Erykah Badu Talks “Neo Soul,” Theater, and How She Met D’Angelo

Erykah Badu sat down for a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times. In the conversation with Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, she opened up about her own artistry, her famous babies' fathers and how she met the late D’Angelo. As far as her sound and image belonging to any specific genre, Badu discussed her frustrations with being put in any kind of box.

“I really hate that I get categorized, because I don’t think I do one thing. I certainly don’t think there’s one song that I’ve made that sounds like the other. I’m always in the specific moment of that music, and the drums come first. I love the idea of live instrumentation because I am a jazz artist. I love improvisation. I love to make a song, but I like to see how far we can take it live.”

She recalled her introduction to D’Angelo and how much Brown Sugar impacted her. 

“I first met D’Angelo’s music,” Badu shared. “I was working in a coffee shop in Dallas, Texas, called Grinders, and somebody was playing D’Angelo’s new album, Brown Sugar. I heard it, and it was just so refreshing to me because I was also working on music and really wanted to meet him.

“The next month, I went to South by Southwest. I was passing out my demo and I guess I gave one of them to the right person, who was managing Mobb Deep. And she goes, “I have a friend that I’m gonna hand this to,” and the friend was Kedar [Massenburg, a music executive and producer].”

The interview was conducted before D’Angelo’s death on Oct. 14. Elsewhere in the convo, Badu talked about her famous exes: Andre 3000, The D.O.C. and Jay Electronica. 

“I think what we have in common is that we were all on that path,” she says. “Any person that I’ve come in contact with — specifically the fathers of my amazing children — I think that they were on that already. That’s why we sympathetically vibrated together.”

Badu also admitted that some of the social media criticism she’s endured in recent years had an effect on her and sowed seeds of doubt.

“I didn’t hear anything on the way to stardom,” she said. “I started having self-doubt after I was more popular — way after Baduizm, way after Mama’s Gun — because people have opinions and those opinions, you know, they’re a force.”