By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Erykah Badu asked for three things when she sat down in a private room at London's Soho hotel: the lights dimmed, a soft seat, and a green juice. She'd been up late — playing songs at a piano with Dave Chappelle until the small hours, by her own account — and she wasn't in a hurry to explain what exactly happened. "Oh yes," she said, slow and sly, gold teeth catching the low light. "It was a late one …"
That unhurried quality is, by her own telling, the whole method. Badu, 55, has just released her first album in eleven years, made alongside the producer the Alchemist, and she is not apologetic about the wait. "It's important to gather the data," she told the Guardian — data being, in her case, the ordinary and extraordinary material of a life: dating, dying, dopamine. She is also a registered birth and death doula, work she treats as inseparable from the music rather than a curiosity on the side.
What comes through, in conversation, is a refusal to be pinned down — not coyness, but a genuine resistance to definition that has marked her career since Baduizm nearly three decades ago. "I'm an ever-changing vessel," she says, and the line does double duty: it's an artistic credo and, apparently, a fair description of how she spent her Thursday night.
Whether the new record justifies an eleven-year gap is a question only the listening public can answer, and this piece — drawn from a single extensive interview — doesn't attempt to review it. But Badu's account of how she works, unhurried and doula-steady even at the piano, is its own kind of statement.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."