Erykah Badu: Freestyle Mac
Erykah Badu is awash in creative energy. She conjures the stuff from thin air, whipping up hooks and melodies with little more than a basic backing track. Think soulful freestyle riffs and lyrics punctuated by the boom and clack of a jazzy drum kit. Yet even a steady stream of creativity like Badu’s can be diverted—for days, weeks, months, or years. In fact, five years passed without a new Badu album. Some said she had writer’s block. Some said she had lost her groove. Turns out the vibe was alive the whole time—it simply needed a new channel to flow into.
“I didn’t really have writer’s block,” she says. “I just needed another medium, another way to be creative. I needed a new boyfriend to bring the old butterflies back.”
That new medium was a MacBook running GarageBand. Badu fired up the application one quiet day around the house, and the music surged. She laid down vocals and sent them via iChat to producers 9th Wonder and James Poyser. The three traded tracks for months, collaborating with producers Karriem Riggins and Rashad “Ringo” Smith. Engineer Mike Chav helped stitch it all together—and that’s how Badu’s new record, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), was created.
“Making this album at home felt good,” Badu says. “I felt relaxed. I didn’t feel any pressure at all. I took my time. And in taking my time, things happened so quickly. I know that’s strange, but that’s how it happened. I didn’t have to go through the hustle and bustle and fuss of finding another engineer. I have a home studio, but I didn’t use it that much, because I was able to maneuver things by myself on the Mac. In four months, I had three albums—seventy-something songs and 20 to 50 more ideas.”
Finding the Groove
For Badu, discovering the new musical tools in her MacBook was an organic process that blossomed out of a few simple iChat windows. “I got on iChat, and all my friends started sending me MP3 tracks and asking me to come up with vocals and lyrics,” she says. Soon she launched GarageBand and started dragging tracks into the timeline. “They told me that I could basically layer my vocals in GarageBand like I used to do with my old four-track,” she says. “I’m an analog girl, so it was easy to relate.” Within a few minutes she’d recorded a new track, with several more ready to go.
“I learned how to use GarageBand by trial and error,” Badu says. “I hate reading instructions, so I just figured it out. It took the amount of time that I dragged the MP3 into a track. It’s like somebody stuck a plug in the back of my neck and uploaded a program to learn how to use GarageBand. It was automatic. Everything on that Mac was automatic.”
Suddenly Badu was free to create on her own time, wherever she wanted, without the hassle of extraneous recording gear. “I started writing so much, so quickly, and so independently of people disturbing me,” she says. “It was just me, my headphones, and my laptop. I could be anywhere, as long as I had some juice, and write music.”
Improv Ink
For Badu, songwriting is improvisational, a jam session on paper. “I never write lyrics,” she says. “The music inspires me. I listen to the music, I’m in it, I hear it, and I begin to hum a melody. As I’m humming a melody, I begin to find a rhythm for the melody. There has to be space between the kick and the snare for what I’m saying. It’s all about finding a space where I belong. Soon that humming and rhythm breaks into syllables and I just find words that match the syllables of the melody. It somehow all makes sense.”
For New Amerykah, Badu laid freestyle vocals over tracks from producer 9th Wonder, who collaborated with producer James Poyser. “9th Wonder would send me a track and I would put some vocals on it, put a tambourine on it or something. Then 9th Wonder would IM it to James Poyser, who would put some keys on it. Poyser would IM it back to me, and I’d write a hook. I’d send it all to Mike Chavarria, and he would dump everything to two-inch tape to get a nice warm analog sound.”
