SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER, 2020
VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER THREE
BRIAN BLADE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
GIGI GRYCE
(May 16-22)
CLARK TERRY
(May 23-29)
BRANFORD MARSALIS
(May 30-June 5)
ART FARMER
(June 6-12)
FATS NAVARRO
(June 13-19)
BILLY HIGGINS
(June 20-26)
HANK MOBLEY
(June 27-July 3)
RAPHAEL SAADIQ
(July 4-10)
INDIA.ARIE
(July 11-17)
JOHN CLAYTON
(July 18-24)
MARCUS MILLER
(July 25-31)
JAMES P. JOHNSON
(August 1-7)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/indiaarie-mn0000084446/biography
India.Arie is among a small class of post-millennial R&B artists more likely to cite and recall the likes of Bill Withers and Roberta Flack than almost any given artist playlisted by urban contemporary radio stations. Arie entered with Acoustic Soul
(2001), an album that carried on the tradition of introspective,
additive-resistant singer/songwriter soul. Instantly embraced
commercially, critically, and within the music industry, it was a Top
Ten, multi-platinum success, and led to nominations in seven Grammy
categories, including all of the big four: Record of the Year, Song of
the Year, Album of the Year, and Best New Artist. Although Arie
has placed eight singles on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop chart, she's
an album artist through and through. Four subsequent LPs, including the
Grammy-winning Voyage to India (2002) and the number one Testimony, Vol. 1: Life & Relationship (2007), all went Top Ten, with Arie
making subtle refinements to her writing, shaking up her sound with
African, Turkish, and contemporary country musicians instead of seeking
hits with hot rappers. After five proper albums with major labels, Arie went independent with the new age crossover SongVersation: Medicine EP (2017), and followed it a couple years later with Worthy (2019).
Born in Denver to parents from Memphis and Detroit, India Arie Simpson
always had music in her life. Her family moved to Atlanta when she was
13, and after high school she began playing guitar with her mother's
encouragement. Involvement in the Atlanta music scene led to the
formation of an artist's collective called Groovement and an independent
label, EarthShare, which released a compilation featuring the first
songs credited to India.Arie. A second-stage slot on the 1998 Lilith Fair tour garnered interest from major labels, including Motown, which signed Arie
after guaranteeing her artistic control. Heralded with "Video," a
proudly individualist and anti-materialistic first single that
eventually neared the pop Top 40, Acoustic Soul
was released in March 2001 and entered the Billboard 200 at number ten
on its way to multi-platinum certification. A slew of Grammy nominations
ensued. "Video" was up for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best
Female R&B Vocal Performance, and Best R&B Song. The parent
release was nominated for Best R&B Album and Best Album. Arie herself was a Best New Artist nominee.
Wasting no time, Arie followed up in September 2002 with the number six entry Voyage to India,
featuring "Little Things" -- a number 89 pop hit that lyrically
referenced some of the artist's vintage favorites while subtly
interpolating Rufus & Chaka Khan's "Hollywood." The song won that year's Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance, while Voyage to India took the award for Best R&B Album. In June 2006, Testimony, Vol. 1: Life & Relationship was released as Arie's third album, a soul-searching post-breakup set of forgiveness and closure. Among the guests were Rascal Flatts, not the only indication that Arie was inspired by contemporary country music. The album topped the R&B/hip-hop and Billboard 200 charts, leading to Arie's
third consecutive nomination for Best R&B Album, along with a pair
of nominations for the standout single "I Am Not My Hair." Arie closed out the decade on Universal Republic with the more outward-looking Testimony, Vol. 2: Love & Politics,
a number three entry upon its February 2009 release. As with each one
of her previous LPs, it was nominated for Best R&B Album. A cover of
Sade's "Pearls," featuring Ivory Coast singer Dobet Gnahoré, went over particularly well, winning that year's Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance. Arie subsequently took part in Herbie Hancock's The Imagine Project and won another Grammy -- for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals -- as one of the featured musicians on its cover of John Lennon's "Imagine."
After a brief hiatus from the industry, Arie returned to Motown, through which she released SongVersation in June 2013. Gently uplifting, with input from a group of Turkish musicians including the Istanbul Strings, it became her fifth consecutive Top Ten album. Arie went on to perform with Stevie Wonder during the Motown giant's Songs in the Key of Life tour and, in 2015, teamed up with another legend, the Crusaders' Joe Sample, for the holiday release Christmas with Friends.
Newly independent and inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Arie's next solo release was the 2016 single "Breathe," which appeared the following June on the SongVersation: Medicine EP. Its stronger emphasis on wellness, combined with a uniformly soft, stripped-down sound, was acknowledged with a Grammy nomination in the category of Best New Age Album. Arie continued to draw from sounds across the globe with her sixth proper full-length, Worthy, released in February 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/arts/a-soul-singer-with-a-vision-of-beauty.html
India Arie is a four-time Grammy award-winning singer, songwriter, actress, and record producer. She has sold over 10 million records worldwide.
Arie was born in Denver, Colorado on October 3, 1975 to parents Joyce and Ralph Simpson. When she was 13, her parents divorced and Arie moved with her mother and siblings to Atlanta, Georgia. When she got to Atlanta, Arie began to play guitar. Arie went on to also play the saxophone, baritone clarinet, French horn, and trumpet. Arie attended Savannah College of Arts and Design where she studied jewelry design. She would eventually give this up to focus her attention on music.
Collaborating with other local artists in Atlanta, Arie and the artists eventually formed the music group Groovement. The group was very successful, but in 1999, Arie was discovered by and signed a deal with Motown records in Los Angeles, California. There at the age of 24 she began her career as a solo artist.
Arie is famous for writing songs about female empowerment and dismissing the societal standards of beauty. Arie’s debut album, Acoustic Soul, was released in 2001 and earned her seven Grammy nominations. The album was also certified double platinum by the Music Industry Association of America (RIAA).
In 2002, Arie released her second album, Voyage to India. It was certified platinum by the RIAA and it won Best R&BAlbum at the 2003 Grammy Awards. Arie’s success continued with her albums Testimony: Vol 1, Life and Relationship and Testimony: Vol 2, Love and Politics released in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Her album, Testimony: Vol 2 debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 list. Arie took a few years off from making music and in 2013, she released her fifth album, Songversation. Arie released a collaborative album with musician Joe Sample called Christmas with Friends in 2015. In 2016, she released a song called “Breathe” that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of Eric Garner. In 2017, Arie released her first EP called Songversation: Medicine.
Arie has four Grammy awards and 21 Grammy nominations. She also has two BET awards, four NAACP Image awards, and has been nominated for five Soul Train music awards.
https://www.unity.org/publications/unity-magazine/articles/listening-%E2%80%A6-indiaarie-sound-affects
The controversy? The single's artwork. On it the 37-year-old poses with her tresses in a towering head wrap, legs peeking from a short dress, and her skin, possibly glistening from the song's titular product, glowing.
THIS is how you know you've struck a chord: Oprah Winfrey leans into you on her nationally syndicated television show, squeezes your arm and says, "We love that song. Not only do we love that song, we love you for writing that song. We needed that song."
That song is "Video," the first single from India.Arie's Motown debut, "Acoustic Soul." Its success has pushed album sales past 700,000 and landed India.Arie the opening slot on Sade's comeback tour.
More importantly, it has struck a nerve with women by boldly rejecting the exaggerated, and for most people, unattainable standards of beauty propagated by the media (it was inspired by some male friends gawking over women in a music video). Given her own well-documented history of physical malleability, it's easy to see why Winfrey would tap into this lilting anthem of self-empowerment and self-love.
"When I look in the mirror and the only one there is me/ every freckle on my face is where it's supposed to be/ and I know my Creator didn't make no mistakes on me/ my feet, my thighs, my lips, my eyes, I'm loving what I see."
Later, India.Arie adds, "Don't need your silicone, I prefer my own," and on the chorus, summarizes it all this way: "I'm not your average girl from the video/ and I ain't built like a supermodel/ but I've learned to love myself unconditionally/ because I am a queen."
"Video" is the kind of song that inspires feedback from stars like Winfrey as well as common folk who encounter its creator on the street back home in Atlanta. It offers the kind of inspiration she herself has found in many songs over the years.
"For me, it validates the idea that music can help and mean something," says the 25-year-old singer, who put the " . " in her name for purely artistic reasons. "For a long time, I felt idealistic for thinking that. I always loved music, but I didn't know if I could be the kind of artist that makes a difference. Even though I felt music and would get chills and cry, and certain songs just really meant a lot to me, that could just be me, being overly emotional or whatever.
"But this proves to me that music can really, really, really help people in a tangible way, that it can make a difference to people who might not love music as much as I do, people who don't make music, but people who just might have the same insecurities that I do."
India.Arie overcame enough insecurity to name-check herself on the chorus to "Video," but it wasn't done in the boastful, often overbearing manner of rap, but rather in the soulful tradition of Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" and Curtis Mayfield's "We're a Winner." The album's success has put the singer in good company with Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Angie Stone, Sunshine Anderson and Macy Gray, a powerful sisterhood responsible for some of the smartest, strongest music in recent times.
Five years ago, however, India.Arie had designs on a career in jewelry, not music.
She was born in Denver and raised mostly in Atlanta after her parents divorced -- dad is Ralph Simpson, an American Basketball Association All-Star who later played with the NBA's Denver Nuggets, and mom is a fashion designer who goes simply by the name Simpson. India.Arie always wrote (short stories and journal entries) and played music (saxophone, French horn and recorder in the school band), as well as singing in the choir, where her voice was buried in the ensemble.
But until college, "I never put all of it together."
That happened at Savannah College of Art and Design, where India.Arie had gone to study jewelry-making after gravitating to the craft in the 10th grade in Denver (she also spent her senior year there because of Denver's excellent public school system). She was, she says, tired of "band teachers, sheet music and all that stuff . . . and jewelry was something that I'd always loved. I would stare at it the same way I would stare at instruments. My mom would have fashion shows and I would be out there trying to polish the bracelets."
Making jewelry requires the right tools, and it was at college that India.Arie finally found the one that would allow her to craft music -- an acoustic guitar, the first instrument she could play and sing with. Then she started searching for a sound, sifting through myriad, and diverse, influences.
"In Denver, all we really had was pop radio, so I grew up on all that late '70s pop stuff -- Billy Joel, James Taylor, Lionel Richie, Elton John, Steve Miller and Toto. Great love songs and really hooky and melodic music -- I have all of that stuff in my heart. That's why I have a good idea of what a song is, as opposed to a poem that you sing."
There were also '90s singer-songwriters like Oleta Adams and the wise ancestors India.Arie honors on her album, folks like Nina Simone, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, Roberta Flack and Motown cornerstones Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder (inspiration for the album's bonus track, "Wonderful").
Back in Atlanta, she became part of the arts collective Groovement/Earthseed, played assorted coffee houses and recorded a hard-to-find solo acoustic album ("I made it with a microphone and eight-track in my bathroom and duplicated it on tape," she says of the 1997 effort). India.Arie also appeared on an Earthseed compilation CD, where her rich, smoky alto caught the attention of Lilith Fair talent scouts. Subsequent appearances on second-stages at a couple of Fairs caught the ear of Motown Records, which has been in the forefront of the late '90s neo-soul movement with D'Angelo and Erykah Badu.
It would take almost two years for the Motown connection to produce "Acoustic Soul." The delay, according to India.Arie, was her responsibility as she tried to figure out the transition from solo act to album artist. All the songs were written on guitar and gradually fleshed out with programmed drums and other supple touches.
"When I decided to go to Motown, I knew that I was going to be experimenting with different sounds," she says. "I thought it was going to be a lot quicker than it was, that I would get session players, have them play and then my album would be done. But after I did that and was listening back to it, it wasn't what I wanted. All the stuff I went through as far as trying things, experimenting and taking so long was really, really all on me. Motown wasn't patient, they were like, hurry up! But when we'd listen to it, they didn't like it either so it was: Let's keep trying."
"I learned so much at the tail end of recording my album," she adds. "I recorded over half of it in the last four months after working on the other part of it for a year!"
What finally emerged was a stripped-down, organic sound that melded classic soul tradition with contemporary elements, including subtle hip-hop rhythms, with uplifting love songs like "I See God in You" and "Brown Skin" and testaments to self-discovery and centeredness like "Strength, Courage and Wisdom" and "Back to the Middle."
And India.Arie has no problem distinguishing between the artificial standards of beauty she decries in "Video" and the earthy fashion sensibility she displays in the video for "Video," where she sings "no matter what I'm wearing I will always be India.Arie."
That's because her mom, Simpson, is still in her corner, creating her clothes, doing her styling.
"It's really special to me," says the proud daughter. "If I don't have the right clothes, I feel weird walking out, I don't feel comfortable in what I have on. I have different colors that I want to wear on different days because it makes me feel different . . . and I like to do a lot of weird stuff, so just to have my mom able to make my clothes means a lot.
"But what means even more is that she taught me everything I know about singing. When I have a new song, I can play it for her -- she has a very critical and deep expertise in music. Music lives in my mother -- she's played in bands in Detroit and toured and did the whole thing. So I have somebody who's done it all to just talk to. And we write songs together," including "Nature" on "Acoustic Soul" and "Can I Walk With You," a snippet of which can be heard on the critically acclaimed soundtrack to Spike Lee's "Bamboozled."
Lee was so impressed with India.Arie that he included five snippets of songs from her debut on his soundtrack album six months before its release. Next week, she'll be featured dueting with John Mellencamp on "Peaceful World," the first single from his new album, and she's been fielding calls from such interested parties as Kenny Loggins, Pink and Cassandra Wilson, who all want to tap into India.Arie's eclectic soul.
