Melissa Giannini

Venus
Fall 2001

Lovetta Pippen

Straight outta the gospel choir, the blues chanteuse’s voice rings loud and clear for His Name Is Alive

By Melissa Giannini

During a recording session for His Name Is Alive, Lovetta Pippen sang a six-minute a cappella piece called “Amazing.” A year later, Warn Defever added some strings to the track for inclusion on the band’s Emergency album. Over the course of six minutes, pitch tends to vary. Amazingly, she was perfectly in tune the entire time.

“I’d say her and maybe John Brannon (Easy Action, Laughing Hyenas) are the best singers I’ve ever heard in my life,” he concludes with a wry smile, the kind he probably gave Cameron Crowe while telling the director his favorite movie was Batman. Or the one he wore while dozens of people scrambled screaming up the stairs of Detroit’s Majestic Theatre basement after he set off explosives during a noise installation/safety hazard appropriately named Fire Truck.

Defever quickly bookends making light of the bold statement with wide-eyed confidence. “When you’re in the roomm with them [Brannon and Pippen], there’s so much … heart. You feel like you’re with someone who’s an American treasure.”

You can hear his seriousness throughout every crook and cranny of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, the band’s latest album, released July 17 in the United States on 4AD/Beggar’s Banquet. Unlike previous HNIA albums where wispy ethereal vocals fit snugly between fuzz curtains, guitar static and zap buzzers, his latest work frames a single voice. the sparse R&B instrumentation is merely a backdrop that frames Pippen’s devastatingly soulful singing. Blues? Hell yeah.

Pippen has worked with Defever and His Name Is Alive for around six years, but in the past she was more of a featured guest. She sang in the gospel choir incorporated into 1996’s Stars on ESP and provide soul-crushing accents cascading throughout the folds of “Everything takes Forever” on Ft. Lake, released in 1998.

Even her speaking voice drips with raspy rhythm. I had to catch my breath when her husked hello drifted over the line during a recent phone interview, the very first solo interview the singer has ever done. She laughs, the kind of full-body blast that crinkles up at the ends, when I ask how she takes such compliments from the guitarist/creative force behind His Name Is Alive.

“Warn’s crazy. I take that as a compliment. But you know … Warn. He makes me laugh. I think he knows that I’m kind of hard on myself. If I do something and it’s not exactly how I want it to come out, you know, I’m sort of a perfectionist and he knows that. He’s like ‘Oh, no. It’s great.’ So I think it’s kind of a joke.”

The 22-year-old may speak modestly, but she sings with the confidence of a been-there-done-that blues chanteuse and a spark of spontaneity sewn from years of isolated obscurity. While growing up, Pippen’s mother and pastor father wouldn’t allow her or her siblings to listen to secular music. As an adult, she’s hearing centuries worth of sound with fresh ears.

“It was kind of overwhelming at first,” she admits. “Now, I’m kind of getting into the groove of things. But it makes me a little frustrated that I missed out in my younger years on so much. So much music I wasn’t allowed to hear. there are certain artists that I had never heard before. It just gives me an opportunity to see it from eyes that only certain people can see. Where I am right now, seeing certain things for the first time.”

The only exposure she had to popular music was through television.

“You know when they sell those records on TV? We knew all those songs. That was pretty much all we could get. Except I would hear kids singing different songs at school. It was sad, but, yeah. It’s like a whole new world.”

Like Defever, who learned to play music from his grandfather as a child before even hearing the radio, Pippen’s early exposure to music was through performance with her family.

“My parents kind of put me up to it. My father was a pastor. And we were his children. And we kind of had to help out with the duties of singing at the church. My mother taught us those songs—you know, “Jesus Loves Me”—all those songs. If your parent calls you up to sing, you’ve got to do a good job. The pressure’s on. So I guess when I was around 6 or something like that was when people started saying, ‘You have a nice voice.’ I started getting called up at church all the time. But my mother and my father were very musical people anyway. It was kind of just a normal thing, to sing. My father played the organ. My mother had a very lovely voice. It was just knd of the norm. It wasn’t anything special that we were singing. I think until people started going, ‘Let that little girl sing this Sunday. We wanna hear that little girl sing’—that’s when I started realizing, ‘Oh God, what have I gotten myself into?’ No, but that’s how it pretty much started. It went from there. From me singing at church for most of my life.”

