Technology can be a tricky thing. Take, for instance, my attempts to talk to Meshell Ndegeocello earlier this week. Cell phones, landlines – it didn’t seem to matter. We couldn’t connect. Multiple tries before we took a 20 minute break and tried again. And then it worked. Finally.
Which lead perfectly into a conversation about whether or not to employ technology – something Ndegeocello did in limited amounts for her most recent album, Ventriloquism. She and her band will be in concert on Saturday night at the Ford Amphitheatre as part of the Ignite! series in support of the recording.
“We all played at one time,” she say of the recording process for Ventriloquism. “Usually you hear the first or second take. Once we got to a third or fourth take, we moved on. We played like a cover band and we were allowed to have some intimacy. I wanted to make sure if I had to play this live, I could play it in a pub in Dublin with just a guitar player or go to a piano bar. I wish there was a place…”
We spend a few minutes talking about the demise of piano bars in Los Angeles before she says, “I wonder if I could open up a bar in Eagle Rock where you could have a drink or bullshit with friends without worrying about it.” She lives in New York, but when in the LA area she likes Eagle Rock.
Ventriloquism finds Ndegeocello doing cover songs from the 80s and 90s. Her selection of these songs was born out of sad circumstances.
“I was mourning that my father was about to journey to the next realm,” she reveals about the inspiration for the album. “I would drive back and forth to the hospital. My mother’s old car only got one station. The soundtrack to that experience was listening to the oldies. That was my joy. So a lot of those covers are just something that was coloring my experience. Something that gave me transcendence during the hard time.”
Ventriloquism features songs by Prince (“Sometimes It Snows in April”), TLC (“Waterfalls”), Janet Jackson (“Funny How Times Flies”) and Tina Turner (“Private Dancer.”)
She isn’t the first artist, and certainly won’t be the last, to do an album of covers. David Bowie had a popular album named Pin-Ups. Do these albums reveal something about the artists themselves?
“That’s a really great question. I can only speak for myself, but it’s like you love a great song and a great song is just that. That means it can survive a revision. A re-envisioning. I think the songs, what they say about me is the foundation of my whole career, even though I really like every genre of music, my foundation is in the R&B of the 80s and 90s. I also grew up in a time when there was serious crossover. And a time when it wasn’t so genre specific. I could hear Neil Diamond and Stevie Wonder on the same station.”
Given some of her previous songs, it was inevitable we got around to politics. I asked her how far she thinks we’ve come as a society from “Leviticus: Faggot” (on her second album – Peace Beyond Passion from 1996) if Justice Clarence Thomas is arguing that the gay marriage decision should be overturned.
“Ooooh…well that’s a complicated conversation. I think we’ve come very far, but you can’t legislate reason without common decency. That man…I wish I could understand what happened to him in his childhood to make him so off-kilter about certain issues. I find myself siding more with Justice Robert. Then it leads me to this more ethereal conversation…I’ve yet to meet any man or woman that I feel should have this much power to judge and set in place rules and ideas that may not be the best for human beings. Is this working for us? Is a democratic society truly democratic when you give so much power to so few people? It’s not.”
One thing I’ve always admired about Ndegeocello’s career is I feel like she’s fully followed the beat of the drummer inside her soul. She doesn’t pander. She doesn’t make artistic decisions based on anything other than her own talent and instincts.
So I asked her about a Frank Kafka quote who said, “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” Has it gotten any easier for her to do that and is there a price to be paid for doing so?
She immediately shot back a question. “Are you an atheist?”
I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”
And then she answered. “I was just curious. Of course there is a price to pay, but if I told you what that was I would be participating in the culture. I had a religious upbringing and I’ve been groomed to not be of the world. I have tried to be and that was really uncomfortable. I think the isolation of reason and honesty with one’s self is difficult. If you are doing it for a glory grab, you’re not going to get it.
“Doing something that feels really good to you and is the path you want to go down, you have to be okay with it and you have to be your own cheerleader. I’m that way for many reasons. I jokingly say my mother was so depressed that she isn’t the person I got my self-esteem from.
“Most important to me is trying to be a good person and whatever good I have to leave behind in the world will go to my children and the musicians I’ve played with. I can see what happens with fame and money. I’m like Harry Potter…sometimes you have to leave that shit alone.”
For tickets go here. (At press time just a few seats were available.)
It should be noted that a portion of the proceeds from sales of Ventriloquism benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
Photos of Meshell Ndegeocello by Charlie Goss/Courtesy of the Ford Theatre