INDIA.ARIE -- Appearing Friday with Sade at Nissan Pavilion. * To hear a free Sound Bite from India.Arie, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000 and press 8124. (Prince William residents, call 690-4110.)
India.Arie's hit, "Video," struck a chord with its self-empowering lyrics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_Arie
India Arie Simpson (born October 3, 1975), also known as India.Arie (sometimes styled as india.arie), is an American singer and songwriter.[1] She has sold over 3.3 million records in the US and 10 million worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards from her 23 nominations, including Best R&B Album.[2]
After Simpson's parents divorced, her mother moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia when India was 13.[4] Simpson had taken up a succession of musical instruments throughout her schooling in Denver, but her interest in the guitar while attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, led to a personal revelation about songwriting and performing. "When I started tapping into my own sensitivity, I started to understand people better. It was a direct result of writing songs", she said at the press release of her debut album, Acoustic Soul.[7]
Co-founding the Atlanta-based independent music collective Groovement EarthShare (Groovement was the collective artists' name and EarthShare was their independent label name), her one-song turn on a locally released compilation led to a second-stage gig at the 1998 Lilith Fair. In 1999, a Universal/Motown music scout signed her and made an introduction to former Motown CEO Kedar Massenburg. Arie resides in New York, NY.
Named to Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul100 list of visionaries and influential leaders,[8] India.Arie performed Songversation during 2017 motivational cruises.[9]
Arie performed a duet with rock singer-guitarist John Mellencamp on the song "Peaceful World" for his 2001 album Cuttin' Heads. While Arie and the album were nominated for seven Grammy awards in 2002, they won no awards, losing in five of seven categories to Alicia Keys. She closed the ceremony with a performance of her song "Video". Arie performed a duet with jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on the song "Just Another Parade" for her 2002 album Belly of the Sun.
Arie followed the success of her debut on September 24, 2002 with the release of Voyage to India.[16] It debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 with first week sales of 109,000 copies[17] and topped the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums,[17] with the RIAA certifying it Platinum.[18] At the 2003 Grammy Awards, it won Best R&B Album, and the single "Little Things" won Best Urban/Alternative Performance.[19] The song "Get It Together" was featured on many film soundtracks including Brown Sugar (2002) and Shark Tale (2004).[20][21]
On September 12, 2005, Arie performed "Just 4 2day", a song written for her appearance on the debut of The Tyra Banks Show.[22] She also performed "What About the Child", a song that did not air but was made available as a one-dollar Internet download to support child victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.[23] Arie is also featured on Stevie Wonder's album A Time to Love, released on October 18, 2005. Arie and Wonder duet on the title track "A Time to Love", written by Arie, which was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals at the 2006 Grammy Awards. Three years earlier, their rendition of Mel Tormé's 1944 classic "The Christmas Song", recorded for the holiday TV commercial for retailer Target, had been nominated for the same category, making it the first song created and financed exclusively for a commercial to be nominated for a Grammy Award.[24]
The first-week sales of Arie's album Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship,
161,000 copies, are her best sales week to date. The album was
certified gold in August 2006, selling 730,000 in US and 1,300,000
worldwide. "I Am Not My Hair", a collaboration with Akon, was the most successful release from Testimony: Vol. 1., reaching the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 at #97 and the UK Singles Chart at #65. On the April 16, 2007 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show entitled "After Imus: Now What?", Arie guest-starred as a panelist. Arie performed a duet with singer Anthony David for his song "Words" for his 2008 album Acey Duecy.
Her next album, Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics was released on Tuesday, February 10, 2009. It debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, and No. 2 on the R&B chart. Within this CD, Arie collaborated with such artists as Sezen Aksu, Keb Mo, Gramps Morgan and Musiq Soulchild to fulfill her self-proclaimed desire to "do projects with people who are making music that is meaningful, with a lot of integrity and a lot of sonic diversity". Arie also identified this CD as her first to write and sing songs without worrying about public opinion after a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. The album was her first produced and released after her departure from Motown to Universal Records.[25] Arie performed "Video" with British singer Adele at the 2009 VH1 Divas. Arie is one of over 70 artists singing on "We Are the World: 25 for Haiti", a charity single in aid of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Arie contributed vocals to "Imagine" for the 2010 Herbie Hancock album, The Imagine Project along with Seal, P!nk, Jeff Beck, Konono N°1, Oumou Sangare and others.[26]
In the fall of 2010, she was a featured guest vocalist on Carlos Santana's version of The Beatles classic song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from his album Guitar Heaven. The song also features Yo-Yo Ma on cello.
In September 2012, she featured in a campaign called "30 Songs/30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book.[27]
In March 2013, it was announced that Arie was working on her upcoming fifth studio album, Songversation, which was released on June 25, 2013. The first single of the album, "6th Avenue", was released on iTunes on November 4, 2012; it was produced by India Arie and Israeli musician Idan Raichel. The second single "Cocoa Butter" was released on iTunes on April 9, 2013.[28][29][30][31]
In 2015, she released a collaborative album with musician Joe Sample titled Christmas with Friends.[32]
In July 2016, she premiered her new single "Breathe" inspired by the Black Lives Matter Movement, especially Eric Garner's last words. She also announced a new album titled Worthy was in the works.[33] She performed the single on the Soul Train Awards with host Erykah Badu in November.[34]
In June 2017, she announced the release of her first EP SongVersation: Medicine on June 30.[35][36] It was preceded by the single "Breathe" and the new single "I Am Light" which was originally included on her 2013 Songversation album. She expressed that the EP was "made to be listened to in a quiet time, prayer, meditation, Yoga. My wish is that these songs bring softness, clarity, calm, and inspiration."[37]
In September 2018, she premiered her new single "That Magic". The song serves as the lead single from her sixth studio album titled Worthy which was released on February 15, 2019.[38][39]
The Grammy Award is an honor awarded by The Recording Academy to recognize outstanding achievement in the mainly English-language music industry. Arie has won four Grammy awards from twenty-three nominations.[40]
"On A Spiritual And Emotional Journey – India.Arie And Her Music". EF News International. Archived from the original on 2011-11-08. Retrieved 2011-10-28.
"Grammy Winner India Arie is coming to Nigeria in June". Bellanaija.com. Retrieved 2018-12-02.
"The soul of a songwriter: India.Arie talks about reading, writing and stoking her creative fires". Black Issues Book Review. September–October 2004. Archived from the original on 2005-01-29. Retrieved 2007-05-05.
"India.Arie MTV biography". MTV. Archived from the original on 2007-10-19. Retrieved 2007-10-15.
"India.Arie Ancestry Reveal". YouTube.com. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
"Growing Interest in DNA-Based Genetic Testing Among African American with Historic Election of President Elect Barack Obama". Prweb.com. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
"About the Performer: India.Arie". laphil.com. Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. Retrieved 4 February 2018.
"Meet the SuperSoul100: The World's Biggest Trailblazers in One Room". O Magazine. 1 Aug 2016. Retrieved 5 Jul 2018.
Caslin, Yvette (16 Aug 2017). "Oprah and friends set sail this summer". rollingout.com. Retrieved 5 Jul 2018.
Duffy, John. "Acoustic Soul – India.Arie". Allmusic. Retrieved on 2009-08-12.
"RIAA – Gold & Platinum – December 13, 2010: Acoustic Soul certified awards". Recording Industry Association of America. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved December 13, 2010.
"British Phonographic Industry search results". British Phonographic Industry. Archived from the original on September 24, 2009. Retrieved December 13, 2010.
"Gold & Platinum Certifications". Music Canada. Archived from the original on February 22, 2014. Retrieved July 5, 2013.
"India.Arie Album & Song Chart History – Hot 100". Billboard. Retrieved December 13, 2010.
Roberts, David. Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums. Guinness World Records Ltd 17th edition (2004), p. 29 ISBN 0-85112-199-3
"India.Arie – Voyage To India". Discogs.com.
"Voyage to India - India.Arie". Billboard.com.
"Little Things". SuperiorPics.com.
"India Arie – Voyage To India CD". CDUniverse.com.
"Soundtracks for Brown Sugar (2002)". IMDb.com.
"Soundtracks for Shark Tale (2004)". IMDb.com.
"Telepictures Productions". Tyrashow.warnerbros.com. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
"Tyra Banks & India.Arie". iAmplify. December 8, 2005. Retrieved 2007-03-06.
"Brian McKnight, Marc Anthony & More On Stevie Wonder Tribute Collection". Spotlight on R&B. February 9, 2003. Retrieved 2007-06-01.
Lewis, Pete. "India.Arie: Sweet, Sweet Soul Music." Bluesandsoul.com. Issue 1024. 3 November 2009
"The Imagine Project". All About Jazz. 2010-06-21. Retrieved 2010-11-29.
"30 Songs / 30 Days for Half the Sky | Half The Sky". Halftheskymovement.org. 2012-08-30. Archived from the original on 2012-10-14. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
Cooper, Charlene. (2013-03-22) Must-Listen: Hear India Arie's New Song, 'Cocoa Butter'. Essence.com. Retrieved on 2013-06-25.
India.Arie to Release "SongVersation" on June 25 @ARTISTdirect. Artistdirect.com. Retrieved on 2013-06-25.
iTunes – Music – Cocoa Butter – Single by India.Arie Archived 2013-04-30 at the Wayback Machine. Itunes.apple.com (2013-04-09). Retrieved on 2013-06-25.
iTunes – Music – 6th Avenue – Single by India.Arie. Itunes.apple.com (2012-11-04). Retrieved on 2013-06-25.
"India.Arie Spends 'Christmas With Friends' Joe Sample, Tori Kelly, Brandy & More". Billboard.com. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
"@SylviaObell". Essence.com. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
"Soul Train Awards Performance: India.Arie and Erykah Badu Are Queens Of Soul and Sass". Bet.com. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
"India Arie's 'SongVersation: Medicine' EP Drops This Week". Parlemag.com. 25 June 2017. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
"SongVersation: Medicine". Amazon.com. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
Malkin, John (31 October 2017). "Music Review: Songversation: Medicine". spiritualityhealth.com. Retrieved 4 February 2018.
India.Arie (14 September 2018). "ELATED!
Freaking. ELATED! Thank you all for all this LOVE! SO much more to
come! #thatmagic #worthy #iamlight whohooooooooo!!!! I'm right now.
Link in Biopic.twitter.com/HBn16pDg5c". Twitter. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
"New Music: India Arie - That Magic + Announces New Album "Worthy"". YouKnowIGotSoul.com. 15 September 2018. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-right-mindset/202006/singer-indiaarie-offers-hope-during-these-troubling-times
The marvelous India.Arie is an American singer/songwriter who has
sold over 3.3 million records in the United States and 10 million
worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards for her 23 nominations,
including Best R&B album. She made a masterpiece film, "Welcome
Home," to help calm the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The coronavirus has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are an interdependent species, Arie told me. “We were brought up to believe wellness is an individual pursuit, but we must expand our vision from me to we.”
As a wellness practitioner, she insists that our economic, political, and social systems are not well, so our people are not well. In the absence of systems that care for us all, mutual and community care are critical pathways to our collective well-being. In striving for wellness, we must expand our vision from me to we. According to Arie, this unprecedented time is the perfect time to offer wellness, peace, and tranquillity using her music as a vessel for thought-provoking lyrics and mindful meditation.
I had the privilege to sit down with Arie to discuss her ideas on how we can become well in an unwell world and become more connected in a culture ruled by separation. And how it all starts with each one of us by looking inside.
Bryan Robinson: India, I’m excited to talk with you. You’re a phenomenal music artist, but I’d like readers to know about your own personal journey into wellness and some of the things you’re doing to help the nation heal during these extraordinary times we’re living in.
India.Arie: When I got into the music industry, my health was hit hard on all levels—mentally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally. I started looking at my spiritual practices not as a hobby but as tools to make it through life. Now my self-development, wellness, and contemplation are my favorite things to do.
Robinson: Is there a correlation between your personal life and some of things you’re doing now?
Arie: When we talk about what things look like as opposed to what they are, the things I’m doing are about the place I’ve developed to. My career is 20 years old now. There’s part of being a celebrity that you construct and you tell people, “This is India.Arie.” We all have a public face. For me, it was missing many facets of everything I really am.
Robinson: In psychology, we call it the persona.
Arie: That’s right. The thing that makes me feel uncomfortable with the persona is how big it is. Sometimes people stop me and say, “Are you India.Arie?” and I have to think for a second. When I hear that, it sounds like they’re talking about a thing. I’m not a billboard. It’s not anything that hurts my feelings or bothers me. It feels weird.
Robinson: It’s as if you become a product or a thing bigger than life, and people want to be close to you.
Arie: Yes, almost like they tell you what you are, but they’re telling you what you are to them. That persona thing is so flat, missing facets of who you really are. Over the years, it was okay with me if it was what I had to do to get where I wanted to go. But as I grew, I’ve outgrown the ability to squash myself down or diminish my real nature in my public life. I used to be so careful not to offend people or say the right thing. Now when I sing, I let the audience know I’m not perky, just low key. I allow myself to be who I am, fully me.
Robinson: Can you tell me about the Wellness of We?
Arie: The Wellness of We is a joint venture with a longtime best friend because these are the things I’ve always wanted to offer. She’s on this journey I’m on to come out of the closet with all my stuff.
I’m a wellness practitioner, and I’m as much a meditator and writer as I am a singer. If I walk out the door right now, people will call me India.Arie, but they don’t know anything about my writing or meditation practice. I’m ready to come out and be all this stuff in public. I’ve always wanted to be part of anybody’s healing process with my music. That was my goal from the very beginning. Now, I’m ready to be more involved in the conversation, more on the ground with smaller groups of people, experiment with what it means to be in the conversation, not just the music. The Wellness of We is doing the personal practice with me being involved but also with giving people something they can turn to.
