm.
Speaker 2: Associated with a few records that are albums of the Year.
Speaker 2: But I find out like in some categories, like especially
Speaker 2: with hip hop and soul, because there's so many collaborators
Speaker 2: and sample credits and all that stuff.
Speaker 7: They don't want to trophies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they'll just give you a little certificate. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you participated.
Speaker 2: But then I'll notice, like on in Classical and Country
Speaker 2: and in the main categories, like everyone gets like you're
Speaker 2: an official Grammy winner, where mine is sort of like
Speaker 2: I get it trophy awards, like, yeah, I participate.
Speaker 1: In voodoo here, here's my thing, you know. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: always wanted to know.
Speaker 7: Well, you should, you should redress that.
Speaker 1: Man, I got my own other battles to deal with.
Speaker 2: So no, but I do feel like when artists win
Speaker 2: Album of the Year and their respective categories, like we
Speaker 2: too should get awards as well.
Speaker 7: So yeah, but I always wanted.
Speaker 2: To know in the main category, do you get an
Speaker 2: award or do you not get work?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I remember Herbie saying if we win, I want
Speaker 7: you to come up on stage. But in the moment,
Speaker 7: I didn't go up. I just like, I've contributed one
Speaker 7: song to this. This is Herbie's saying. And he had
Speaker 7: such a he had a lot to say, right, he
Speaker 7: had a speech prepared in his pocket.
Speaker 1: You know, m No, don't don't dismiss that.
Speaker 2: That was your moment, you know, just in wrapping up
Speaker 2: for me, like I feel like this album is the
Speaker 2: soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist yet, or.
Speaker 1: Like, how do you take this further?
Speaker 2: Because I feel like there's no turning, Like you've done
Speaker 2: to open a door that can't be closed now, So
Speaker 2: like what is your what is your next plan?
Speaker 1: Musically? At least that's a.
Speaker 7: Really good question. I mean, definitely, my engagement with that
Speaker 7: building and those histories definitely doesn't stop. You know, I
Speaker 7: really want to write an essay about the erasure of
Speaker 7: black childhood that I saw in the objects in the
Speaker 7: Arts Bank, because it's a kind of strategic, you know,
Speaker 7: wide ranging kind of assault on childhood. You know, you know,
Speaker 7: hundreds of years long, but you know, it's two hundred
Speaker 7: years of evidence in that in the Arts Bank in
Speaker 7: terms of black children being depicted as not fully innocent,
Speaker 7: they're sexualized, they're seen as labor, you know, people who labor,
Speaker 7: like black childhood doesn't exist for the black children in
Speaker 7: the objects in the Ed Williams collection. And then right
Speaker 7: now next to the Arts Bank is there Tamir rice
Speaker 7: pavilion which is going to be torn down. And Timir
Speaker 7: Rice's mother came to Theesta and asked whether that could
Speaker 7: have its place next to the bank, so that Tamir
Speaker 7: Rice Pavilion is there, and you know, I think a
Speaker 7: lot about the connection between what is it for a
Speaker 7: police officer to not perceive someone as a child, to
Speaker 7: think of them as a dangerous adult instead of seeing
Speaker 7: them as a child playing with a toy because they've
Speaker 7: been swimming in this culture, lifelong culture that extends back
Speaker 7: generations of not affording black children the same space, innocent,
Speaker 7: joy freedom as other children. You know, how does it?
Speaker 7: One thing is cartoons and stories and silly picture books
Speaker 7: and you know, illustrations in the Black Sambo and postcards
Speaker 7: saying all these coon look alike. But the real world
Speaker 7: of effect is, you know, it's death for some young people,
Speaker 7: and so I definitely want to make some sort of
Speaker 7: I want to do some sort of work around that.