As a child, singing brought her nothing but pleasure. As she got older, however, Pippen became more accountable.

“That’s where I think I get my attitude from in terms of me always wanting it to be perfect. Because my father was very demanding in terms of, that note wasn’t right or this note wasn’t right. Very constructive. He criticized all the time. It started off as a good thing and then when I started getting older, there was more and more pressure for me to put on this show at church. It was stressful. I’m serious. And you never knew when they were gonna call you. You might not be on the program. But someone just goes, ‘Come on up, Lovetta! Sing us that song!’ And you were like, ‘Oh … God.’

“There were two or three songs that peple just loved. And I had to sing those songs all the time because they wouldn’t dare hear anything else. One of the songs was ‘When I See Jesus,’ and I swear to God, I don’t ever want to hear that song again.”

Her sisters and brother still sing and play music. “It’s kind of hard to get out of something like that when you’re raised in that way.”

Meeting Defever, who has lived in the same Livonia, Michigan, home his entire life, which just happens to be less than a mile from the hospital where he was born, was a bit of a culture shock to say the least. He had hired her gospel choir to come to his home recording studio and sing some songs for Stars on ESP. The choir director was extremely strict and wouldn’t allow Defever or the male members of his band to speak with the female members of the choir. At one point Pippen snuck away while the director wasn’t looking and asked Defever if he believed in UFOs.

“Things seemed a little weird around here. And we started talking about aliens. I don’t know why I asked him about it. That’s one of my things. … It’s something that I think about. I think it just comes from me wanting to know that there’s something other than this. I think everyone has that hunger to know what happens after you die and all that. but it just seems so logical that there would be something other than this. It makes life more exciting to believe that. Because if you don’t believe in something other than this, then I don’t really know. It’s kind of a disappointment, you know? I guess it’s just my way of making life exciting. I’m always looking up to see something. I never can quite get anything. It’s just intriguing. I like to believe there’s something else. … And he gave me a book. We chatted for a few seconds. And that was pretty much it. He invited me to come back to do some more things and then it just snowballed into what it is now. It was so unplanned and so unexpected.

“I wanted to go, ‘You’re weird; this place is weird.’ But it was great. It was fun. He goes, ‘Do you want to sing some more songs?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And then I’d come back and sing more songs and do more shows. And here we are.”

When she first heard how Defever had incorporated the gospel portions into the album—a kind of Phil Spector-ish reworking of an old folk song, Pippen’s response was ‘Wow.’ She had never heard His Name Is Alive before so it was different and strange and wonderful.

She has come to love the spontaneity of working with Defever.

“The song, ‘Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth,’ I came over and I had never heard the song before and he just goes, ‘However you feel it, just go for it.’ And I sang it and it’s on the record. So the song you hear is the song that I did that day, the first time. We tried to rerecord it and it wasn’t the same … thing.”

Defever has penned the vast majority of the HNIA catalog, which is almost entirely sung by women. Pippen takes ownership of the songs, wrapping her voice around them like shiny reflective paper and torn Scotch tape.

“I try very hard to understand more of the songs. I’ll sit down with Warn and say, ‘I’m having trouble with this song. What does it mean? Because I’m not figuring it out.’ And he’ll do his best. Usually, he doesn’t do a very good job [laughs]. And I’ll just interpret them into what I feel they mean. And that’s the way I’ll sing it. I don’t know. Sometimes I may be singing a song and thinking one thing and the crowd is thinking a whole different thing. I think I do tht with most of the songs. I take them and I interpret them. I try to gain some clues from Warn and then I interpret them my way.”

Someday does feature one song written by Pippen and Dan Littleton of Ida. Called “Happy Blues,” it’s one of the more light-hearted tracks on the album. The term light-hearted is used a bit loosely, however, since the song describes the ecstasy of finally dropping a jerk amid the inevitable crumbling reality that ensues after any breakup.