Robinson: Your opening up and letting people see more of you is going to help them because many people feel they’re the only ones who feel a certain way which isn’t true.
Arie: My writing taught me that. My first album came out at 25, and I thought there were a lot of things that only I had been through, but when the song came out, I was like, “Everybody feels this way?” Then about 10 years ago I started writing songs where I didn’t hold anything back. I have a song called “One” where I sing everything I believe, my complete spiritual philosophy all in one song. It says everything comes down to love, no matter what religion you are. But I had to work my way up to that level of honesty where I didn’t have to hide things or say them a certain way. So in the last 10 years, I write everything I want to write; I say what I want to say. After I wrote “I Am Light” in 2012 and after four or five years of letting myself be free, really free in my songwriting, I was able to write a song so simple but so true. Now I’m writing for that next level of opening. I learned after writing those songs, nothing changed. Nobody judged me. Every once in a while, three or four people will leave the concert, and I think, Well, I’m glad you left now because we’re about to go deeper. You know how people are about religion. It makes them question their whole thing about themselves.
Robinson: That discomfort is their lizard brain, the fearful survival part of us that gets threatened by new ideas. It’s not a thinking or creative brain. It’s narrow and scared of change. What you’re doing is widening that scope. In a way, you’re an evangelist spreading a message.
Arie: My own personal lesson is that my lizard brain had me thinking it was dangerous to write these songs that kept me thinking at the beginning of my career I couldn’t sing these things. Once I got free of that, every time I sing “One” and the deeper songs, the ones that are expressive, I get a standing ovation. And my lizard brain feels just fine.
Robinson: Does any of your music come from personal adversity?
Arie: All my music comes from personal adversity. People who really listen know because it speaks to them about their own personal adversity. If you just listen to the music, it’s pretty, but you miss it. If you listen to the song you hear a person who is working through things. With the song, “I Am Light,” for somebody to say, “I am not the things my family did,” that alone makes you ask, “What did they do to you? You had to have been there to know to sing that.” So I’m not the voices in my head; I’m not the pieces of the brokenness inside.
Robinson: “I Am Light” is my favorite.
Arie: I have another song called “Get It Together.” The first line says, “One shot to your heart without breaking your skin. No one has the power to hurt you like your Kin.” So what did your family do to you? I have song, “He Heals Me.” What is he healing you from, and who is he? How many he’s have there been that hurt you? It’s all from adversity. I’m not your average girl from your video. I learned to love myself unconditionally. So what were you like before you learned to love yourself unconditionally? For me, I want to heal myself with the music. And if anybody else can get something out of it, then I feel like I’m really blessed to get to do this. How many of us get to help people on a mass scale? I am grateful for it, but it starts with me. And I never know what people are going to think or how they’re going to respond. I just know how to sing my story with a certain depth that other people are able to hear their story, too. It all comes from personal adversity, even the songs that sound like the happiest love songs come from adversity because it’s how I’ve learned to say things you could never say in conversations. What I love about songwriting is that you can write the perfect sentence, and I don’t have to search for the words to speak my perfect, perfect truth. That was a long time coming because I came from a person who wrote songs that had spiritual qualities, but I was afraid to say certain things in my songs. Starting in 2009, I set myself free. “I Am Light” is one of the jewels in that crown to be able to express a deep truth in a simple way is a songwriter’s gold. I was able to go all the way from being afraid to sing a song like that to sing it at the Grammy’s ... I didn’t win that award, but I got a standing ovation. That was a whole other type of win. It felt good to come into my own in that moment in a public form.
Robinson: What message would you want to leave with people struggling with fear, uncertainty, and despair during these extraordinary times?
Arie: I lead an unconventional life. I’ve never been married. I’ve never dated a man I wanted to marry. I don’t have children. I was working for myself by the time I was 25. And what I get to do for work is rare and unique. Sometimes I forget the everyday things people go through. I feel like when we live really busy lives a lot of times we’re not only engaging our responsibilities. But we’re also running from our feelings, pain, or fear. Or whatever that stuff is inside—that loud voice. I think there’s something symbolic about the pandemic mandate to stay inside. It feels like an opportunity to go inside. It doesn’t have to be esoteric where you’re meditating for an hour. Just to go to a place and look at all the stuff you’re afraid of because we know when you look at your shadow, it dissipates more quickly than we think it will. And inside that place where you’re able to look at yourself, your fear, often answers come up. And that’s what we need right now: answers. A lot of that gets tossed around in our brain. If we can put it into our mind and heart and turn and look at ourselves, the answers start to come with little ideas and thoughts. Nobody knows what to do, but we all have that place in ourselves that knows. You have to become acquainted with that part of yourself. It’s hard at first to be quiet when you’ve never been quiet because that’s where all the scary stuff is. But it’s not as scary as you think once you look at it.
Robinson: You are very wise. What you just shared is relevant for everybody, regardless of their circumstances. If people could access the place you’re describing within themselves, everything else comes from that.
Arie: The answers are inside for all of us. And there are certain things nobody can tell you but you. Now that the stakes are so high, you’ve got to find a way to hear yourself.
A Final Word
India.Arie’s online practice, The Wellness Of We, seeks to advance collective well-being in an unwell world. The series features daily practice videos and live conversations with a range of wellness practitioners and advocates from around the country, including Arie herself, for talks designed to advance collective well-being and community care. “Wellness of We” is an 8-day online conversation to advance collective well-being that ran live from May 25 to June 1, 2020. You can watch the 8 sessions at Wellness of We.
India.Arie joins Resiliency 2020 on Zoom September 10, 2020. You can register for the free live-streaming webinar at resiliency2020.com.
https://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/02/02/india-arie
ESPN MusicGolfThe Masters
This year, fans will hear a new voice as part of ESPN’s promotional campaign for the Masters, thanks to four-time Grammy Award-winning artist India.Arie in a brand new rendition of the iconic song “Georgia On My Mind.”
India Arie’s rendition of “Georgia On My Mind” is now available.
The track, which was recorded exclusively for the campaign and released Thursday night, captures the reverence and beauty that the Masters inspires.
“We chose India as she brings a new sound and compelling voice to our Masters creative work,” said Senior Vice President, Marketing, Laura Gentile. “In addition, India has a close personal connection to Georgia, which was important to us. As soon as we heard a sample of India’s work we knew she would give a big nod to Ray Charles’ version, with a modern and fresh approach. Her track has exceeded our expectations.”
Front Row spoke to Arie, a longtime resident of Georgia, to learn more about the new song and her connection to sports:
When you heard that ESPN wanted to collaborate around the event in Augusta, what were your first thoughts?
Well, my first thought was – “why did they ask me?” Not that I don’t think I’m worthy of re-making the song “Georgia On My Mind,” but why do they want a new one?
I’m very connected to my heritage as a black American with roots in the south. I just knew that I needed to be me, and my producer Aaron Lindsey helped me to interpret the sound to match who I am as a musician. Also, I referenced the Ray Charles version first and really took the parts of the record that touched me the most.
I’m honored to do this song with this institution of the Masters. I can’t exactly articulate what feels right about it, but I thought long and hard before I said yes and it feels good. It feels right, I love the way the record turned out, and working with the team at ESPN has been really lovely.
Do you have any personal memories or stories about the Masters?
To be honest, all that I ever remember thinking was “There’s a world-class sports event in Augusta?” It was so close to home, that I couldn’t help but to feel sort of territorial and surprised.
What are your favorite childhood memories of your dad, former ABA/NBA and Michigan State star Ralph Simpson, during his playing days?
My father is the reason that I feel connected to athletics at all. For any sport, I funnel that through being the child of a world-class athlete. I have lots of memories but the main ones are being in the world and having people say “that’s Ralph Simpson’s daughter” or having a tall man walk up to me and say “I knew your father, he was very good to me.” It always makes me feel really proud and it makes me feel like I was born with the focus and drive of an athlete so I apply that to my career every day.
What was behind your tweet to NBA star Russell Westbrook?
That was a while ago, but he was on Twitter singing several of my songs and really knew all of the words. I loved that. The words to my songs are the foundation of my life’s work. Then I told him about my father – I don’t remember him answering back. LOL.
https://carmelmonthlymagazine.com/india-arie/
Janelle Morrison
May 29, 2019
Carmel Monthly
Photography // Benedict Evans
India.Arie
Arising from Atlanta’s rich music scene, Arie earned seven Grammy Award nominations with her 2001 debut release, “Acoustic Soul.” She has continued with a string of successful albums (five consecutive Top 10s) and collaborations with artists as diverse as John Mellencamp and Stevie Wonder, whom she accompanied on his historic 2015 Songs in the Key of Life Tour.
Among many other awards, Arie’s 21 Grammy nominations have brought four wins, including a Best R&B Album nod for her 2003 release “Voyage to India.”
Among her accomplishments and accolades are 10 world tours, millions of records sold, five Top 10 albums (including her No. 1 debuting 2006 release, “Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship”), numerous NAACP Image Awards, BET Awards, MTV Awards, command performances for three U.S. presidents (receiving public praise from President Clinton and President Obama), as well as working alongside her mentor Stevie Wonder, including sharing the stage in his history-making 2014–15 Songs in the Key of Life Tour.
She also met the Dalai Lama and toured the National Civil Rights Museum with him in Memphis, Tennessee. Arie was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 2009 and has joined Oprah Winfrey on multiple projects. She was also chosen by Winfrey’s OWN Network for their SuperSoul 100 list in the Change Makers and Wisdom Teachers category.
Arie is touring nationally in support of her new, eighth album, “Worthy,” featuring the singles “That Magic,” already a Top 10 R&B hit, and “What If,” a tribute to civil rights pioneers Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and many more.
Each ticket purchased for this show includes either a free digital download or CD copy of India.Arie’s album “Worthy.” You will receive an email with more details about this offer approximately seven days after your purchase. For tickets and details, visit thecenterpresents.org.
I spoke with India.Arie about the new album, “Worthy,” what she learned about herself during her three-year hiatus from touring and, of course, who are some of her mentors and sources of inspiration. Arie is a soulful, brilliant and multilayered artist whose timeless message that we are all “worthy” makes her music relevant and multigenerational.
It’s been a few years since you last toured. How’s the preparation going and how difficult or easy is it to get back into the swing of being on the road?
I wouldn’t say it’s easy to get back into the swing of things, but I’m ready, so I’m making it work. I’m looking forward to touring. It’s hard, but it gets easier each time you do it. I’m getting prepared and still learning a lot.
Looking back over the last three years, what were your experiences that led to the creation of “Worthy”?
It’s funny, this era of recording “Worthy” is not the first time that I’ve been through a lot of hard lessons. When I was younger—in my early 20s—I came out with my first album [2001, “Acoustic Soul”]. I didn’t really know what the rhythms of life were. And so, I just took it as I was learning these hard lessons.
Most of the time writing and recording this album, I was in a relationship, long term for me. That brings this whole set of lessons, as any adult knows. The songs on this album, anyone listening to them can hear the things I’ve been thinking about. Outside of the subject matter of the songs, I have also learned a lot about writing and producing albums for myself.
When I started working on this album, “Worthy,” I didn’t actually know that I was going to make another album. I wasn’t chomping at the bit like I had been in the past to make an album, and I didn’t have this whole stack of songs and saying, ‘Let’s get it popping and get this album done.’ But I knew that I wanted to make another album because that’s what I do, but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know if it was going to be completed or start gaining momentum.
You did complete the album, but it is unlike any of your previous albums. What “lesson” did you learn in the process of producing this album that has changed your overall state of being?
I made an album much different than anything I thought I was going to make. I learned what it means to surrender, I guess. Maybe that’s the overall lesson of these last three years. I learned to love. I learned how to surrender love when it’s time for it to be over. I surrendered to the music, and to the songs. I moved to another state, and I surrendered to that. I’m surrendering to something new. It’s been an interesting era. Ten years ago, I would’ve been under the bed, afraid of what’s going to happen and all that. But now, I just feel like it’s life and I’m ready to deal with whatever’s coming.
What does “Worthy” mean to you?
In the process of making my last four projects, I’ve been able to be empowered and not have to search for it. I think that comes across in my music in the way that I am able to better articulate a message of empowerment and not talking about searching for it. I’m talking about being it. I think that’s the beauty of the word “worthy.” It’s all-encompassing. Telling someone “You’re worthy” is not saying “You’re good at what you do” or “You’re pretty” or “I like the sound of your voice.” Telling someone “You’re worthy” is basically saying “You deserve to exist.” I don’t know if that word would resonate with me the way that it does or that I could write a body of songs about it the way I have if I didn’t understand that [the meaning] for myself.
What do you hope people take away from the “Worthy” album?
I want people to get whatever they’re meant to get from it, but I feel that some people need to be reminded [they’re worthy] because there’s messages everyday all over TV and social media that teach us we need to be a certain thing to be “worthy.” I wanted this album to be a reminder and a message to anybody who never heard someone say, “No, no, no, the world will tell you different, but you’re worthy, you’re significant and you matter because you exist.”
I want it [the album] to be a voice of that, but also, I just love the word [worthy] and I want it, through me, to be something that’s living in the world for a while.
I can never say what anybody gets from a song. I can really only speak to what my intention is because people get different things, which is the beauty of music. I know for me, my intentions in those first two albums were to express myself and to do it in a way that I knew I would feel good about what I was saying. In the beginning, it was theoretical that I would be singing these songs for the next 20 years. I hoped that people would want to hear them 20 years later, but I didn’t know.
At some point, I decided that if I was going to be singing them for the next 20 years, I want to be able to phrase things in a way and use words that are empowering to me. Until I had reached my third and fourth project, it felt more like I had things that I needed to get off my chest. By the time I got to my “SongVersation” album, I had been through so much growing up that I understood, just from experience, how words can affect people.