Speaker 7: But at the same time, I know there's people who
Speaker 7: are more gifted in that area. You know, I'm just
Speaker 7: reading Christina Sharp's book. You know, there's some towering academics
Speaker 7: in that world. But at the same time, there's all
Speaker 7: this collection of the stuff that I'm interested in. So,
Speaker 7: I mean, and you wanted to find a way to
Speaker 7: make some sort of commentary and that, But yeah, for me, musically,
Speaker 7: I just feel like I came from a place on
Speaker 7: my third album feeling like I am a failed pop
Speaker 7: star who has sort of squandered their chips at the
Speaker 7: you know, the Roulette table of music. You know, you
Speaker 7: had all this and you could have And my third
Speaker 7: record was that. You know, it's me just playing what
Speaker 7: songs to music executives, you know, eight men in a
Speaker 7: room and having them say I just don't think that's
Speaker 7: the first single, you know, and thinking okay, And after
Speaker 7: a while I didn't need them to be in the
Speaker 7: room at all because they were just in my head
Speaker 7: everything I started. What's the point of even finishing this song?
Speaker 7: It's not an international megasmash, you know, it's not uptown funk,
Speaker 7: So why am I even going to finish it? To
Speaker 7: now feeling like I am an artist? An artist's job
Speaker 7: is to exemplify freedom. I this is my work. This
Speaker 7: is what I love to do. It's what I've always
Speaker 7: loved to do. This is what I'll always do. That
Speaker 7: is the position I feel like I'm in.
Speaker 2: Are you pleased with the response that you're getting about
Speaker 2: the record.
Speaker 7: I've overjoyed with the response, definitely, because I feel, I mean,
Speaker 7: I don't read it, but I've got someone who's telling me,
Speaker 7: you know, yeah, you know, it's a good response.
Speaker 2: And I live between fuck Pitchfork and did you see
Speaker 2: where Pittsfork said? And to me, you know, sometimes they
Speaker 2: get it right. I mean even when they're this and me,
Speaker 2: they get it right. But sometimes they get it right.
Speaker 4: What's been the difference we were talking about labels earlier,
Speaker 4: Now that you're with thirty Tigers and kind of doing
Speaker 4: it independently, what is that like now?
Speaker 2: What is the difference between you know, being labels? YEA,
Speaker 2: put a number before an animal is.
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think, doctor Seuss, I think. But yeah, I
Speaker 7: loved that label straight away when I met them. I mean,
Speaker 7: I made the record independently. I made it with my
Speaker 7: own means, and I made it with you know, from
Speaker 7: our studio, and that gave me all this freedom. One
Speaker 7: I thought of it as a side project too. There
Speaker 7: was no one saying where's the hits or when is
Speaker 7: it finished? Which was really important because I also realized
Speaker 7: I don't respond well to that kind of pressure either.
Speaker 7: And my first record sort of being made like that,
Speaker 7: I made it in the basement of an art studio
Speaker 7: with someone that I got to know as a friend,
Speaker 7: you know, so, and then we walked it into labels
Speaker 7: and we worked it to Sony and they were like,
Speaker 7: And then we walked at Universal and they were you know.
Speaker 7: So it's like I felt, and I feel like, whatever
Speaker 7: I do in the future, I'm going to make that
Speaker 7: record and see who likes it, because why would you
Speaker 7: want to work with people who don't like it? And
Speaker 7: it's so hard, you know, my third record, it was
Speaker 7: so hard, feeling like I was just disappointing people at
Speaker 7: every turn, you know, and at that point, people are
Speaker 7: getting sacked if you don't make the right record right.
Speaker 7: People are losing their jobs, and the people you've known
Speaker 7: for ten years and you know their kids, and so
Speaker 7: you feel a lot of responsibility. But it's so weird
Speaker 7: being an artist how you can feel trapped by the
Speaker 7: things that you made. You know that it doesn't make
Speaker 7: any sense, does it. But I think you can make
Speaker 7: something and then it makes you this corridor and then
Speaker 7: you think, well that I have to go down that.
Speaker 7: You know. The way that I was able to feel
Speaker 7: free on this was thinking it's not a Corinne Bailey
Speaker 7: ray record, but that that's just me. So, you know,
Speaker 7: it was only when the artist, you know, he's a
Speaker 7: brilliant graph Writery writes, it makes amazing things for skateboard.