“The song is kind of like an attitude, how often you view life,” Pippen explains. “How I was viewing life at that time. How I feel driving through life. I heard the music and I think that’s what I was feeling like at that time. I think it’s a pretty good song. Warn kind of laughed at it the first time he heard it. He goes, ‘Happy Blues? What kind of song is that?’ Well, I think it grew on everybody.”

While Pippen’s unique style may one day be recognized as influential, in the meantime, she points to fellow Detroiter Aretha Franklin as an influence.

“She’s the queen. Singers that appeal to me always seem to have this fearless attitude. Fearless and they have a freedom in their voice. You can’t just tell them anything. It’s like, ‘Do your thing. I’m not gonna bother you.’ I love that.”

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Venus
Summer 2006

The Fiery Furnaces

The bro-and-sis duo reminisces about hometown softball games, grandma’s grooves, and their latest release, Bitter Tea

By Melissa Giannini

Eleanor Friedberger hit a three-run triple during her heyday as a catcher for her Oak Park, Illinois, high school’s softball team. The feat warranted a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Friedberger’s Big Day Powers Oak Park.” And according to a biography for the Fiery Furnaces—the band she shares with her brother, Matthew—it remains her crowning achievement.

The biography is a tongue-in-cheek rant, a stream-of-consciousness-style life history painted onto a piece of rice—each grain of truth stretched and exaggerated until it could feed a family for a week, before deflating into a self-defeating cliché: “He then moved back in with his mother, sealing his fate and cementing his status as a parasite and waster of indulgence and advantage.”

These words, written by Matthew, the parasite, speak volumes about the band and its most recent album, Bitter Tea. They speak to their modest sense of self, cross-hatched with their propensity to indulge in the art of personal myth and their sense of humor, which is dryer than the house wine we shared at a Brooklyn bar during our March interview.

“Ooh, that’s delicious … not,” Eleanor comments upon first sip.

“I tasted dirt. Good. It’s a little dirty,” her brother concurs.

After delivering our wine, our server took a seat behind the tall bar and took to resting his chin on his forearm and listening to us talk. It was clear that he recognized Eleanor and Matthew. They are bona fide rock stars to be certain, and it is quite possible that in this waiter’s mind, something very important was happening. Granted, we also were the only ones in the bar.

To be completely honest, the majority of our conversation consisted of sharing stories about the small-pond celebrities we know in common from my hometown of Detroit. But for all of their sarcasm and brother-sister bickering, there is still an instant familiarity to their combined demeanor, and instead of an intimidating, asthma-inducing Q&A session, our interview melted into a soft-edged Midwestern meet-up. The Friedbergers hail from Oak Park—a near-Chicago suburb—and recorded Bitter Tea in Benton Harbor, Michigan, an experience they loved.

“We grew up going to Lake Michigan every summer, not too far from there,” Matthew said. “Our mom used to vacation in St. Joe when she was a little kid. Our great uncle would sing at the House of David [a religious communal society based in Benton Harbor].”

Eleanor adds, “Half my clothes are from Benton Harbor.”

But it was a big bottle of house wine, and we managed to get back to Brooklyn in our conversation to talk a little about the new record.

Speaking of honesty, their most recent release might be the most revealing of the duo’s canon. Where 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark and 2004’s Blueberry Boat tossed a wordplay salad and 2005’s Rehearsing My Choir had the siblings in the backseat of their then-82-year-old grandmother’s life story, Bitter Tea’s lyrics have a lovelorn quality. There is a lot of waiting for true loves to return, losing true loves in the rain, and a lot of “you’re there and I’m here” and “you swore you’d never leave.” Musically, it’s a clear return to the ADD-addled, defaced-pop sensibilities of their highly touted debut.

FIRST BASE

Chinese bitter tea is known for its initial bitter flavor, followed by a sweet finish. It’s said to have cleansing qualities combined with antioxidants and anti-hypertension relief.

Matthew refers to Bitter Tea as being girly, “sissy psychedelic Satanism,” or the granddaughter record. “We made the record right after making Rehearsing My Choir, thinking that they would go together,” Matthew explains. “This one would be the other side of the grandmother record.”