The notion of being in this industry for 20 years is no longer theoretical for you. What does it mean to you to still be creating and producing songs for another generation of fans?
In the beginning, it was my hope and wish that I could be around for 20 years, but inside of that wish was all the stuff you can imagine. Maybe people’s children will grow up on my music or maybe people will walk down the aisles to my songs or maybe somebody will say I taught them something—because that’s what the music I love does for me. It’s taught me things about life and is a part of my actual life. I hope that I can be that for someone.
With “Worthy”, I want to continue to let people in on my process and where I am in my life and what I’m thinking about. For anybody who’s been with me these 20 years, I want them to continue to walk my journey and my growth with me. But also, people who are younger and just learning about life, I want to be something they can turn to that has that [positive] energy in it.
There’s lots of music coming out every day. Music is so different right now—the things people are saying and think are OK to say, especially with how much candid talk [there is] about drugs and what kind of drugs people take. For me, that’s one of the most shocking things right now, and I want to continue to be an alternative voice. People can listen to what they want to listen to, of course—whatever they find entertaining.
I want to be something that can be on their shelves too. For their quiet moments or Sunday mornings or when they’re struggling with something.
You have mentioned that some of your mentors include your mom and Stevie Wonder. [Arie’s mother, Joyce Simpson, was a Motown singer who opened for Stevie Wonder and Al Green.] How have they impacted and how do they continue to impact your personal and professional development?
Yes, my mom is a vocal talent, but she also taught me how to write songs. I watched her write songs, go into the studios, and produce and record them. My mother makes all my stage gowns and my stage clothes, and she’s also a person that I can count on. She never asks me for things. She doesn’t ask me for money. She doesn’t use me or try to get me to sign things for her friends or get [me] to show up to places so she can look cool—she doesn’t do any of that. My mom is grounded, and she’s what helps me to be grounded. She taught me everything I know. She supports me in everything.
And Stevie [Wonder] too—just the fact that he wants to be there for me is an inspiration. He’s my favorite artist—period. Not just [as a] musician, he’s my favorite artist. For him to be available for me to ask questions or to vent about things or even to talk about personal stuff, relationships and all that, is inspiring, just because who doesn’t want their favorite artist to be on their side?
What do you enjoy when you’re not performing and creating music?
Another thing that is really important to my life is travel. I learn so much through the people that I meet. I’ve had conversations with all kinds of different people. I’ve talked with old African priests and had a chance to talk with Maya Angelou on several occasions. I got to talk to Nelson Mandela one time.
Oprah has been a source of inspiration and mentorship. [Arie appeared with Oprah Winfrey on OWN’s “SuperSoul Sunday” television show, conducted a 25-minute “SongVersation” on Oprah’s “SuperSoul Sessions” and showcased her” SongVersation” on Oprah’s Share Your Adventure Cruise.]
Anytime I email her about something, she answers back, right away. She’s always so cool. I emailed her the other day—it had something to do with diet—and she answered me right away. I’ve also been able to learn a lot from different elder musicians.
I remember having a conversation with one the of Temptations and once with Tony Bennett. He’s inspiring, as you know. I talked with him one time outside of a hotel and just what he said [in that conversation] got me straight about some things. Some people I talk to periodically and other people just have the perfect words at the perfect time, and I take it in. I take it seriously when Tony Bennett is telling me something.
Having great mentors assist you along your journey, how important is it for you to mentor those who seek wisdom and guidance?
It’s funny, I don’t know if other people have this happen to them, but it happens to me all the time where I think, “What do I have to teach anybody?” But there’s always somebody who is coming up behind you who needs to know things that have become basic for you, and I find myself having conversations with people and not realizing that I’m actually mentoring them.
I think it’s important, especially in the music industry, because there is so much that you don’t know until you are down in the trenches. I think it’s important to have people to talk to about it, and it’s weird because in the music industry, everybody is doing their own thing and it’s kind of a self-absorbed way to live. You’re so busy all the time, and you’re worried about you or you’re worried about your crew—you might have 18 people on the road with you, and that’s all you think about for two months.
There’s not a sorority or fraternity for the music industry, though I think there should be, that could help a lot of people who go through things that are sometimes painful. When somebody asks me a question, I will give them everything I know because sometimes it’s all you have. Most of the people in your life have never been on tour or don’t know what it’s like to have a whole bunch of personal stuff going on inside and still have to sing a happy song on TV at 6 a.m. because it’s your single. Most of the people in an artist’s life won’t know what that’s like even if they empathize with you and love you.
I’m here for whoever wants to talk and wish that I could do it more often and that people would ask me more. Whether it’s about men, touring, money, managers, not just music, call me. I just want to put myself out there the way Stevie did for me. I wish there was a way, especially for women [artists], where we could be together and talk once a quarter or something. We have our parents and stuff, but it’s different to have someone who loves you who does what you do. That’s what my relationship with Stevie [Wonder] means for me.
In addition to running your own lifestyle/music brand SoulBird [launched in 2011], you also produce your own podcast. Are you continuing to produce that while on tour?
Yes, I took a break after the new year. Since I’m doing it on my own, I called the next round of shows “Season Two,” so before this tour, I recorded six of them, and they’ll come out while I’m on tour. I do it myself, on my laptop, and engineer the whole thing. It is call “SongVersation: The Podcast,” and I love doing it. It goes back to your last question—it is a certain type of mentorship. It is based on music, but it’s really not about the music but the wisdom behind the song and the process of recording the song and where it comes from.
I’m really just sharing my experiences and wisdom. I love doing this. I hope anybody who likes to talk about music and spiritual things, personal growth and how those things intertwine, that’s what my podcast is about.
Follow India.Arie’s podcast, “SongVersation,” on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Anchor.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/indiaarie-mn0000084446/biography
India.Arie
(b. October 3, 1975)
Artist Biography by Andy Kellman
Newly independent and inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Arie's next solo release was the 2016 single "Breathe," which appeared the following June on the SongVersation: Medicine EP. Its stronger emphasis on wellness, combined with a uniformly soft, stripped-down sound, was acknowledged with a Grammy nomination in the category of Best New Age Album. Arie continued to draw from sounds across the globe with her sixth proper full-length, Worthy, released in February 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/arts/a-soul-singer-with-a-vision-of-beauty.html
A Soul Singer With a Vision Of Beauty
by Anthony Decurtis
IT'S not often
you see the swaggering Eminem thrown off his game. But when he bumped
into the soul singer India.Arie backstage at BET's after-school show,
''106 and Park: Top Ten Live'' one afternoon last month, he stopped dead
in his tracks.
Eminem's homophobic,
misogynistic and violent rap lyrics have made him the scourge of the
P.T.A. and the politically correct. Ms. Arie's spiritual ballads and
anthems of self-esteem have made her a beacon for those who believe that
popular music must be an agent for positive change. Now, unexpectedly,
they were face to face -- and Eminem suddenly looked like a schoolboy
caught smoking behind the gym by the principal.
Ms.
Arie broke the silence. ''I think you're brilliant,'' she said, resting
her hand on Eminem's arm. ''We need to talk. I'd like to do something
with you.''
Eminem's features
softened and his lips curled into a smile. ''Definitely,'' he said. He
then told Ms. Arie that he liked her debut album, ''Acoustic Soul.'' A
photographer snapped pictures of this unlikely pair, and then they each
turned to leave. Suddenly Ms. Arie whirled around and called out: ''Wait
a minute, wait a minute! When's your birthday?''
''October 17th,'' Eminem said, amused.
''You're
a Libra!'' Ms. Arie exclaimed with a wide smile, as if a mystery had
been solved. Taking her seat in the van that was transporting her and
her small entourage around the city, she said: ''That goes down in my
book as today's information. Eminem's a Libra.''
If
you haven't already guessed, Ms. Arie is a Libra, too, along with
Sting, John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi, she pointed out. (The proximity
of her birthday to Gandhi's is the source of Ms. Arie's first name.) And
the principal characteristic of that sign is honesty, she said, a
virtue Ms. Arie has in great supply.
On
''Acoustic Soul,'' which came out last year and earned her seven Grammy
nominations, Ms. Arie, who is 26, articulated a vision of
African-American physical beauty that has proved inspirational to a
large, passionate audience of young women. ''I'm not the average girl
from your video,'' she sang on the hit song ''Video.'' ''And I ain't
built like a supermodel/ But I learned to love myself unconditionally/
Because I am a queen.''
Even more
tellingly, in a modern update of the 60's declaration that ''Black Is
Beautiful,'' her seductive song ''Brown Skin,'' a tribute to a lover,
was heard as a paean to black men and women whose dark coloring and
broad features, like Ms. Arie's own, don't conform to white standards of
beauty.
Rane, a female disc jockey
for radio station WPGC in Washington, raised the issue directly with Ms.
Arie in an interview backstage at rehearsals for MTV's Video Music
Awards show, shortly after the singer's encounter with Eminem. ''It's a
lot of sisters out here who admire you,'' the D.J. said, ''especially a
lot of dark-skinned sisters. We always have this conversation at the
station about chocolate sisters and how few there are in the music
industry. Do you think it's been harder for you being darker than a
paper bag?''
Ms.
Arie laughed knowingly at the reference to an infamous measure of
African-American beauty. ''It might have been a hard thing for me in
high school or junior high, not being the prom queen or whatever,'' she
responded. ''But I know for certain that God made us the way we're
supposed to be, and I love everything about myself, the way I look, my
nose, my skin.''
Ms. Arie's music
only further enhanced her reputation as an artist of substance;
centering on her acoustic guitar and confident but restrained vocals, it
recalls such soul masters as Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack.
Ms.
Arie's new album, ''Voyage to India,'' which is to be released on
Tuesday by Motown, might be considered the next chapter in the story she
began to tell on ''Acoustic Soul.'' The title is borrowed from an
instrumental on Mr. Wonder's 1979 album, ''Journey Through the Secret
Life of Plants.'' And like her first album, ''Voyage'' combines songs of
self-encouragement (''Little Things,'' ''Slow Down''), declarations of
faith (''God Is Real'') and sensitive explorations of the bonds between
men and women (''Talk to Her,'' ''Can I Walk With You,'' ''Complicated
Melody'').
So why, then, would this woman think Eminem is ''brilliant''?
''You
see, there's two different sides to that,'' she explained over dinner
at the Candle Cafe, a funky health-food restaurant on the Upper East
Side of Manhattan. ''I have an opinion about his effect on minds that
are young and impressionable, obviously. On the other side of it, I love
great art. And loving words, rhyme schemes and stories the way that I
do, Eminem is brilliant. I'm just newly realizing that about him -- and
Jay-Z too. I used to just think, 'Those words are irresponsible, and
it's not good for children.' But I'm grownup, and I can deal with it.
And when you look at the art of it, it's great.''
MS.
ARIE is also aware that the high-mindedness of her music has created an
image of her that is reserved and serious, even somewhat
school-marmish. She is nothing like that in real life, however. Like her
idol, Mr. Wonder, she is prone to burst into song whenever melodies
float through her mind, as they often do. And when young fans approach
her, as they did when she entered the lobby of MTV to do a taping
earlier in the day, she outdid them in her enthusiasm. Her eyes rolling
with delight, she twirled, waved her arms and danced. In her bright
yellow shirt and head-wrap, she was a sight to see. ''Be sure not to
tell everybody I'm so silly,'' she playfully warned at one point. ''I'm
supposed to be deep.'' Then she laughed and shouted, ''Destroy the
misconception!''
Most important to
Ms. Arie, clearly, is the freedom to follow her creative impulses, and
that requires not being boxed in by anyone's expectations. It's part of
what ''Voyage'' is about. When ''Acoustic Soul,'' which has sold more
than 1.6 million copies domestically, began to catch fire in the
marketplace, Ms. Arie said, she had to struggle to keep a grip on
herself, and her own expectations.
India Arie (1975- )
Arie was born in Denver, Colorado on October 3, 1975 to parents Joyce and Ralph Simpson. When she was 13, her parents divorced and Arie moved with her mother and siblings to Atlanta, Georgia. When she got to Atlanta, Arie began to play guitar. Arie went on to also play the saxophone, baritone clarinet, French horn, and trumpet. Arie attended Savannah College of Arts and Design where she studied jewelry design. She would eventually give this up to focus her attention on music.
Collaborating with other local artists in Atlanta, Arie and the artists eventually formed the music group Groovement. The group was very successful, but in 1999, Arie was discovered by and signed a deal with Motown records in Los Angeles, California. There at the age of 24 she began her career as a solo artist.
Arie is famous for writing songs about female empowerment and dismissing the societal standards of beauty. Arie’s debut album, Acoustic Soul, was released in 2001 and earned her seven Grammy nominations. The album was also certified double platinum by the Music Industry Association of America (RIAA).
In 2002, Arie released her second album, Voyage to India. It was certified platinum by the RIAA and it won Best R&BAlbum at the 2003 Grammy Awards. Arie’s success continued with her albums Testimony: Vol 1, Life and Relationship and Testimony: Vol 2, Love and Politics released in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Her album, Testimony: Vol 2 debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 list. Arie took a few years off from making music and in 2013, she released her fifth album, Songversation. Arie released a collaborative album with musician Joe Sample called Christmas with Friends in 2015. In 2016, she released a song called “Breathe” that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of Eric Garner. In 2017, Arie released her first EP called Songversation: Medicine.
Arie has four Grammy awards and 21 Grammy nominations. She also has two BET awards, four NAACP Image awards, and has been nominated for five Soul Train music awards.
Listening in With … India.Arie: Sound Affects
Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter India.Arie, now 39, became a sensation in her late 20s when her debut album, Acoustic Soul,
went double platinum in 2001. In the next eight years, she cut three
more albums and saw her total worldwide album sales reach 10 million.