Speaker 7: Skateboard magazine is where I saw his work. It's only
Speaker 7: when he sent me the cover and I saw my name.
Speaker 7: The first thing I thought was like, I got to
Speaker 7: tell him not to put my name on it. It meant
Speaker 7: to say black rainbows, right, And then I saw my name.
Speaker 7: I thought, there's something about not seeing it as a font.
Speaker 7: I think sometimes when you see your name as a font,
Speaker 7: it becomes a sort of brand that somehow like tears
Speaker 7: away from you and becomes a separate thing. And it's like, oh,
Speaker 7: it's not in that font, it's just freehand, but it's me.
Speaker 7: And I thought, yeah, I never want to be boxed
Speaker 7: in again by my perception of what I think other
Speaker 7: people's perception of me, which, which of course is too
Speaker 7: is too circular anyway, So yeah, I definitely sort of
Speaker 7: can't go back. And then now I'm just trying to
Speaker 7: work out what to do.
Speaker 2: Next tour wise. How many weeks are you doing in
Speaker 2: the States, And we did.
Speaker 7: Five weeks in September, then we went to Europe and
Speaker 7: did six weeks. I know it wasn't six weeks. It
Speaker 7: was about four. And then we've come back now and
Speaker 7: we've done some West Coast dates and then we've got
Speaker 7: our Blue Note shows, and then we're coming back in
Speaker 7: June and do some US dates as well. And I'm
Speaker 7: playing in Australia and I'm playing you know, it's like
Speaker 7: it's that's a good thing is you know, just getting
Speaker 7: to play all over the world. It's a dream to me.
Speaker 7: You know, I'm not playing to twenty thousand people. I'm
Speaker 7: playing to two thousand people. But they're scattered all over
Speaker 7: the world, and I'm happy to get on a plane
Speaker 7: and go to them. You know.
Speaker 4: One the last question I wanted to ask Korean. I
Speaker 4: was always curious about your recording process for The Sea.
Speaker 4: You mentioned earlier that you know, that was when your
Speaker 4: husband had died, and so from what I've read, part
Speaker 4: of it was recorded prior, and then the other half was.
Speaker 3: How did you make it through that process?
Speaker 2: I was going to say it happened. I think it
Speaker 2: happened when we were recording Black.
Speaker 1: Lily, That's right.
Speaker 7: We had done some work take and then yeah, and
Speaker 7: we had done I've done this great jam with James
Speaker 7: Poison and it was like, oh this all this feels
Speaker 7: really good and I'm happy in this really happy place,
Speaker 7: and Jason was playing with Mark Ronson and it was
Speaker 7: things were looking so good for us, and then.
Speaker 1: Break and then I just remember the session stopped.
Speaker 2: And at first I was like, well, I guess you
Speaker 2: didn't like where we were going with it.
Speaker 1: I had no clue, and then they explained to me
Speaker 1: what I can't remember.
Speaker 7: I think something something might have happened while we were on,
Speaker 7: while we were there, but then yeah, this all happened
Speaker 7: in the in the March in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 7: And then I guess after that I just sort of
Speaker 7: stopped making music. It kind of felt like the end
Speaker 7: of my life. And I was twenty nine, and you know,
Speaker 7: when you're twenty nine, you sort of think you're old,
Speaker 7: you know, because you're nearly thirty, and thirty is the
Speaker 7: end of your life, right, So I thought, well, you know,
Speaker 7: I've had this great life and I've done this, I've
Speaker 7: had all this great you know, I've really enjoyed my music.
Speaker 7: Stuff that when you have an intense period, sometimes that
Speaker 7: eighteen months feels more expansive than it really is. So
Speaker 7: it felt like I've done a few years of this,
Speaker 7: and then yeah, I just thought, Okay, that's the end
Speaker 7: of my life. And then and they also it was
Speaker 7: so painful. I kind of couldn't imagine thirty nine, forty nine,
Speaker 7: fifty nine. I was just about how could I sort
Speaker 7: of carry on with this amount of physical pain? And
Speaker 7: then I guess, you know, anyone who's experienced grief is
Speaker 7: just like slowly, slowly, slowly, it's like the sound being
Speaker 7: sort of turned back up again, and you find little
Speaker 7: moments or you find interest, so you find you cease.