Or maybe the sweet finish. It evokes the China Town hipster kitsch of bamboo plants, cute 10-cent soaps, $5 slippers, and fake Dolce sunglasses. But while it’s more straightforward in a pop sense, it is by no means bubblegum. Vocals are played backward, creating an anxious, suction-cup sensation that Matthew describes as “The beautiful sound of a human voice trying to rush back inside the mouth from which it came.” Not to mention subject matter that swirls with themes of gambling addiction and loss. Likewise, musical themes jump back and forth without warning, and all kinds of effects provide a texture far from what’s considered easily digestible.

“We always want to exaggerate it one way or the other to make it something different or definite,” he explains. He does most of the writing and playing. Eleanor does most of the singing and some drums. “If the song has got a loud noise in it, you want to make sure it’s a loud noise. If it’s backwards and not in tune, you want to make sure it’s especially backwards and not in tune.”

But the songs themselves are strong and can withstand whatever abuse is forced upon them. “Waiting to Know You” is a standout. A wistful sigh of a song, it’s the last track on some lost Northern soul album, with groove dust crackles replaced by speaker-fuzz squiggles.

Lyrically, the wordplay has graduated into a surreal style of storytelling, with a Haruki Murakami-style subtlety to its humor. In “Oh Sweet Woods,” Eleanor is kidnapped by “two extra-blond, short-sleeve, button-down-white-shirt, blue-tie mystery Mormons” who think she “stashed away the only pewter pocket watch that ever belonged to Joseph Smith’s great-great uncle’s brother-in-law.” Imagine this story set to a catchy half-disco complete with cheesy keyboard handclaps and you’ll understand.

Also a standout is Eleanor’s voice itself, carrying the narrator from a little thatched hut to Tahoe, the California side, to Borneo and a town called Nevers, which “never wasn’t was what it weren’t.”

“It’s a place you think is nice,” Matthew says softly. “You’re going to run away there, but it’s not going to be better. You’re not going to know your way around it. You’re not going to manage to escape.”

Another engaging song, “The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry,” tracks a quest to find religion, listing the addresses of various houses of worship in Los Angeles, California: the Right Road Ministry, the Armenian Brotherhood Bible Church, the Iglesia Evangelica Rey de Reyes y Señor y Señores, the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star and Kingdom of God in Faith, the Sweet Hour of Prayer Mission, St. Innocent Orthodox and Jesus in Delight and so on. It ends with Eleanor saying that she finally called up with the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry at 323-221-7625. Several message boards detail Fiery Furnaces fans’ failed attempts to call this number. A quick Web search informed me that the actual number for the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry is 323-221-6725.

PLAY’S AT THIRD

While Eleanor’s voice is striking—like a blunt-edged Nico, a more lilting Patti Smith—her stage presence is what ties everything together. Rarely flamboyant in dress, she relies on other elements of intensity to grab the listener, such as highly concentrated eye contact and severely controlled movements.

“(It’s from) years in front of the mirror, dancing around to Led Zeppelin, trying to re-enact ‘In My Time of Dying’ over and over again in some strange way,” she explains. “I don’t know who I was pretending to be—not Robert Plant, not myself.”

Matthew thinks it stems back to her softball days.

“It’s from saying (in a tough, Brooklyn “accent” holding up two fingers): ‘OK, two outs.’”

“Oh yeah!” Eleanor laughs. “Being onstage is just like being behind the plate. You know, I have to stand up every once in a while, I address the audience, like when you have to tell the players how many outs there are, where to make the next play.”

Matthew continues in the same accent from before: “Play’s at third. Play’s at third.”

Eleanor equates the feeling of being onstage in front of thousands with being at bat, in front of a few family members and friends. It sounds kind of ridiculous at first, but then not, because it’s … true.

“When I used to play softball, I’d pretty much have the same feeling. I’d be a little bit nervous, going up to bat. It’s pretty much the exact same … at big games, I can remember going up to bat and thinking, ‘People are watching me.’”