Her unique sound—described as R&B, folk, neo-soul, and combinations
thereof—garnered her four Grammys. But in 2009, a frustrated Arie walked
away from the industry with no promises to return. Fortunately, her
hiatus ended in the spring of 2013 with the release of her fifth and
newest album, SongVersation, which makes several strong spiritual statements. Unity Magazine editor Katy Koontz spoke with the artist about her unapologetic passion for spirituality and the power of sound to raise consciousness.
Katy Koontz: You’ve
always shared empowering spiritual messages in your music, so did your
spirituality deepen during your time away, or did you just decide to
focus more on it?
India.Arie: I grew up in both
Baptist and Pentecostal churches, but even then my parents were more
about wanting us to have a relationship with God than being dogmatic.
That changed a bit when my father became a pastor, but I was already in
my mid- to late teens, and by that time, I was shaping my own beliefs
based on what I felt in my soul.
So when I took that time off, I got stronger and more
mature, and so of course my spirituality got even deeper than it already
was. A big part of that spiritual maturing was that I had more trust—I
realized I could just sing the things I wanted to sing and that it would
work out.
KK: It sounds like you were really able to relax into that trust and go with the flow.
I.A: When I’m in the flow, I honor
it, because I know how easy it is to fall out of it. So even if I’m
scared to say something, I do it, because it’s like that saying, “Why
ask God for directions if you’re not willing to move your feet?” I know I
have to do what I hear, or I suffer. I get my butt kicked! There’s
never an easy way out of that.
But when I say I had more trust, I don’t mean I had trust
that things would be great. I mean I trusted that I would be able to
deal with whatever happened and that choosing that path would work for
me, even if it didn’t work for the people around me—or even if it made
things a bit harder, which it did, because SongVersation is the least-selling album I’ve ever done. But it’s also the most creative and fulfilling album I’ve ever done—by far!
KK: How would you describe your spiritual practice?
I.A: Prayer, meditation, movement,
and music. I never said that before, but that is how I’d describe it.
And one more thing: reading.
KK: What kind of movement?
I.A: Mainly yoga and dance. But
even deeper than that, it’s the beauty of being in a place in my life
where I have figured out what my physical language is. I spent most of
my life living in my head, so dropping down into my
body and learning how I love to move is wonderful. I love when I’m doing
yoga and I feel emotions releasing as I’m rolling through the balls of
my feet. I celebrate that because I was disconnected from my body for so
long—until I was in my early 30s. I gained all this weight and then in
the process of getting the weight off, I started really feeling my body.
I was never a dancer before—I was too shy—but now I dance all the time.
I have a ballet bar in my living room.
KK: What kind of meditation do you practice?
I.A: I haven’t spoken about this
often, but the best way to describe it is to say that my spiritual
mentor, who’s been in my life since I was 19, taught me how to
understand my own language of meditation. And it works—I get clarity,
and I get answers, and I get songs and lyrics. I get whatever I need
when I need it. He called it increasing my inner vision, and because I
love Stevie Wonder, I call it my “innervision,” playing off of the name
of his Innervisions album. My innervision has guided every choice
I’ve made in my life. Every big decision, every song—it all comes from
that place.
KK: What feedback have industry executives and peers shared about the shift you made with SongVersation?
I.A: I
don’t think industry executives know enough about who I really am to
perceive it as a shift. I was always too esoteric and too different—too
hard to put in a box, and I still am. They don’t see me. I don’t mean to
sound negative, it’s just true. For them, it’s not about the craft;
it’s just about how much you can sell.
The consensus from my peers was, “This is so brave.”
Then Stevie Wonder called and said, “The whole family is together and
we are all listening to your album, and this is the best one.” Having him say that just meant everything to me. It was huge!
He said, “Aisha’s favorite one is this, and Kwame’s favorite one is
that.” I care more about his opinion of my music than almost anyone,
next to my mom, because I love the way he brings spiritual messages
inside of a joyful sound.
The most amazing response, though, was from the audiences, and the song they talk about most is “I Am Light.”
KK: I love that song! It’s a centering song.
I.A: Yes! That’s my
favorite cut on the whole album, and it’s the first song I sing when I
go out on stage because it centers me and it seems to center the
audience. Everyone screams at the top of their lungs when I walk out,
but when I sing “I Am Light,” they’re always 100 percent pin-drop quiet.
KK: That song is so simple, yet so
powerful: “I am not the mistakes I have made or any of the things that
caused me pain,” “I am not the voices in my head,” “I’m not my age, I am
not my race,” “I am light.” Those three words say it all.
I.A: The truth generally is
simple. Before I start writing, I pray my intentions for what I want the
song to feel like or what I want to be able to do in the world with it.
The day I wrote that song was 12/12/12, and I said to myself, I want to write a song today that will help people see the truth of who they really are and that will remind me of who I am too. So I started writing it, and then the voices in my head started telling me, I am light? Really? People are going to say this and they’re going to say that … It took me a while to quiet that stuff.
KK: In “One,” you sing, “Some say
God’s a him and still many believe that he is a her. Does God live in
our hearts, or is she somewhere out there in the universe?” Did you
catch any heat for suggesting that some people see God as female?
I.A: Not so far. And really, what
I’m suggesting is that it doesn’t matter what you call God. When I sing
that song live, people start holding hands, as if they’re thinking, That’s right, that’s right! We are one! They shout out, “Yes!” and clap in the middle. It’s cool.
KK: What is it about music that makes it so effective for reaching people on a spiritual level like that?
I.A: I think our subtle body—the
eternal part of us that extends beyond our physical body—is affected by
the vibration of sound. Sound actually moves the subtle body—it shakes
it. Sound can make that subtle body grow or shrink or heal. To me,
that’s what prayer is too. Prayer is a sound; it’s an incantation. In my
opinion, music at its best is prayer. And when there are lyrics, the
words affect thought patterns and consciousness. They’re so powerful,
both in positive ways and obviously in negative ways too.
KK: Speaking of that, what do you
think about the energetic effect of today’s increasingly violent and
misogynistic lyrics—particularly in rap music?
I.A: The way we’re using that very
powerful, impactful, sacred thing that we call sound is a lot of the
reason why our kids are in trouble. It makes me so mad because it
teaches people to think that way, and so then that’s what people are
hungry for, and so then the music industry creates more of that. It just
keeps feeding on itself.
I have always been on that journey of how to shift the
consciousness of people so that they’re hungry for something else—to
spread love, healing, peace, and joy through the power of words and
music.
I can’t count how many times I have seen young people come
into the business, and then their natural inclination shifts to
accommodate what is more commercial. Their energy and all that magic
they had is gone. It happens all the time. I get it, it’s a
business. But I have learned to define success by how true I am to
myself and how accurately I can put how I feel about something into a
song. I used to be afraid to say certain things, but now there’s nothing
that I believe spiritually that I can’t write a song about. In fact,
when I wrote “One,” I thought, I’m going to write a song that has everything that I was always afraid to say all in one song.
KK: So what does it feel like to sing that?
I.A: Like I’m coming alive. My
spirituality is the center of my life, but my life’s passion is my
music, and to have any fear around that feels like being caged. I took
those four years off because I began to feel horrible, and I thought, There has to be something better than this.
I needed to remember who I was outside of who people kept telling me I
was. For a while, their distorted vision of who I was worked for me, but
then it started to feel stifling. I wasn’t able to grow because they
couldn’t accept that I was a lot more than the way they saw me. I also
got tired of putting myself in situations where I had to live up to some
expectation that was never mine.
KK: So how did you approach your time off?
I.A: In the beginning, I started thinking, Who really am I as a performer?
I’m not up there to sing and dance and get everybody to clap their
hands. Those things are fun, but that’s not who I see myself as. It took
me a month of constant thinking until the word songversation
finally came through. So when I get on stage now, I tell the audience,
“This is not a concert. This is a songversation,” and then I proceed to
do it so they can see what it is because it’s a word I made up. For me,
it’s equal parts spiritual conversation and singing.
I don’t see myself as a teacher so much as a person who
has a lot to say. That’s just my nature—I love to read, I journal
obsessively, and I think a lot. I used to feel like when I was in
concert, I had to squeeze out everything I wanted to say really fast and
then sing, because I felt guilty—like hearing me talk is not what
people came for.
So during this time away, I created this moniker and this
new show. And in May last year, I participated in an event called “Our
Inner Lives: Spirit, Faith and Action” in New York City. It was my first
time singing the songs on SongVersation in front of an
audience—and they gave me a standing ovation after every song. I cried
so hard that I cried my eyelashes off! I had been through so much to be
able to speak all these messages and speak my truth. I had come so far,
and they kept responding with so much enthusiasm.
KK: Was it scary making the decision to step away?
I.A: Loving my music as much as I
do made it easier because I’m so protective of my creative self. I don’t
have kids, so this is what matters most to me. The impetus for growth
is right there. It’s not like I’m going to be able to say, “No, I don’t
want to grow.” That doesn’t even sound possible.
KK: Even knowing growth is often painful?
I.A: I used to think that avoiding
pain was what you were supposed to do. But sometimes life is going to
hurt—I get that now. I don’t want to walk into painful situations
but I know that inside of anything we care about, there’s going to be
things that cause pain. So let’s live life and deal with the pain when
it comes—and feel blessed that we care that much about something.
Your scars signify that you went through stuff and you
healed from it—that’s what makes a person wise and mature. I understand
that because I have my own scars now, and I love them. I never want to
go back to any age I was before. I like the age where I am now, and I
hope I keep saying that ’til the day I die because that means I’m
accepting my life as it is. That’s peace. Peace is not when everything
is okay; it’s when you accept where you are.
KK: That would make a great song.
I.A: It would, actually—you’re right. I’m writing that down right now!
India.Arie is part of the conversation again
India.Arie has a new album, "Songversation." (Randee St. Nicholas / Randee St. Nicholas)
On India.Arie's new song, "Cocoa Butter," she sweetly sings of a love
that nourishes past scars. It's a signature Arie track with a positive
message wrapped in a tender groove that made news of a backlash over the
single — her first in more than four years — disturbing.
The controversy? The single's artwork. On it the 37-year-old poses with her tresses in a towering head wrap, legs peeking from a short dress, and her skin, possibly glistening from the song's titular product, glowing.
The photo was trending on Twitter in March as commenters mulled her
"lighter" complexion and issued a rash accusation: Did the singer — long
praised for Afro-centric anthems such as "Brown Skin," "Video" and "I
Am Not My Hair" — have her skin "bleached"?
"I was completely taken off guard," Arie said by phone from Atlanta.
"[But] that conversation belongs to the black community. It's not TMZ
fodder. I'm still trying to figure out how to wrap my words around my
feelings about it."
"Part of it was serendipity," she continued. "They were talking about
'Cocoa Butter' and seeing my picture and talking about my album. When I
left the scene four years ago I was struggling to get people to know I
had an album out."
Though the singer's glow on the cover is the result of what Arie calls
"magnificent lighting," a great deal of that radiance came from finding
the self-acceptance she's struggled with during her decade-plus career.
She channeled those feelings into her fifth album, "Songversation,"
which comes out June 25.
When the Denver-born, Atlanta-based musician, born India Arie Simpson,
arrived on the scene in 2001, she helped rejuvenate contemporary R&B
with deeply personal songs about love, spirituality, politics and
self-love steeped in an acoustic-driven mix of soul, R&B, jazz, folk
and hip-hop.
Arie instantly became a critics' darling and a torchbearer for a new
class of neo-soul singers that included Alicia Keys and Jill Scott. But
after "Acoustic Soul," was shut out at the Grammys despite seven
nominations in 2002, Arie's spirit was broken, and she started feeling
the pressure to fit into a landscape of easily marketable R&B divas.
"I'm not a straight-down-the-middle artist. There was a lane cut right
out for me because people were interested, but that lasted a couple of
years," she said. "If I were not a black artist but I was still singing,
playing guitar and singing ballads that are spiritual and cerebral, I'd
be easier to market because people accept that from white female
singer-songwriters faster."
As Arie "walked the line really carefully" between satisfying label
expectations and her own artistry, a handful of albums followed — some
sturdier than others. She eventually crumbled after 2009's "Testimony:
Vol. 2, Love & Politics," and considered leaving music.
"I always felt like — I mean I was told, really — I couldn't go too far
with the productions because it didn't appeal to black radio," she
explained. "It wasn't until I decided I was going to do what I wanted to
do or I was going to quit that I empowered myself. I took my power
back."
Though Arie's hard-earned confidence makes "Songversation" an
inspirational, even iridescent listen, the album didn't come without
conflict. The recording sessions were spurred by the demise of a
previous album, "Open Door," a passion project with Israeli singer Idan
Raichel. ("We couldn't agree on the business terms at all," Arie
offered. "I had to take a deep breath and say, OK, let's just not do
it.")
Arie said that because "Open Door" "reeked" of ill feelings toward her
career, she purposefully opted to not channel hurt feelings over
scrapping that album into "Songversation." Instead she crafted the album
she'd always wanted. It's her same guitar-steered soul, but inflected
by an eclectic mix of sonic elements from her travels, especially in the
Middle East. And the lyrics show Arie at her most personal.
"I will no longer be defined by what someone else believed I am," she
sings on "Soulbird Rise." "Now that I've dropped the weight/ I'm light
as a feather."
The singer will test out the new material and her renewed confidence
when she plays at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday as part of the weekend's
Playboy Jazz Festival. But Arie isn't concerned about how she fits on
the eclectic bill.
"This is the best time of my life because I feel free. Even when it's
hard, I still feel free," Arie said. "I'm having hard times based off
what I want to be doing. Before it was just hard times trying to figure
out someone else's vision for my life."