Speaker 7: I remember being in New York and seeing this couple
Speaker 7: and she was pregnantly had a little baby, and I
Speaker 7: remember sort of thinking, oh, like I had a little pine
Speaker 7: for that, like, oh, in my future, I want to
Speaker 7: be a parent. I remember feeling that, and that was
Speaker 7: a little sort of crack of hope. And then, you know,
Speaker 7: or I'd sit at the piano and just get like
Speaker 7: two chords and think, oh, I want to finish that.
Speaker 7: There were just little bits of things, but it's a
Speaker 7: really really really really long time, you know. I And
Speaker 7: when I was touring the Sea, I was still very
Speaker 7: much in my sort of widowhood, and so I mean
Speaker 7: it was it was useful to play the songs, but
Speaker 7: it was really difficult to play them as well. And
Speaker 7: also it attracted to me a lot of people who
Speaker 7: were grieving too, which was very beautiful but also had
Speaker 7: its own weight to it. You know. I remember meeting
Speaker 7: a couple after a show and they had lost a
Speaker 7: child before it was born, and they wanted to talk
Speaker 7: to me about that, and they even wanted to show
Speaker 7: me photographs, and I remember sort of thinking I am
Speaker 7: not sort of qualified for that, but at the same time,
Speaker 7: here I am in this space, which is I'm standing
Speaker 7: on the stage talking about loss, and not many people
Speaker 7: that are saying that this moment, and so it was
Speaker 7: just I'd meet people in the street they say I
Speaker 7: lost my brother, I lost my mother, I lost my partner.
Speaker 7: People would write your letters I lost my husband, and
Speaker 7: I just I felt in my heart were so open
Speaker 7: and bleeding in that time. You know, just just like
Speaker 7: the naivety that you can have if you haven't experienced loss,
Speaker 7: you sort of walk around the world like, yeah, kind
Speaker 7: of in control of my life, and you know, like
Speaker 7: I just got to manifest this, and you just don't
Speaker 7: realize how everything can change. In a moment. So I
Speaker 7: guess when I came through that grief, the place I
Speaker 7: arrived at was total gratitude at being alive, and you know,
Speaker 7: and then I had my children, and then I felt
Speaker 7: very differently about my life. I thought I really wanted
Speaker 7: to live, you know, I want to make it, you know,
Speaker 7: I want to make it and I want to survive
Speaker 7: for them. So every day that I wake up, I'm
Speaker 7: like an old person. You know, when you talk to
Speaker 7: an eighty year old and they say, you say, how
Speaker 7: are you and they say, well, I woke up today,
Speaker 7: you know, they say that, It's like that's what I'm like.
Speaker 7: Am I here? I am, I'm awake, you know, I'm here.
Speaker 7: Like I just feel this massive gratitude and massive joy
Speaker 7: all the time because I have been so low to
Speaker 7: the point where I felt I don't want this life.
Speaker 7: I don't want my life, and now I really really
Speaker 7: want it, really want it. So I'm really grateful and
Speaker 7: definitely play music help me to articulate those thoughts.
Speaker 2: Well, I thank you for sharing that, and again I
Speaker 2: love No, I fucking love your album. And I you know,
Speaker 2: anyone listening now just please like give your support, like
Speaker 2: this is really, really a great record and repeat listens
Speaker 2: over and over again. And you know, I can't wait
Speaker 2: to see this live. I'm going to see you this
Speaker 2: week when you come to Blue Note. Of course, this
Speaker 2: will be on the air way after the fact, so
Speaker 2: if Corinth is in town then you need to support her.
Speaker 2: But thank you for doing this for us, and I
Speaker 2: appreciate you.
Speaker 7: Thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks everybody.
Speaker 2: Uh, this is Quest Love and thank you once again, Uh,
Speaker 2: miss Ray for joining us.
Speaker 1: And we'll see you guys on the next go round
Speaker 1: of Quest Love Supreme. All right, West Love Supreme is
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