By Wesley Morris
A good musician’s relationship with the past is tricky. You want to move forward without entirely forsaking what you’ve already done. You don’t want it defining you when so much future defining lies ahead. It’s a dilemma Meshell Ndegeocello was thinking through at her dining room table in Brooklyn on a recent afternoon.
Ndegeocello happens to be much more than merely a good musician. She’s been playing professionally since the early 1990s and, at 55, is about to release her 14th album, a collection of songs that excites her. The past — the repertoire, the old stuff, the hits — can start to feel like “karaoke of myself,” she said. Take her performances earlier this year at the Blue Note, the essential Greenwich Village jazz club.
Over the course of a month, she and the six assiduous, deliriously skilled musicians in her band turned a rush-hour subway car of a venue into their hearth. To fuel these shows, Ndegeocello could have reached into three decades of her own music, an eclectic body of work whose spine is funk — she’s all but synonymous with the bass — and guided by her insinuating baritone. Yet on one January night, her ensemble’s layered mantras and lacquered grooves were the fruit of a long-gestating project built around the existential straits of being Black in America that now comprise this new album, “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.”
The room swayed and rhythmically nodded as rapt, reverent congregants. More than halfway through: a change-up. A jewel from the Ndegeocello trove, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” off her 31-year-old debut album, “Plantation Lullabies.” The song had essentially been reconsidered, infused with the solemnity and rumination befitting the rest of the set. But the women at the table behind mine flipped out with the gratitude of recognition.
That moment at the Blue Note came back to me watching Ndegeocello and her band rehearse one afternoon last month at her studio in Long Island City, in Queens. They were getting ready for an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Ndegeocello had planned to stock it with selections from “No More Water,” which arrives on Friday. (Its release coincides with Baldwin’s centennial.) Running through the set list, she mentioned “Outside Your Door,” a quiet-storm slow burn from “Plantation Lullabies” that a casual Ndegeocellist might be expecting. Then she reconsidered, wary of NPR’s request that she perform a hit.
A few days later, we were back at the homey apartment she shares with her wife of almost 20 years, Alison Riley, who’s also her manager. Ndegeocello was mulling over the dilemma of her substantial catalog.
Ndegeocello had a memorable 1990s. “Plantation Lullabies” arrived in 1993, and was the kind of album that broke molds and made mosaics of the pieces. “Neo-soul,” the unimaginative music writers called it. She gave it some polemics and some provocation (“Shoot’n Up and Gett’n High,” “Step Into the Projects,” “Soul on Ice”). She put herself on the streets and between the sheets. The sensibility swaggered.
Ndegeocello’s look seemed daring, too. She kept her head bald; she slung her bass from behind her back as if it were loaded. This person was butch and femme and for real. Her style matched the rambunctious hip-hop androgyny that felt both defiant and kind of normal for all kinds of Black pop stars in the early 1990s (Janet Jackson, TLC, MC Lyte, SWV, Jade): Queer studies hiding in plain sight and storming the charts. Ndegeocello was distinct among the gender colliders. She sounded the part. It wasn’t a part at all.
The industry noticed. Ndegeocello signed with Madonna’s new Maverick label and, later, rapped the bridge on her “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” with swaggy lassitude. Ndegeocello duetted with John Mellencamp and played bass on a ubiquitous cover of “Wild Night,” whose popularity has superseded Van Morrison’s original. In 1995, she was up for four Grammys; the year before, two MTV Video Music Awards, when those were still a prize. She was on a path to stardom.
But she was also in her mid-20s and was still unsure what kind of artist to be. “You don’t trust in yourself. You’re waiting for the crowd that you’ve assembled,” she said about paying audiences, “to affirm you. And it’s painful.”
But by the end of the 1990s and the start of the 2000s, after she’d reached her 30s, a wide cohort of singer-songwriter peers had come up with and around her (Sarah McLachlan, K.D. Lang, Tori Amos, Dionne Farris, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, Jill Scott, Macy Gray). She knew better what her strengths were.
The albums she made during the period after “Plantation Lullabies” — “Peace Beyond Passion” (1996), “Bitter” (1999), “Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape” (2002) — were bolder, more ambitious, yet more considered as albums.
A white executive told Ndegeocello she needed Blacker music. She meant “Cookie” (2002), with its flexing racial declamations, as comic revenge. By the end of this stretch, epiphany had dawned. “I’m a musician,” Ndegeocello recalled realizing. “I don’t want to be a star. I just want to be a working musician. I want to have a career. I don’t want to have one hit.”
There’s a version of Ndegeocello’s story in which she remains frozen in, say, 1995, retreading. What happened instead is freedom and constant discovery.
During the pandemic, she deepened her connection to Baldwin. “No More Water” is the culmination of that rekindling. It’s an expansive, adventurous piece that turns the writer and activist into an organizing principle. It’s some of the most hauntingly, melodically beautifully work she’s made. (We don’t hear Ndegeocello’s voice in the clear until the fifth song.)
The album is vivid about the ways in which the American past recurs in the present. It also feels like a reckoning with how true peace could sound. There is Donny Hathaway in there, church cellar, too. It’s tear-inducing. You’ve heard of house music. This is home music — a garden, a porch, in a community.
At the Tiny Desk performance, she was inviting and sage, marching in place, grooving, in a dashiki, a kaffiyeh draped unmistakably over her microphone. The set just about ended with“Virgo,” from her 2023 album “The Omnichord Real Book.” She introduced the band, mentioned the release date for “No More Water,” then thanked the audience “for listening to something new. It means so much to me.”
Then she presented her bonus, “just for you,” she said, before wading into “Outside Your Door.” People in the room were moaning in ecstasy. It is a gift that Ndegeocello has learned to give.
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