------------------------------------
The 35th Playboy Jazz Festival
Lineup: Saturday:
George Duke with Jeffrey Osborne, Naturally 7 with Herbie Hancock,
Angelique Kidjo and Hugh Masekela, Robert Glasper Experiment, Gregory
Porter, Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band with Lee Ritenour, "Ole Coltrane"
James Carter and Poncho Sanchez and His Latin Jazz Band, Pedrito
Martinez Group, Phil Woods, Los Angeles County High School for the Arts
Jazz Ensemble.
Sunday:
Sheila E., Bob James with David Sanborn, India.Arie, Trombone Shorty,
The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, Taj Mahal, Ladysmith Black Mambazo,
ELEW and the JazzAntiqua Dance Ensemble, LAUSD Beyond the Bell Jazz
Band. Hosted by George Lopez.
When: 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun.
Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., L.A.
Cost: $20 to $160
India.Arie: A Gem of a Performer
THIS is how you know you've struck a chord: Oprah Winfrey leans into you on her nationally syndicated television show, squeezes your arm and says, "We love that song. Not only do we love that song, we love you for writing that song. We needed that song."
That song is "Video," the first single from India.Arie's Motown debut, "Acoustic Soul." Its success has pushed album sales past 700,000 and landed India.Arie the opening slot on Sade's comeback tour.
More importantly, it has struck a nerve with women by boldly rejecting the exaggerated, and for most people, unattainable standards of beauty propagated by the media (it was inspired by some male friends gawking over women in a music video). Given her own well-documented history of physical malleability, it's easy to see why Winfrey would tap into this lilting anthem of self-empowerment and self-love.
"When I look in the mirror and the only one there is me/ every freckle on my face is where it's supposed to be/ and I know my Creator didn't make no mistakes on me/ my feet, my thighs, my lips, my eyes, I'm loving what I see."
Later, India.Arie adds, "Don't need your silicone, I prefer my own," and on the chorus, summarizes it all this way: "I'm not your average girl from the video/ and I ain't built like a supermodel/ but I've learned to love myself unconditionally/ because I am a queen."
"Video" is the kind of song that inspires feedback from stars like Winfrey as well as common folk who encounter its creator on the street back home in Atlanta. It offers the kind of inspiration she herself has found in many songs over the years.
"For me, it validates the idea that music can help and mean something," says the 25-year-old singer, who put the " . " in her name for purely artistic reasons. "For a long time, I felt idealistic for thinking that. I always loved music, but I didn't know if I could be the kind of artist that makes a difference. Even though I felt music and would get chills and cry, and certain songs just really meant a lot to me, that could just be me, being overly emotional or whatever.
"But this proves to me that music can really, really, really help people in a tangible way, that it can make a difference to people who might not love music as much as I do, people who don't make music, but people who just might have the same insecurities that I do."
India.Arie overcame enough insecurity to name-check herself on the chorus to "Video," but it wasn't done in the boastful, often overbearing manner of rap, but rather in the soulful tradition of Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" and Curtis Mayfield's "We're a Winner." The album's success has put the singer in good company with Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Angie Stone, Sunshine Anderson and Macy Gray, a powerful sisterhood responsible for some of the smartest, strongest music in recent times.
Five years ago, however, India.Arie had designs on a career in jewelry, not music.
She was born in Denver and raised mostly in Atlanta after her parents divorced -- dad is Ralph Simpson, an American Basketball Association All-Star who later played with the NBA's Denver Nuggets, and mom is a fashion designer who goes simply by the name Simpson. India.Arie always wrote (short stories and journal entries) and played music (saxophone, French horn and recorder in the school band), as well as singing in the choir, where her voice was buried in the ensemble.
But until college, "I never put all of it together."
That happened at Savannah College of Art and Design, where India.Arie had gone to study jewelry-making after gravitating to the craft in the 10th grade in Denver (she also spent her senior year there because of Denver's excellent public school system). She was, she says, tired of "band teachers, sheet music and all that stuff . . . and jewelry was something that I'd always loved. I would stare at it the same way I would stare at instruments. My mom would have fashion shows and I would be out there trying to polish the bracelets."
Making jewelry requires the right tools, and it was at college that India.Arie finally found the one that would allow her to craft music -- an acoustic guitar, the first instrument she could play and sing with. Then she started searching for a sound, sifting through myriad, and diverse, influences.
"In Denver, all we really had was pop radio, so I grew up on all that late '70s pop stuff -- Billy Joel, James Taylor, Lionel Richie, Elton John, Steve Miller and Toto. Great love songs and really hooky and melodic music -- I have all of that stuff in my heart. That's why I have a good idea of what a song is, as opposed to a poem that you sing."
There were also '90s singer-songwriters like Oleta Adams and the wise ancestors India.Arie honors on her album, folks like Nina Simone, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, Roberta Flack and Motown cornerstones Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder (inspiration for the album's bonus track, "Wonderful").
Back in Atlanta, she became part of the arts collective Groovement/Earthseed, played assorted coffee houses and recorded a hard-to-find solo acoustic album ("I made it with a microphone and eight-track in my bathroom and duplicated it on tape," she says of the 1997 effort). India.Arie also appeared on an Earthseed compilation CD, where her rich, smoky alto caught the attention of Lilith Fair talent scouts. Subsequent appearances on second-stages at a couple of Fairs caught the ear of Motown Records, which has been in the forefront of the late '90s neo-soul movement with D'Angelo and Erykah Badu.
It would take almost two years for the Motown connection to produce "Acoustic Soul." The delay, according to India.Arie, was her responsibility as she tried to figure out the transition from solo act to album artist. All the songs were written on guitar and gradually fleshed out with programmed drums and other supple touches.
"When I decided to go to Motown, I knew that I was going to be experimenting with different sounds," she says. "I thought it was going to be a lot quicker than it was, that I would get session players, have them play and then my album would be done. But after I did that and was listening back to it, it wasn't what I wanted. All the stuff I went through as far as trying things, experimenting and taking so long was really, really all on me. Motown wasn't patient, they were like, hurry up! But when we'd listen to it, they didn't like it either so it was: Let's keep trying."
"I learned so much at the tail end of recording my album," she adds. "I recorded over half of it in the last four months after working on the other part of it for a year!"
What finally emerged was a stripped-down, organic sound that melded classic soul tradition with contemporary elements, including subtle hip-hop rhythms, with uplifting love songs like "I See God in You" and "Brown Skin" and testaments to self-discovery and centeredness like "Strength, Courage and Wisdom" and "Back to the Middle."
And India.Arie has no problem distinguishing between the artificial standards of beauty she decries in "Video" and the earthy fashion sensibility she displays in the video for "Video," where she sings "no matter what I'm wearing I will always be India.Arie."
That's because her mom, Simpson, is still in her corner, creating her clothes, doing her styling.
"It's really special to me," says the proud daughter. "If I don't have the right clothes, I feel weird walking out, I don't feel comfortable in what I have on. I have different colors that I want to wear on different days because it makes me feel different . . . and I like to do a lot of weird stuff, so just to have my mom able to make my clothes means a lot.
"But what means even more is that she taught me everything I know about singing. When I have a new song, I can play it for her -- she has a very critical and deep expertise in music. Music lives in my mother -- she's played in bands in Detroit and toured and did the whole thing. So I have somebody who's done it all to just talk to. And we write songs together," including "Nature" on "Acoustic Soul" and "Can I Walk With You," a snippet of which can be heard on the critically acclaimed soundtrack to Spike Lee's "Bamboozled."
Lee was so impressed with India.Arie that he included five snippets of songs from her debut on his soundtrack album six months before its release. Next week, she'll be featured dueting with John Mellencamp on "Peaceful World," the first single from his new album, and she's been fielding calls from such interested parties as Kenny Loggins, Pink and Cassandra Wilson, who all want to tap into India.Arie's eclectic soul.
INDIA.ARIE -- Appearing Friday with Sade at Nissan Pavilion. * To hear a free Sound Bite from India.Arie, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000 and press 8124. (Prince William residents, call 690-4110.)
India.Arie's hit, "Video," struck a chord with its self-empowering lyrics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_Arie
India Arie
India Arie Simpson (born October 3, 1975), also known as India.Arie (sometimes styled as india.arie), is an American singer and songwriter.[1] She has sold over 3.3 million records in the US and 10 million worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards from her 23 nominations, including Best R&B Album.[2]
Background
She was born in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Joyce and Ralph Simpson. Her musical skills were encouraged by both parents in her younger years. Her mother is a former singer (she was signed to Motown as a teenager and opened for Stevie Wonder and Al Green)[3] and is now her stylist. She has an older brother named J'On and younger sister Mary A Martin of Philadelphia, PA.[4] Arie is African-American, and according to a DNA analysis, she descends from the Mende people of Sierra Leone, the Kru people of Liberia and the Fula people of Guinea-Bissau.[5][6]After Simpson's parents divorced, her mother moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia when India was 13.[4] Simpson had taken up a succession of musical instruments throughout her schooling in Denver, but her interest in the guitar while attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, led to a personal revelation about songwriting and performing. "When I started tapping into my own sensitivity, I started to understand people better. It was a direct result of writing songs", she said at the press release of her debut album, Acoustic Soul.[7]
Co-founding the Atlanta-based independent music collective Groovement EarthShare (Groovement was the collective artists' name and EarthShare was their independent label name), her one-song turn on a locally released compilation led to a second-stage gig at the 1998 Lilith Fair. In 1999, a Universal/Motown music scout signed her and made an introduction to former Motown CEO Kedar Massenburg. Arie resides in New York, NY.
Named to Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul100 list of visionaries and influential leaders,[8] India.Arie performed Songversation during 2017 motivational cruises.[9]
Musical career
Arie released her debut album Acoustic Soul on March 27, 2001. The album was met with positive reviews and commercial success.[10] "Acoustic Soul" debuted at number ten on the U.S. Billboard 200 and number three on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. Within months, without the concentrated radio airplay that typically powers pop and rap albums, Acoustic Soul was certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), selling 2,180,000 copies in the U.S. and 3,000,000 copies worldwide.[11] The album was also certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry[12] and platinum by Music Canada.[13] The album was promoted with the release of the lead single "Video". "Video" attained commercial success peaking at forty seven on the US Billboard Hot 100 and becoming her highest charting song in the region to date.[14] The album's second single "Brown Skin" failed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, but it became her highest charting single in the United Kingdom, peaking at number 29.[15]Arie performed a duet with rock singer-guitarist John Mellencamp on the song "Peaceful World" for his 2001 album Cuttin' Heads. While Arie and the album were nominated for seven Grammy awards in 2002, they won no awards, losing in five of seven categories to Alicia Keys. She closed the ceremony with a performance of her song "Video". Arie performed a duet with jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on the song "Just Another Parade" for her 2002 album Belly of the Sun.
Arie followed the success of her debut on September 24, 2002 with the release of Voyage to India.[16] It debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 with first week sales of 109,000 copies[17] and topped the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums,[17] with the RIAA certifying it Platinum.[18] At the 2003 Grammy Awards, it won Best R&B Album, and the single "Little Things" won Best Urban/Alternative Performance.[19] The song "Get It Together" was featured on many film soundtracks including Brown Sugar (2002) and Shark Tale (2004).[20][21]
On September 12, 2005, Arie performed "Just 4 2day", a song written for her appearance on the debut of The Tyra Banks Show.[22] She also performed "What About the Child", a song that did not air but was made available as a one-dollar Internet download to support child victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.[23] Arie is also featured on Stevie Wonder's album A Time to Love, released on October 18, 2005. Arie and Wonder duet on the title track "A Time to Love", written by Arie, which was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals at the 2006 Grammy Awards. Three years earlier, their rendition of Mel Tormé's 1944 classic "The Christmas Song", recorded for the holiday TV commercial for retailer Target, had been nominated for the same category, making it the first song created and financed exclusively for a commercial to be nominated for a Grammy Award.[24]
India Arie performing in Lokeren Belgium, August 3, 2004
Her next album, Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics was released on Tuesday, February 10, 2009. It debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, and No. 2 on the R&B chart. Within this CD, Arie collaborated with such artists as Sezen Aksu, Keb Mo, Gramps Morgan and Musiq Soulchild to fulfill her self-proclaimed desire to "do projects with people who are making music that is meaningful, with a lot of integrity and a lot of sonic diversity". Arie also identified this CD as her first to write and sing songs without worrying about public opinion after a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. The album was her first produced and released after her departure from Motown to Universal Records.[25] Arie performed "Video" with British singer Adele at the 2009 VH1 Divas. Arie is one of over 70 artists singing on "We Are the World: 25 for Haiti", a charity single in aid of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Arie contributed vocals to "Imagine" for the 2010 Herbie Hancock album, The Imagine Project along with Seal, P!nk, Jeff Beck, Konono N°1, Oumou Sangare and others.[26]
In the fall of 2010, she was a featured guest vocalist on Carlos Santana's version of The Beatles classic song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from his album Guitar Heaven. The song also features Yo-Yo Ma on cello.
