SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST 2009

Erykah Badu's high aspirations

By Deborah Sengupta Stith
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Every year, a few standout late adds end up energizing the South by Southwest schedule. One of 2009's is Erykah Badu, who will play a free show at Auditorium Shores on Saturday. Pregnant and powerful, Badu wowed a huge crowd at the Austin City Limits Music Festival last year when she blended numbers from her densely complex 2009 release, "New Amerykah Part One (The Fourth World War)," with classic Baduizm. With a new daughter at home and a sequel to "New Amerykah" due out this spring, Badu returns to Austin with the Cannabinoids, a group of Dallas urban music all-stars. We caught up with Badu over the phone last week. As the baby cooed quietly in the background, we talked about music, politics and the story behind the weediest band name since the Doobie Brothers.

American-Statesman: Your last album was both deeply personal and political. Do you make a conscious choice to be political or is it just a natural side effect of your self-expression?

Badu: I think that it's the latter. For "New Amerykah Part One" I wrote about 40-50 songs just when I was in my writing mode. When I'm putting an album together I tend to kind of categorize the songs — personal, political, emotional, relationship or party or whatever — and try to put them in an order that makes sense to tell a story. All of those things are of course feelings that I have and things that I have experienced or witnessed. For "New Amerykah Part One (Fourth World War)" they just sort of fell in line like that. I took those 10 songs in particular and managed to tell that story because I felt that was something I needed to express. It's also therapy for me to be able to get those things out of my mind and head and heart. Part Two would be the other group of songs which are more right brained and emotional if you will.

And on the new album the themes will be more spiritual, emotional?

Not only that, but the songs fall in line together. They fit together like a puzzle sonically, how they sound, how they feel. Theme always comes last because what comes first for me is always music and the music kind of inspires what I say.

When a lot of people think of Texas urban music, they think of Houston, what do you think characterizes the Dallas sound?

Well we have a very heavy jazz influence in Dallas and I would say even more blues than jazz. It's kind of a blues meets jazz. We had a thing called Deep Ellum back in the '30s and '40s that was thriving musically. Jazz and blues musicians. In South Dallas there was a restaurant called the Green Parrot which is adjacent to the Forest Theater. A lot of musicians used to come in — from Aretha Franklin to Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis — a variety of different soul, R&B and jazz musicians, blues musicians would come (to the theater) but then after hours they would go over to the Green Parrot where they would improv and I guess, do what they do best. That was their therapy. It's more bluesy and jazzy. It comes out in our hip-hop, it comes out in our soul music, even comes out a little bit in our rock music here. There's a really bluesy alley type of down home Southern thing going on. That's what I hear in us.

Can you talk about the Cannabinoids? It strikes me as a Dallas supergroup.

Yeah it is. It represents a musical exploration of the science of addiction. I guess it was inspired by a cosmic collaboration of the different artists that I always admire here in Dallas. DJs, producers, beat makers and I call them scientists, mad scientists. We just kind of get together in a room and improv with all of these digital pieces of equipment. No analog equipment except for maybe shakers and tambourines and things. It's a new way of doing a jazz jam session. Jazz has a lot of improvisation in it and so does this thing, but it's all digital.

The reason I thought Cannabinoids was at the time I had really been wanting something to change the flow of what was going on in Dallas. People weren't very inspired anymore and I wanted something to inspire the minds and kind of stimulate the brains to bring out more creativity and I thought that's what cannabinoids do. What cannabinoids are, they are a group of terpenophenolic compounds present in Cannibis sativa. Some of the cannabinoids make you hungry, some make you hallucinate, some make you sleepy. These are these little receptors that are present in this herb. So I was thinking we can create it with us. We can be the synthetic cannabinoids. ... I wanted us to get high through this musical collaboration.

Erykah Badu at SXSW: The Cannabinoids featuring Erykah Badu, with Beach House and Explosions in the Sky, play a free show at Auditorium Shores beginning at 6 p.m. Saturday.