Matthew is loving the direction our conversation is headed. He gets to tease his little sister, but an overriding sense of pride also rings clear: “OK people, this song’s called, ‘Two Outs, Play’s at Third.’”

“It’s just fun to play catch,” Eleanor continues. “I could do it for hours, just throw pop-ups, grounders …”

BASES ARE LOADED

Eleanor had never been in a band before the Fiery Furnaces so she didn’t have a lot of practice “except in my own private, imagined pretend time, which I did a lot of, which I think a lot of people do a lot of, but no one really talks about.”

Matthew is her only brother, and when he went to college (the started the band when they were both done with school), she had the house to herself from the age of 14. “My mom would be working, and I’d have three hours where I could be alone at home, playing music really loud, pretending to drink vodka drinks. I’d have Sprite with ice and I’d cut pencils to make them look like cigarettes, and I’d pretend to drink and smoke.”

Matthew, incredulously: “You ‘pretended’ to drink and smoke when you were 14?”

Eleanor, sheepishly: “Well, I drank, too, but not in the afternoon after school.”

Matthew, jokingly: “You had to take the edge off with a drink?”

Eleanor, also joking: “No, I saved that for nighttime.”

Matthew took piano lessons, played upright bass and played in a few bands during his youth. “None of them were very good, no offense to my good friends who were in them. It wasn’t their fault. It must have been my fault.”

When Eleanor was about 10, she remembers Matthew, who was 14 or 15 at the time, playing in the basement with two other guys: “It seemed totally normal, and our mom never cared or anything.”

And Matthew returns with: “It is normal. What are you going to do? You’re 13, so you’re not going to play fort anymore. You have to play rock band.”

SLIDING HOME

The siblings’ musical upbringing goes beyond Eleanor’s lip-synching in from of the mirror and Matthew’s basement bands, however. Rehearsing My Choir made the siblings’ family myth public. They set the life of their grandmother, a retiring choir director in Chicago, to music.

“It would make sense to include our grandmother [in our music] because she’s the real music lover in our family,” Eleanor says.

Matthew is quick to correct her: “No, she’s not a music lover. She’s a musician. Our dad is the music lover, but not at all a musician.”

Their father likes classical and 18th century music, Matthew explains.

“The interesting thing about our grandmother is she’s constantly ‘playing’ music, never ‘putting on’ music, which is a very nice attitude.”

Eleanor adds: “She’s picking up the sheet music and playing the piano.”

Matthew says he really appreciates being exposed to that as a kid, “because that was a normal action as much as putting on a record or whatever, being passive about. It was very lucky [that we were] exposed to that kind of thing, where you go and play music to entertain yourself. With music, you go and play it and sing it as opposed to put it on.”

Lately, Eleanor admits that she hasn’t been listening to music as much, or in the same way anyway, saying iPods have changed the way she listens to music. But when pressed, she does say that her boyfriend was in Brazil recently, and he brought her back some records.

But when pressed on details about her boyfriend (Note: It’s been widely reported in headlines bigger than the three-run triple that her and Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kopranos have dated. And, oh, the band appears to have just returned from Brazil), Eleanor is keeping quiet. “He’s just some guy I like,” she says with a warm smile.

I guess that life story is staying private, at least for this inning.

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Venus
Winter 2002

Jean Grae Superstar

The hip-hop MC and producer discusses Eminem, image, and sex-change operations

By Melissa Giannini

Jean Grae looks like someone. I can’t really place it. Is it an elementary school classmate, someone I see on the train everyday, or a kid from a former television family? Janet Jackson in the role of Wilona’s adopted daughter, Penny? No way, that’s not it at all.

She bears no resemblance to Miss Jackson post–Good Times, or any other mainstream pop diva for that matter. The underground hip-hop MC-producer and all-around cool lady is concerned more with expanding her grae matter and maintaining creative control out of respect for herself and her audience. It’s never really crossed her mind to expand her bra size or surgically control her waist measurement to get people to listen.

Jean Grae is not about image—so much so that her anti-image has become an image in itself. Major-label reps of course tried to get her to sex it up a bit. And then there was a rumor going around the offices of big-time indie label, Matador, that she was a man (supposedly, Grae was joking with the label’s owner that they needed to speed up the signing process because she had to pay for the “operation.”)

“Apparently, he took it to heart,” Grae laughs. “Which is stupid. So yeah, they never wanted me to get sexy [like some other labels]. They just thought I was a man. Which is that much better.”

Matador didn’t end up signing Grae. She put out her first full-length, Attack of the Attacking Things on micro-mini indie Third Earth Music. Frustration with not getting signed inspired some of the sharpest rhymes and tightest tracks on the record: “They still want chicks with tits and ass out / My respect is worth more than your advance cash out.” If the label heads heard these songs, she might’ve had more luck. Then again, probably not. She’s got a definite underground sound and attitude—a smooth funky flow over skittish beats and a mouth full of no-hold-back poetry: “And a big f*** you to bitch Chris Lombardi at Matador / And every A&R that turned me down / Props to kids who stayed loyal since “Baseball” dropped / And copped the underground / See, the barrel was facing me / Now I’ve turned the gun around / And it’s got unlimited ammunition / I dare you to question.”

Born to exiled South African jazz musicians, Grae grew up in New York and was a vocal major at the High School of Performing Arts. She also developed a love for writing and production and studied music business at New York University. After a semester, she dropped out of the classroom and hopped into the field. Since then, she’s emceed and produced with Natural Resource, produced singles for Pumpkinhead and The Bad Seed and worked with The Herbaliser. She’s provided countless cameos, including a track on Mumia 911, Apani B Fly’s Estragen, and Mr. Len’s Pity the Fool, which included the disturbing and brilliant “Taco Day,” a track that inspired more than a few “female Eminem” references. Now in her mid-20s, she’s released her first self-written and –produced full-length and has plenty more in the works.

There aren’t too many women doing what you’re doing right now, at least independently. Is it a lonely place to be, or do you think it’s changing?
I definitely think that on the underground scene, there are a lot of females, such as the Anomalies and Apani, who are really trying to push for a change in the music industry. But as far as mainstream goes, it’s hard to break through, not because of the audience is ready for, but pretty much what the label is willing to invest their money into. They’re still into an image and a “sex sells” sort of thing, so it’s a little more difficult. I’m just thankful that I’ve been getting the love from the media that I have been, for doing a record with no budget on a label that nobody’s heard of and being able to compete with people who have million-dollar budgets. And I don’t necessarily even think of it as a female issue, but just almost a change in music coming around. People are starting to be like, OK, there’s got to be something else out there other than what the media has been force-feeding them. I think the doors are definitely opening, especially to underground artists right now.

You’ve said before that you don’t like being called out as a female MC or producer—even to the point that you’ve said you’re a woman second.
It’s not that I’m a woman second. It’s very obvious in the way that I approach the music. I’d like to be promoted as an artist first more than anything. Definitely, I wouldn’t say I’m more of a feminist. I would say I’m more for people being themselves, being individuals, and pushing their creativity first. I think that’s important. I think that a lot of young female artists coming up, especially in the mainstream, it’s just the same thing over and over again—a pretty face, but really, what’s behind it? I think if we’re going to push ourselves as female artists, then we have to do it in the right way.

You’ve put out songs before under names that are non-gender-specific (What? What?, Run Run Shaw). And Jean is still kind of ambiguous because spelled differently, Gene, it’s a male name. But there are female associations with it, specifically, the X-Men character, Jean Grey. Do you think you’ve reached a point where your skill has been established and you don’t need those names anymore to get people to listen without immediately “genderizing” you?
You know, I never even really thought of it like that. I didn’t know I was. When I did What? What?, I didn’t even think of it. That’s very interesting. It was kind of just where I was at the moment. And Jean Grae, it’s the X-Men character, so I don’t know. That’s a very interesting question. I’ve never been asked that before. Good work.

Even Grae has somewhat ambiguous connotations. As a color, it’s not black or white. It’s kind of blurred.
I didn’t want to have a name that was Miss something and obviously, I’m not little, so there’s no Lil’ Grae. Actually, the first name I had was a DJ name I used, Cleopatra Jones. I never really thought of it as if I were being ambiguous with the name. That’s very interesting. I’m going to think about that later on today.

How are you liking the independent route so far? Are you doing it again with the next record?
I’m guessing it’s going to be independent, because no major has stepped up to the table as of yet. It would be nice to have something that had a little more financial backing, but for right now, having the creative control is beautiful. I can do what I want. And I know that there’s a definite fan base who’s gonna go pick it up. If we don’t have the money for video budgets and everything like that, that’s fine. The first album I don’t think was necessarily radio-friendly, but then again what’s radio-friendly is changing from day to day now. So yeah, the next release is probably going to be pretty much as independent. I’m actually working on it right now. I’m trying to get it out by December, January.

Is that the one called Boo This Woman?
That’s actually the third one. The second one, I’ve decided to work with a production company called Magic Fingers. I wanted to step away from doing producing and everything and focus on the writing. It’s kind of like the one-and-a-half record. It’s just going through a group of producers that are incredible, and they’ve all got a different sound. This one is Involuntary Inebriation.

How did you get into the space to write and record “God’s Gift” (a song on Attack told through the perspective of a male playa)?
I think “God’s Gift” took the least time to write. Masta Ace had given me a tape with some beats on it and I went through them and picked three of them and I kept listening to that one. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I usually don’t have an idea until I start writing, and as soon as I started writing, it came out from that perspective and it was so easy to write that way. I think it’s a lot easier for me to jump out of my own skin and put myself in another character and write from that perspective.

Last year, Tori Amos put out a record of covers written by men. There’s a pretty chilling one of the Eminem song where he raps about killing his wife. Have you heard it?
I heard about it, but I’ve never heard it.

What do you think of being called a female Eminem?
I’ve heard that before. I’m flattered. At least it’s not the female MC Hammer. It’s cool. ’Cause who wants to be that? But I think the only similarity possibly is that a lot of lyricists aren’t really focused on doing concepts and telling stories anymore. I think he would be the No. 1 person to point out as, “all right, he’s doing conceptual things and she’s doing conceptual things.” Sometimes I do tend to get a little violent with the concepts. But it’s not necessarily me. It’s just telling a story. I’m an Eminem fan, so it’s flattering.

Like on “Taco Day” (where Grae tells the story of a prom queen on a murder spree)?
Yes. That was the big female-Eminem song. But I wasn’t trying to copy him or do it in any way. It was just the way it came out. That song is interesting because I wasn’t even jumping out of my perspective (as a woman), but I was rhyming out of voice and everything and trying to put myself as far into the character as I could.

But unlike Eminem, your overall message is pretty positive. Who are you trying to speak to?
There are certain songs on the album that are definitely directed to certain groups. I think “Block Party” is toward a young audience and not necessarily black, for lack of a better word, people of color. Not even just in America, just worldwide. We’re at a point where things have gotten extremely stagnant and everybody seems to be settling for what they’ve got and I think we’re missing out on a lot of opportunity. I know that my audience is a mainly white audience. And I definitely appreciate the fans and everything, not to take anything away from that. But I think it’s important that if I have an ability to have a captive audience of people who listen, why not say something positive to these kids? Nobody else is. And if they are, it’s kind of getting lost in the other messages that are put out there. It would be nice if I could widen my audience to include them because they kind of don’t know I exist. It’s not necessarily their fault. But I think a lot of stuff on this album is directed to a younger black urban community.

So what’s next? The one-and-a-half album, Boo This Woman. Anything else? I heard something about you working with Mr. Len again on a project called Brickface and Stucco.
Oh yeah, Brickface and Stucco, myself and Mr. Len. We should probably try and start working on that. Thank you for reminding me. Myself and MURS from Living Legends are also trying to work out doing an album, but it’s difficult because we’re on different coasts. I think we’re really going to try to find a time that we’re both traveling. And I guess whenever we can get it done, we’ll get it done. The next single should be coming out … and then a little white label in between. And hopefully an EP before the album.

Wow
I know. I’m crazy to be doing too many things. But I’m not running out of music anytime soon, so why not?