In September 2012, she featured in a campaign called "30 Songs/30 Days" to support Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a multi-platform media project inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book.[27]
In March 2013, it was announced that Arie was working on her upcoming fifth studio album, Songversation, which was released on June 25, 2013. The first single of the album, "6th Avenue", was released on iTunes on November 4, 2012; it was produced by India Arie and Israeli musician Idan Raichel. The second single "Cocoa Butter" was released on iTunes on April 9, 2013.[28][29][30][31]
In 2015, she released a collaborative album with musician Joe Sample titled Christmas with Friends.[32]
In July 2016, she premiered her new single "Breathe" inspired by the Black Lives Matter Movement, especially Eric Garner's last words. She also announced a new album titled Worthy was in the works.[33] She performed the single on the Soul Train Awards with host Erykah Badu in November.[34]
In June 2017, she announced the release of her first EP SongVersation: Medicine on June 30.[35][36] It was preceded by the single "Breathe" and the new single "I Am Light" which was originally included on her 2013 Songversation album. She expressed that the EP was "made to be listened to in a quiet time, prayer, meditation, Yoga. My wish is that these songs bring softness, clarity, calm, and inspiration."[37]
In September 2018, she premiered her new single "That Magic". The song serves as the lead single from her sixth studio album titled Worthy which was released on February 15, 2019.[38][39]
Discography
Studio albums
- 2001: Acoustic Soul
- 2002: Voyage to India
- 2006: Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship
- 2009: Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics
- 2013: Songversation
- 2015: Christmas with Friends
- 2019: Worthy
EP albums
- 2017: SongVersation: Medicine – EP
Collaborations
- 2010 : Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time by Carlos Santana. – India sings While my guitar gently weeps with Yo Yo Ma on cello.
- 2010 : The Imagine Project by Herbie Hancock. – India sings Imagine with P!NK, Seal, Konono No. 1, Oumou Sangare and Jeff Beck.
- 2020: " My Everything" by Sauti Sol - Midnight Train album
Awards
India Arie on the red carpet at VH1 Divas 2009.
The Grammy Award is an honor awarded by The Recording Academy to recognize outstanding achievement in the mainly English-language music industry. Arie has won four Grammy awards from twenty-three nominations.[40]
Tours
.jpg)
India Arie performing at Texas A&M University–Commerce in April 2014
- Headlining
- Voyage to World Tour (2002/03)
- Testimony Tour (2006/10)
- Songversation Tour (2013/14)
- Opening act
- Lovers Rock Tour (2001)
Filmography
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | American Dreams | Nina Simone | "Act of Contrition" (Season 1, Episode 16) |
| 2003 | The Bernie Mac Show | Herself | "Raging Election" (Season 2, Episode 13) |
| 2004 | Blue's Clues | Herself | "Bluestock" (Season 6, Episode 9) |
| 2006 | One on One | Herself | "I Love L.A.: Part 1" (Season 5, Episode 21) |
| 2009 | Pastor Brown | Lateefah | Debut film |
| 2009 | Sesame Street | Herself | "The Alphabet Song with Elmo and India Arie" |
| 2015 | Being Mary Jane | Herself | "Life in the Sand" (Season 2, Episode 9) |
Theater
In 2009, India Arie portrayed Nina Simone in a staged reading at the Roundabout Theatre Company of the upcoming Broadway musical "Soul Doctor", about the life of Shlomo Carlebach written by Daniel Wise.References
- "India Arie". Grammy.com.
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to India.Arie. |
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-right-mindset/202006/singer-indiaarie-offers-hope-during-these-troubling-times
Singer India.Arie Offers Hope During
These Troubling Times
How she overcame fears ofletting herself bloom.
June 13, 2020
Psychology Today
"I've outgrown the ability to squash myself down or diminish my real nature," says multi-Grammy Award winner, India.Arie Source: Photo by Duan Davis
The coronavirus has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are an interdependent species, Arie told me. “We were brought up to believe wellness is an individual pursuit, but we must expand our vision from me to we.”
As a wellness practitioner, she insists that our economic, political, and social systems are not well, so our people are not well. In the absence of systems that care for us all, mutual and community care are critical pathways to our collective well-being. In striving for wellness, we must expand our vision from me to we. According to Arie, this unprecedented time is the perfect time to offer wellness, peace, and tranquillity using her music as a vessel for thought-provoking lyrics and mindful meditation.
I had the privilege to sit down with Arie to discuss her ideas on how we can become well in an unwell world and become more connected in a culture ruled by separation. And how it all starts with each one of us by looking inside.
Bryan Robinson: India, I’m excited to talk with you. You’re a phenomenal music artist, but I’d like readers to know about your own personal journey into wellness and some of the things you’re doing to help the nation heal during these extraordinary times we’re living in.
India.Arie: When I got into the music industry, my health was hit hard on all levels—mentally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally. I started looking at my spiritual practices not as a hobby but as tools to make it through life. Now my self-development, wellness, and contemplation are my favorite things to do.
Robinson: Is there a correlation between your personal life and some of things you’re doing now?
Arie: When we talk about what things look like as opposed to what they are, the things I’m doing are about the place I’ve developed to. My career is 20 years old now. There’s part of being a celebrity that you construct and you tell people, “This is India.Arie.” We all have a public face. For me, it was missing many facets of everything I really am.
Robinson: In psychology, we call it the persona.
Arie: That’s right. The thing that makes me feel uncomfortable with the persona is how big it is. Sometimes people stop me and say, “Are you India.Arie?” and I have to think for a second. When I hear that, it sounds like they’re talking about a thing. I’m not a billboard. It’s not anything that hurts my feelings or bothers me. It feels weird.
Robinson: It’s as if you become a product or a thing bigger than life, and people want to be close to you.
Arie: Yes, almost like they tell you what you are, but they’re telling you what you are to them. That persona thing is so flat, missing facets of who you really are. Over the years, it was okay with me if it was what I had to do to get where I wanted to go. But as I grew, I’ve outgrown the ability to squash myself down or diminish my real nature in my public life. I used to be so careful not to offend people or say the right thing. Now when I sing, I let the audience know I’m not perky, just low key. I allow myself to be who I am, fully me.
Robinson: Can you tell me about the Wellness of We?
Arie: The Wellness of We is a joint venture with a longtime best friend because these are the things I’ve always wanted to offer. She’s on this journey I’m on to come out of the closet with all my stuff.
I’m a wellness practitioner, and I’m as much a meditator and writer as I am a singer. If I walk out the door right now, people will call me India.Arie, but they don’t know anything about my writing or meditation practice. I’m ready to come out and be all this stuff in public. I’ve always wanted to be part of anybody’s healing process with my music. That was my goal from the very beginning. Now, I’m ready to be more involved in the conversation, more on the ground with smaller groups of people, experiment with what it means to be in the conversation, not just the music. The Wellness of We is doing the personal practice with me being involved but also with giving people something they can turn to.
Robinson: Your opening up and letting people see more of you is going to help them because many people feel they’re the only ones who feel a certain way which isn’t true.
Arie: My writing taught me that. My first album came out at 25, and I thought there were a lot of things that only I had been through, but when the song came out, I was like, “Everybody feels this way?” Then about 10 years ago I started writing songs where I didn’t hold anything back. I have a song called “One” where I sing everything I believe, my complete spiritual philosophy all in one song. It says everything comes down to love, no matter what religion you are. But I had to work my way up to that level of honesty where I didn’t have to hide things or say them a certain way. So in the last 10 years, I write everything I want to write; I say what I want to say. After I wrote “I Am Light” in 2012 and after four or five years of letting myself be free, really free in my songwriting, I was able to write a song so simple but so true. Now I’m writing for that next level of opening. I learned after writing those songs, nothing changed. Nobody judged me. Every once in a while, three or four people will leave the concert, and I think, Well, I’m glad you left now because we’re about to go deeper. You know how people are about religion. It makes them question their whole thing about themselves.
Robinson: That discomfort is their lizard brain, the fearful survival part of us that gets threatened by new ideas. It’s not a thinking or creative brain. It’s narrow and scared of change. What you’re doing is widening that scope. In a way, you’re an evangelist spreading a message.
Arie: My own personal lesson is that my lizard brain had me thinking it was dangerous to write these songs that kept me thinking at the beginning of my career I couldn’t sing these things. Once I got free of that, every time I sing “One” and the deeper songs, the ones that are expressive, I get a standing ovation. And my lizard brain feels just fine.
Robinson: Does any of your music come from personal adversity?
Arie: All my music comes from personal adversity. People who really listen know because it speaks to them about their own personal adversity. If you just listen to the music, it’s pretty, but you miss it. If you listen to the song you hear a person who is working through things. With the song, “I Am Light,” for somebody to say, “I am not the things my family did,” that alone makes you ask, “What did they do to you? You had to have been there to know to sing that.” So I’m not the voices in my head; I’m not the pieces of the brokenness inside.
Robinson: “I Am Light” is my favorite.
Arie: I have another song called “Get It Together.” The first line says, “One shot to your heart without breaking your skin. No one has the power to hurt you like your Kin.” So what did your family do to you? I have song, “He Heals Me.” What is he healing you from, and who is he? How many he’s have there been that hurt you? It’s all from adversity. I’m not your average girl from your video. I learned to love myself unconditionally. So what were you like before you learned to love yourself unconditionally? For me, I want to heal myself with the music. And if anybody else can get something out of it, then I feel like I’m really blessed to get to do this. How many of us get to help people on a mass scale? I am grateful for it, but it starts with me. And I never know what people are going to think or how they’re going to respond. I just know how to sing my story with a certain depth that other people are able to hear their story, too. It all comes from personal adversity, even the songs that sound like the happiest love songs come from adversity because it’s how I’ve learned to say things you could never say in conversations. What I love about songwriting is that you can write the perfect sentence, and I don’t have to search for the words to speak my perfect, perfect truth. That was a long time coming because I came from a person who wrote songs that had spiritual qualities, but I was afraid to say certain things in my songs. Starting in 2009, I set myself free. “I Am Light” is one of the jewels in that crown to be able to express a deep truth in a simple way is a songwriter’s gold. I was able to go all the way from being afraid to sing a song like that to sing it at the Grammy’s ... I didn’t win that award, but I got a standing ovation. That was a whole other type of win. It felt good to come into my own in that moment in a public form.
Robinson: What message would you want to leave with people struggling with fear, uncertainty, and despair during these extraordinary times?
Arie: I lead an unconventional life. I’ve never been married. I’ve never dated a man I wanted to marry. I don’t have children. I was working for myself by the time I was 25. And what I get to do for work is rare and unique. Sometimes I forget the everyday things people go through. I feel like when we live really busy lives a lot of times we’re not only engaging our responsibilities. But we’re also running from our feelings, pain, or fear. Or whatever that stuff is inside—that loud voice. I think there’s something symbolic about the pandemic mandate to stay inside. It feels like an opportunity to go inside. It doesn’t have to be esoteric where you’re meditating for an hour. Just to go to a place and look at all the stuff you’re afraid of because we know when you look at your shadow, it dissipates more quickly than we think it will. And inside that place where you’re able to look at yourself, your fear, often answers come up. And that’s what we need right now: answers. A lot of that gets tossed around in our brain. If we can put it into our mind and heart and turn and look at ourselves, the answers start to come with little ideas and thoughts. Nobody knows what to do, but we all have that place in ourselves that knows. You have to become acquainted with that part of yourself. It’s hard at first to be quiet when you’ve never been quiet because that’s where all the scary stuff is. But it’s not as scary as you think once you look at it.
Robinson: You are very wise. What you just shared is relevant for everybody, regardless of their circumstances. If people could access the place you’re describing within themselves, everything else comes from that.
Arie: The answers are inside for all of us. And there are certain things nobody can tell you but you. Now that the stakes are so high, you’ve got to find a way to hear yourself.
A Final Word
India.Arie’s online practice, The Wellness Of We, seeks to advance collective well-being in an unwell world. The series features daily practice videos and live conversations with a range of wellness practitioners and advocates from around the country, including Arie herself, for talks designed to advance collective well-being and community care. “Wellness of We” is an 8-day online conversation to advance collective well-being that ran live from May 25 to June 1, 2020. You can watch the 8 sessions at Wellness of We.
India.Arie joins Resiliency 2020 on Zoom September 10, 2020. You can register for the free live-streaming webinar at resiliency2020.com.
https://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/02/02/india-arie
Singer-Songwriter India.Arie Brings Message Of Inclusivity And Hope To Berklee's MLK Celebration
February 2, 2017
The
marches, speeches and philosophy of non-violent resistance were
important facets of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights
movement, but King described music, specifically freedom songs, as the
"soul of the movement." "They are more than just incantations of clever
phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the
history of the Negro in America," King said.
The
roles of musician and activist often overlapped in people like Elaine
Brown and Nina Simone, giving the movement a repertoire of protest
songs. R&B and soul singer-songwriter India.Arie, who is performing
at Berklee's MLK celebration on Friday, Feb. 3, is carving out a place for herself in this realm today.
Get local arts and culture news, artist resources and ways to stay creative at home sent to your inbox each week. Sign up now.
Her
work joins the growing collection of contemporary protest music
emerging with the Black Lives Matter movement from artists like Kendrick
Lamar, Beyoncé, D’Angelo and Blood Orange.
Arie
hit her performing and recording stride in the early 2000s, and is now
more on the periphery of the pop music limelight. That doesn’t stop her
from creating music that is culturally and politically aware.
A
robust, athletic voice and sensitive songwriting gave Arie a large
local following in Atlanta when she was a teenager, often performing
solo, accompanying herself on guitar. A Motown music talent scout
discovered Arie in 1999 and her debut album "Acoustic Soul" was released
in 2001. The seven Grammy nominations for “Acoustic Soul” would be the
first of many, as well as some wins later on.
From
her debut, Arie was infusing social commentary into her lyrics as in
the body positive lead single for "Acoustic Soul," "Video."
ESPN MusicGolfThe Masters
“I love the way the record turned out, and working with the team at ESPN has been really lovely”
India.Arie's rendition of "Georgia On My Mind" scores new spot for the Masters; daughter of former NBA star discusses working with ESPN, Russell Westbrook's fandom, more
This year, fans will hear a new voice as part of ESPN’s promotional campaign for the Masters, thanks to four-time Grammy Award-winning artist India.Arie in a brand new rendition of the iconic song “Georgia On My Mind.”
The track, which was recorded exclusively for the campaign and released Thursday night, captures the reverence and beauty that the Masters inspires.
