June 18th, 2009
“How I Got Over” Pushed Back To October
There’s a great, long piece on the Roots posted over at JamBase, which among many other things notes that the group’s forthcoming album How I Got Over is “80-to-90-percent finished” and that it’s been pushed back from a June to an October release “in a well thought-out effort to give you people the best product possible – and to give [their record label] Def Jam proper set up time,” as per ?uestlove’s recent Tweet. Here’s an excerpt from the article discussing the new disc:
On the heels of 2006’s Game Theory and 2008’s Rising Down, the darkest albums of the band’s career, Questlove says that the dawn of the Obama era has given them a glimmer of hope but not yet unadulterated celebration. The title is a reference to the Clara Ward gospel hymn made famous by Mahalia Jackson.
The album will feature collaborations with Chrisette Michelle, Beanie Sigel, Young Chris, Blu, Phonte from Little Brother, and Pharoahe Monch. The band has also worked with Cody ChesnuTT, the rarely seen singer-songwriter who re-recorded his song “The Seed” with The Roots in 2002. They’ll do the same on How I Got Over with ChesnuTT’s “Serve This Royalty.” The album also features a cover of Gary Bartz’s “Celestial Blues,” featuring its original singer, Andy Bey.
“It’s an album that deals with angels and demons,” Questlove says. “And man’s inner struggle to do good and the temptation to do bad, which is easier than taking the scenic route to good. It would have been very easy to do the celebratory ‘It’s a new day’ kind of thing. This is the light at the end of the tunnel record but there’s this sort of gasping for air.”
He refers to the scene in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, one of Questlove’s favorite films, in which Robert De Niro’s character is tied to the boat and the water is at nose level, leaving him just enough space to breathe before he starts drowning. “That’s sort of the tone of the album,” he continues. “The album is like, ‘We know there’s going to be light at the end of the tunnel but it’s still a struggle.’ A lot of mess has been made in the last eight years. We are probably the only rap group whose creative direction really depends on where things are socially in America. This time it’s a slight sigh of relief, not as angry as the last one.”
[Photo by Michael Alan Goldberg.]
1 Trackback(s)