It’s the basic, fundamental, spiritual truth: Be good to each other, love someone for more than what they look like on the outside, feel the energy of the earth-and be happy to be alive, knowing that being alive isn’t easy but it’s a journey. Not religious, just how I feel things work. The common thread in all the songs is a very present expression of my spiritual philosophies. We were all shocked by how much we got finished in Turkey in just five days. We ended up taking those to Turkey, and bringing them back with a whole lot done. It was that feeling when you’re not writing songs to any end other than the desire to write songs. We went somewhere by the water and just wrote.

My most frequent collaborator, Shannon Sanders, who wrote songs on my first album, ended up producing and writing songs for all my subsequent albums. I’m not there anymore, so songs like that didn’t resonate. It wasn’t like, “Let me pull some things out of the vault and polish them off.” I wasn’t in that place of healing from heartbreak or struggling with my empowerment.

I met a pianist in Hawaii named Michael Ruff who has a very special way of working chords-it’s mystical and dreamy.įor me, the most remarkable thing about this album is that I really started a new album. There are other songs that are piano-driven. I have some songs that are just guitar, vocal and a bit of beat-really simple. That’s the kind of music that really touches my soul. What I really love is real simple, quiet, acoustic music. I hear people say, “What is that? Is that strings?” You can hear it’s a string section, but to our Western way of hearing music, we never hear a whole orchestra of people sliding notes, so it sounds like a new instrument. You’ll hear Turkish elements in particular, but it’s Middle Eastern–style inside a Western musical approach. The record has Middle Eastern–style string arrangements, live Middle Eastern percussion, and Middle Eastern approaches to woodwinds and brass. Her exact words were, “Anything my India is doing, I’m in.” So I quickly flew to Turkey, and she had all of Turkey’s most sought-after musicians in her studio. When the album I was working on, Open Door, fell through-and I don’t know if it’s ever going to come out-I called and told her I was working on a new album. She always said if I ever needed anything, or if I ever wanted to do music with her, all I had to do was ask. I met a Turkish singer, Sezen Aksu, walking downtown in the Village. My goal when I decided to do that was, “I’m going to do this now, but I’m going from here based on the experiences I have.” I was thinking somebody was supposed to give me my freedom, but really I needed to just take it.Īfter deciding to retire and then realizing that I didn’t want to retire, I really wanted to pursue my career on my own terms. It’s something I’ve always done lyrically, but have never been given the freedom to do with the production. My goal from the beginning-even before I finished my first album-was to bring my life experiences to my music. The artist talked with us from NYC about traveling, growing up, and how-when all else fails-you can always look to Oprah for advice. To feel unexpressed like that made me sick.” Produced primarily by longtime collaborator Shannon Sanders, SongVersation reflects India.Arie’s life experiences. “It’s in me all the time, and not being able to put it in my music is something I never want to have to feel again. “I just wanted to do what I love, and those are my main things,” says Arie, 37. But rather than pack it in, she re-evaluated. “But that type of production wasn’t what gave me chills or made me want to dance.”Īrie recorded an Israeli-influenced album, Open Door, only to shelve the project.

“People I was working with always wanted me to do production that would get played on black radio,” she says. Still, she wasn’t happy with the direction her albums had taken. For more than a decade, she’s been creating R&B-inflected pop albums, selling 10 million records in the process. But the four-time Grammy winner has had a lot of practice. I’m still laughing at that one.” That kind of speed hardly sounds like the process of a woman who had been planning retirement only three years earlier. But I told myself that’s what I needed to do-and I did it.

“I had no idea I could make an album in six months,” says India.Arie of her fifth studio project, SongVersation. The distinctive artist defines success-and her music-in her own terms

India arie songs 2013