“We chose India as she brings a new sound and compelling voice to our Masters creative work,” said Senior Vice President, Marketing, Laura Gentile. “In addition, India has a close personal connection to Georgia, which was important to us. As soon as we heard a sample of India’s work we knew she would give a big nod to Ray Charles’ version, with a modern and fresh approach. Her track has exceeded our expectations.”
Front Row spoke to Arie, a longtime resident of Georgia, to learn more about the new song and her connection to sports:
When you heard that ESPN wanted to collaborate around the event in Augusta, what were your first thoughts?
Well, my first thought was – “why did they ask me?” Not that I don’t think I’m worthy of re-making the song “Georgia On My Mind,” but why do they want a new one?
I’m honored to do this song with this institution of the Masters. I can’t exactly articulate what feels right about it, but I thought long and hard before I said yes and it feels good. – India.ArieWhat personal connection or inspiration did you draw upon for this interpretation of such an iconic song?
I’m very connected to my heritage as a black American with roots in the south. I just knew that I needed to be me, and my producer Aaron Lindsey helped me to interpret the sound to match who I am as a musician. Also, I referenced the Ray Charles version first and really took the parts of the record that touched me the most.
I’m honored to do this song with this institution of the Masters. I can’t exactly articulate what feels right about it, but I thought long and hard before I said yes and it feels good. It feels right, I love the way the record turned out, and working with the team at ESPN has been really lovely.
Do you have any personal memories or stories about the Masters?
To be honest, all that I ever remember thinking was “There’s a world-class sports event in Augusta?” It was so close to home, that I couldn’t help but to feel sort of territorial and surprised.
What are your favorite childhood memories of your dad, former ABA/NBA and Michigan State star Ralph Simpson, during his playing days?
My father is the reason that I feel connected to athletics at all. For any sport, I funnel that through being the child of a world-class athlete. I have lots of memories but the main ones are being in the world and having people say “that’s Ralph Simpson’s daughter” or having a tall man walk up to me and say “I knew your father, he was very good to me.” It always makes me feel really proud and it makes me feel like I was born with the focus and drive of an athlete so I apply that to my career every day.
What was behind your tweet to NBA star Russell Westbrook?
That was a while ago, but he was on Twitter singing several of my songs and really knew all of the words. I loved that. The words to my songs are the foundation of my life’s work. Then I told him about my father – I don’t remember him answering back. LOL.
https://carmelmonthlymagazine.com/india-arie/
Palladium Spotlight: India.Arie The Worthy Tour
The PalladiumJanelle Morrison
May 29, 2019
Carmel Monthly
Photography // Benedict Evans
Arising from Atlanta’s rich music scene, Arie earned seven Grammy Award nominations with her 2001 debut release, “Acoustic Soul.” She has continued with a string of successful albums (five consecutive Top 10s) and collaborations with artists as diverse as John Mellencamp and Stevie Wonder, whom she accompanied on his historic 2015 Songs in the Key of Life Tour.
Among many other awards, Arie’s 21 Grammy nominations have brought four wins, including a Best R&B Album nod for her 2003 release “Voyage to India.”
Among her accomplishments and accolades are 10 world tours, millions of records sold, five Top 10 albums (including her No. 1 debuting 2006 release, “Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship”), numerous NAACP Image Awards, BET Awards, MTV Awards, command performances for three U.S. presidents (receiving public praise from President Clinton and President Obama), as well as working alongside her mentor Stevie Wonder, including sharing the stage in his history-making 2014–15 Songs in the Key of Life Tour.
She also met the Dalai Lama and toured the National Civil Rights Museum with him in Memphis, Tennessee. Arie was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 2009 and has joined Oprah Winfrey on multiple projects. She was also chosen by Winfrey’s OWN Network for their SuperSoul 100 list in the Change Makers and Wisdom Teachers category.
Arie is touring nationally in support of her new, eighth album, “Worthy,” featuring the singles “That Magic,” already a Top 10 R&B hit, and “What If,” a tribute to civil rights pioneers Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and many more.
Each ticket purchased for this show includes either a free digital download or CD copy of India.Arie’s album “Worthy.” You will receive an email with more details about this offer approximately seven days after your purchase. For tickets and details, visit thecenterpresents.org.
I spoke with India.Arie about the new album, “Worthy,” what she learned about herself during her three-year hiatus from touring and, of course, who are some of her mentors and sources of inspiration. Arie is a soulful, brilliant and multilayered artist whose timeless message that we are all “worthy” makes her music relevant and multigenerational.
It’s been a few years since you last toured. How’s the preparation going and how difficult or easy is it to get back into the swing of being on the road?
I wouldn’t say it’s easy to get back into the swing of things, but I’m ready, so I’m making it work. I’m looking forward to touring. It’s hard, but it gets easier each time you do it. I’m getting prepared and still learning a lot.
Looking back over the last three years, what were your experiences that led to the creation of “Worthy”?
It’s funny, this era of recording “Worthy” is not the first time that I’ve been through a lot of hard lessons. When I was younger—in my early 20s—I came out with my first album [2001, “Acoustic Soul”]. I didn’t really know what the rhythms of life were. And so, I just took it as I was learning these hard lessons.
Most of the time writing and recording this album, I was in a relationship, long term for me. That brings this whole set of lessons, as any adult knows. The songs on this album, anyone listening to them can hear the things I’ve been thinking about. Outside of the subject matter of the songs, I have also learned a lot about writing and producing albums for myself.
When I started working on this album, “Worthy,” I didn’t actually know that I was going to make another album. I wasn’t chomping at the bit like I had been in the past to make an album, and I didn’t have this whole stack of songs and saying, ‘Let’s get it popping and get this album done.’ But I knew that I wanted to make another album because that’s what I do, but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know if it was going to be completed or start gaining momentum.
You did complete the album, but it is unlike any of your previous albums. What “lesson” did you learn in the process of producing this album that has changed your overall state of being?
I made an album much different than anything I thought I was going to make. I learned what it means to surrender, I guess. Maybe that’s the overall lesson of these last three years. I learned to love. I learned how to surrender love when it’s time for it to be over. I surrendered to the music, and to the songs. I moved to another state, and I surrendered to that. I’m surrendering to something new. It’s been an interesting era. Ten years ago, I would’ve been under the bed, afraid of what’s going to happen and all that. But now, I just feel like it’s life and I’m ready to deal with whatever’s coming.
What does “Worthy” mean to you?
In the process of making my last four projects, I’ve been able to be empowered and not have to search for it. I think that comes across in my music in the way that I am able to better articulate a message of empowerment and not talking about searching for it. I’m talking about being it. I think that’s the beauty of the word “worthy.” It’s all-encompassing. Telling someone “You’re worthy” is not saying “You’re good at what you do” or “You’re pretty” or “I like the sound of your voice.” Telling someone “You’re worthy” is basically saying “You deserve to exist.” I don’t know if that word would resonate with me the way that it does or that I could write a body of songs about it the way I have if I didn’t understand that [the meaning] for myself.
What do you hope people take away from the “Worthy” album?
I want people to get whatever they’re meant to get from it, but I feel that some people need to be reminded [they’re worthy] because there’s messages everyday all over TV and social media that teach us we need to be a certain thing to be “worthy.” I wanted this album to be a reminder and a message to anybody who never heard someone say, “No, no, no, the world will tell you different, but you’re worthy, you’re significant and you matter because you exist.”
I want it [the album] to be a voice of that, but also, I just love the word [worthy] and I want it, through me, to be something that’s living in the world for a while.
I can never say what anybody gets from a song. I can really only speak to what my intention is because people get different things, which is the beauty of music. I know for me, my intentions in those first two albums were to express myself and to do it in a way that I knew I would feel good about what I was saying. In the beginning, it was theoretical that I would be singing these songs for the next 20 years. I hoped that people would want to hear them 20 years later, but I didn’t know.
At some point, I decided that if I was going to be singing them for the next 20 years, I want to be able to phrase things in a way and use words that are empowering to me. Until I had reached my third and fourth project, it felt more like I had things that I needed to get off my chest. By the time I got to my “SongVersation” album, I had been through so much growing up that I understood, just from experience, how words can affect people.
The notion of being in this industry for 20 years is no longer theoretical for you. What does it mean to you to still be creating and producing songs for another generation of fans?
In the beginning, it was my hope and wish that I could be around for 20 years, but inside of that wish was all the stuff you can imagine. Maybe people’s children will grow up on my music or maybe people will walk down the aisles to my songs or maybe somebody will say I taught them something—because that’s what the music I love does for me. It’s taught me things about life and is a part of my actual life. I hope that I can be that for someone.
With “Worthy”, I want to continue to let people in on my process and where I am in my life and what I’m thinking about. For anybody who’s been with me these 20 years, I want them to continue to walk my journey and my growth with me. But also, people who are younger and just learning about life, I want to be something they can turn to that has that [positive] energy in it.
There’s lots of music coming out every day. Music is so different right now—the things people are saying and think are OK to say, especially with how much candid talk [there is] about drugs and what kind of drugs people take. For me, that’s one of the most shocking things right now, and I want to continue to be an alternative voice. People can listen to what they want to listen to, of course—whatever they find entertaining.
I want to be something that can be on their shelves too. For their quiet moments or Sunday mornings or when they’re struggling with something.
You have mentioned that some of your mentors include your mom and Stevie Wonder. [Arie’s mother, Joyce Simpson, was a Motown singer who opened for Stevie Wonder and Al Green.] How have they impacted and how do they continue to impact your personal and professional development?
Yes, my mom is a vocal talent, but she also taught me how to write songs. I watched her write songs, go into the studios, and produce and record them. My mother makes all my stage gowns and my stage clothes, and she’s also a person that I can count on. She never asks me for things. She doesn’t ask me for money. She doesn’t use me or try to get me to sign things for her friends or get [me] to show up to places so she can look cool—she doesn’t do any of that. My mom is grounded, and she’s what helps me to be grounded. She taught me everything I know. She supports me in everything.
And Stevie [Wonder] too—just the fact that he wants to be there for me is an inspiration. He’s my favorite artist—period. Not just [as a] musician, he’s my favorite artist. For him to be available for me to ask questions or to vent about things or even to talk about personal stuff, relationships and all that, is inspiring, just because who doesn’t want their favorite artist to be on their side?
What do you enjoy when you’re not performing and creating music?
Another thing that is really important to my life is travel. I learn so much through the people that I meet. I’ve had conversations with all kinds of different people. I’ve talked with old African priests and had a chance to talk with Maya Angelou on several occasions. I got to talk to Nelson Mandela one time.
Oprah has been a source of inspiration and mentorship. [Arie appeared with Oprah Winfrey on OWN’s “SuperSoul Sunday” television show, conducted a 25-minute “SongVersation” on Oprah’s “SuperSoul Sessions” and showcased her” SongVersation” on Oprah’s Share Your Adventure Cruise.]
Anytime I email her about something, she answers back, right away. She’s always so cool. I emailed her the other day—it had something to do with diet—and she answered me right away. I’ve also been able to learn a lot from different elder musicians.
I remember having a conversation with one the of Temptations and once with Tony Bennett. He’s inspiring, as you know. I talked with him one time outside of a hotel and just what he said [in that conversation] got me straight about some things. Some people I talk to periodically and other people just have the perfect words at the perfect time, and I take it in. I take it seriously when Tony Bennett is telling me something.
Having great mentors assist you along your journey, how important is it for you to mentor those who seek wisdom and guidance?
It’s funny, I don’t know if other people have this happen to them, but it happens to me all the time where I think, “What do I have to teach anybody?” But there’s always somebody who is coming up behind you who needs to know things that have become basic for you, and I find myself having conversations with people and not realizing that I’m actually mentoring them.
I think it’s important, especially in the music industry, because there is so much that you don’t know until you are down in the trenches. I think it’s important to have people to talk to about it, and it’s weird because in the music industry, everybody is doing their own thing and it’s kind of a self-absorbed way to live. You’re so busy all the time, and you’re worried about you or you’re worried about your crew—you might have 18 people on the road with you, and that’s all you think about for two months.
There’s not a sorority or fraternity for the music industry, though I think there should be, that could help a lot of people who go through things that are sometimes painful. When somebody asks me a question, I will give them everything I know because sometimes it’s all you have. Most of the people in your life have never been on tour or don’t know what it’s like to have a whole bunch of personal stuff going on inside and still have to sing a happy song on TV at 6 a.m. because it’s your single. Most of the people in an artist’s life won’t know what that’s like even if they empathize with you and love you.
I’m here for whoever wants to talk and wish that I could do it more often and that people would ask me more. Whether it’s about men, touring, money, managers, not just music, call me. I just want to put myself out there the way Stevie did for me. I wish there was a way, especially for women [artists], where we could be together and talk once a quarter or something. We have our parents and stuff, but it’s different to have someone who loves you who does what you do. That’s what my relationship with Stevie [Wonder] means for me.
In addition to running your own lifestyle/music brand SoulBird [launched in 2011], you also produce your own podcast. Are you continuing to produce that while on tour?
Yes, I took a break after the new year. Since I’m doing it on my own, I called the next round of shows “Season Two,” so before this tour, I recorded six of them, and they’ll come out while I’m on tour. I do it myself, on my laptop, and engineer the whole thing. It is call “SongVersation: The Podcast,” and I love doing it. It goes back to your last question—it is a certain type of mentorship. It is based on music, but it’s really not about the music but the wisdom behind the song and the process of recording the song and where it comes from.
I’m really just sharing my experiences and wisdom. I love doing this. I hope anybody who likes to talk about music and spiritual things, personal growth and how those things intertwine, that’s what my podcast is about.
Follow India.Arie’s podcast, “SongVersation,” on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Anchor.
THE MUSIC OF INDIA.ARIE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH INDIA.ARIE:
