Erykah Badu
Erykah Badu
Erykah Abi Wright, better known by her stage name Erykah Badu, is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, activist, and actress. Badu's career began after opening a show for D'Angelo in 1994 in her hometown; record label executive Kedar Massenburg was highly impressed with her performance and signed her to Kedar Entertainment. Her first album, Baduizm, was released on February 11, 1997. It spawned three singles: "On & On", "Next Lifetime" and "Otherside of the Game". The album was certified triple...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionR&B Singer
Date of Birth26 February 1971
CityDallas, TX
CountryUnited States of America
I trust the political system to be what it is. It's a structure to keep the country running, a boat to get us [citizens] from one side to the other, and it has the country's best interests at heart. Not the people's.
What a frequency What a voice. I love Bilal. I couldn't imagine a music world without his voice.
I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.
All of my children are the same way I am. They're little artists too, in their own ways.
My truth is relevant and my songs are relevant, but I have to recalibrate myself and speed up my vibrations so that I can communicate with the voice of this generation.
When I get ready to do an album, that means I have something to say for the sake of words, and I listen back to all of the things I've been creating and pull things from out of the air to go with them. It's almost like I start creating the album before I even think about creating it.
I don't plan how many people I work with. I don't charge anything. It's for my own learning, and I just enjoy being the welcoming committee. I became a doula by default.
A home birth is about being able to create exactly what you want, because it's such a violent moment inside of the body that you want everything else to be as beautiful as it can be.
I'm in training to become a midwife. I'm almost there and before I know it I'll be able to open my own practice, if that's what I desire.
There are millions and billions of atoms of memory of all kinds of musical themes in me.
I don't feel like I need to preach to the world or nothing like that. I just feel like I share what I say, and if listeners get it, they get it. And I never underestimate the audience's ability to feel me.
What I work hard at doing is staying on a path of being kind and showing and proving that I'm a good person to society. That's hard. The talent, that's a gift. I just came here like that.
I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy.
It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.