Drama Queens - Work in Progress: Aloe Blacc

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc is back with his first album in five years — but it's not your typical album. This one merges the music with philanthropic causes.Aloe shares how his family's roots have helped shape the sounds of his 6th studio album, the vital role of community, his fascinating take on what the music industry was like in the 90s without social media, and what led to him using his music for positive social transformation!Aloe Blacc's new album, 'Stand Together' is available now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, everyone. It's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another week of Work in Progress. I am geeked about today's guest because I am such an enormous fan, not only of his art, but his activism, and I cannot wait to pick his brain on all of it. Today's guest is Allo Black. You know him as an American singer and rapper. You know him from Avichie's Wake

Me Up and from his smash hit, I Need a Dollar. What you may not know is that Allo never planned on being a musician. His life kind of happened by accident. He thought he would be an academic and somehow took a left turn. And from touring around the world and major stages everywhere, he has managed to solidify his place in the mainstream music scene while also being an incredible advocate for change, from studying the methodologies of Nelson Mandela to being mentored by Harry Belafonte.

Allo has been involved in so many charitable causes and in deep social justice work. He speaks out on the importance of mental health awareness. He has collaborated with the Biden administration to promote its national strategy to prevent suicide. And his latest album, Stand Together, is not only a beautiful musical journey that I've been waiting for for five years,

but every song on the album has a partnered philanthropic initiative that fans can learn about, Talk about being a true artist in every sense of the word and spending your privilege and your platform for good. Let's hear from Allo Black. Where are you today? I live in L.A. I'm in Glendale. Oh, are you there now?

Neighbors. No, I'm actually on the East Coast now. but my folks are still there and yeah we were like miracle mile kids and then eventually my parents moved to Pasadena and they're still there oh crazy normally I like to ask people about who they were as kids and so often when I'm interviewing parents that have kids in that kind of stage of developmental age that I know years are in they get to kind of see this mirroring of themselves as children and see versions of themselves in their own children at the same time. Yeah. And I wonder if you got to go back and hang out with yourself as a 10-year-old kid, the way you

get to hang out with your kids. Would you see aspects of the man you are today in that little boy? Oh, probably not. I don't know. I don't know. I was, I see my son and there are a lot of similarities in him as a child compared to who I was as a child. And I think it's going to be, I think he might be the same. It's going to be like a night and day flip where the kind of rambunctious unbridled energy of youth sort of meets with this, this moment of change where you become measured and more temperate and decisive but no also with the ability to navigate between both personalities the extrovert the introvert the entertainer and the observer yeah i feel like yeah he seems like he's probably going to uh flip that switch

in the next seven years probably. Wow. And is that right around when it started to happen for you? No. It happened for me earlier, then I think it will happen for him. But I think that it's just different circumstances. You know, I had two parents that worked full time. We were a very kind of middle-class family. and what's different now is that there's, I think, a lot more attention that my wife and I give to the kids a lot more comfort and intentional parenting

versus fly by the seat of your pants, put wood on the table, make sure the kids get to school parenting that I grew up with. Yeah. I talk to my friends about this all the time because we're really the first generation that has been in this phase of life with all these resources, all the mental health studies and all the understanding of, you know, communication and the value of therapy and all these things that our folks didn't really have. And it's so inspiring for me to look at parents in my life and watch the way they can acknowledge where their own parents fell short, still love them

for it, and be choosing to create a different pattern in real time. Yeah. It's pretty incredible. It is incredible. There's a lot, like you said, a lot of resources. We've chosen a school that has a pedagogy that I think helps parents become better parents. one of the really special things is that before the surgeon general's warning on social media we were already engaged in a media free campus media free lifestyle and so you know it's

very limited the amount of television or tv programming that the kids would get and they're you know, they're fine with it. They've learned to manage without it. And there's no pressure coming from the school because the other kids are on board with the program. So it's helped us the better parents, but also just more focused and intentional. Yeah. It's an interesting thing, I think, for people in our lines of work to analyze relationships to media. And even when you talk about how the sort of flip happened in your young self, how as an adult you have to hold both your performer and your introvert. You know, I think about that a lot, being the performer, the entertainer, and also a listener who likes to be quiet. There's then the layer of how you

have to participate in media on top of it. And when you've pursued a career in it, I mean, when before you became a solo artist you were part of a of a hip hop duo and LA in the 90s I mean everything about it was so incredible and music was so incredible and there's no way to be a musician without being in the media right so like right at least then there was no social there was no thumb scroll on the iPhone what was that what was that era like for you was the era. I don't know that we'll ever be able to have that again. I would love to try to replicate it somehow, but it would take concerted effort on everybody's part to recognize that what makes it special is sort of the exclusivity of the temporal exclusivity, the spatial

exclusivity and the informational exclusivity is that if you know you know and once you're there you get to experience it and then it's word of mouth and if you weren't there then it's like the the tail of you know the fish that you caught just keeps getting bigger and big and so the hype gets is real so but wow um when i was growing up and in the hip hop scene, we would have access to all of the artists, the stars nowadays, people that you kind of just look at like, oh, that's a bona fide, you know, superstar billionaire artist in hip hop. Those folks, we would literally go to clubs and see them for five bucks or ten bucks in L.A. And just an awesome time of music and dance. And then.

and art and culture. I know that it is possible, and I know that it was part of our mental wellness, right? It was our own modality for ensuring that we were healthy because we had a community and a culture that we belonged to that we subscribed to. Of course, my parents were from Panama. There was a whole community and culture from Central America,

Latin America, that I was part of. And then my friends that I went to school with, we had our own sort of, you know, suburban subculture. And then there were my hip-hop friends and culture. So I had the opportunity to choose between and actually code switch between a lot of different cultures. But it's the, it was the beautiful mental wellness. I'm going to, making it an association with mental wellness now, I wouldn't have done it back then, but now I can see that the fact that we were in propinquity and proximity with one another, that we were engaged in physical activity, so it was dance or performance, the fact that we were free to make mistakes without the repercussion of forever documentation, all of that combined. was, I think, the best and most nurturing soil to grow up in.

I love that, that idea that you could be free not only to make mistakes, but to experiment with your own art. Because, sure, if you can make a mistake in private, you can have a normally sized consequence of sorts. to do it in public does something to, I think, a tiny human brain that it's not meant to experience. But I worry about this, everyone recording everything all the time, I worry about what that's costing art

because people are afraid to have something that's mediocre go on the internet. But you've got to rehearse, you've got to try things, you've got to see, if you're a comedian, you have to see how a joke works in a crowd, comedian's workshop around the country. Artists perform a new song, see what the vibe is, realize it's missing a synth or a drum or whatever, and go back and layer. And nobody wants to do that anymore. People only want to give out what is perfect because it might go somewhere.

And I'm scared of the generation of art we're costing ourselves because everyone's too afraid to take risks now? Yeah, that's a real concern of mine as well. And I would add in the layer of algorithms and industry. Industry is so much smarter. And now with algorithms, they're even more informed about how to sell and market. And what's unfortunate is that it becomes this recursive loop, a reductive recursive loop that does not allow for better or more interesting or productive art. Yes. And I think about how we can, you know, try to, you know, go back to square one. And I don't want to sound like, you know, back in my day, but there was something special about the garage band.

oh yes and now that it's more so the discovery and engagement is online and it's more insular is more solo

than it is the group and the groups that exist are all so manicured and perfect and pristine that it's it begs the

question, will we ever be able to see, you know, kids just having fun for the sake of having fun anymore? Or is all of their fun for display and does it have to be perfectly presented and rehearsed fun? And when it works for these young artists, the blowup is so fast. You know, it's been interesting to watch Chapel Rhone have this big year and everyone's like, good for her. And she's out there being And like, I'm traumatized. Like, the internet's wild. What people expect of me is really hard for me to process. A year and a half ago, nobody knew this kid's name.

And I think about the pressure, you know, we kind of got to be out there and make a thing and have a show premiere or drop an album and do the press tour. And then also, like, go home, go to the bar with our friends. Like, not every outing was expected to. to be chased and tailed and photographed and packaged. And I think about things that are so, like those moments that take me back, almost like an olfactory hit when you smell something,

and suddenly you're next to someone you haven't seen in ages. And when I was getting ready for today, and I was thinking about all the phases of my own life that your music has been a part of, I even think about when I need a dollar, was, you know, the theme song to make it in America. And like, my buddy Brian Greenberg from my first show, One Tree Hill, was on that show.

And we were like, oh, my God. And it felt like this moment for us, like supporting our friend and the song that was everywhere on the radio. And it was the theme song of the HBO show. Like the possibilities felt so big. And it was, it's like one of my favorite memories as a young artist. And it wasn't even my show. But it was like we all had this connection in this way.

and nobody was expected to be in like the head to toe look by the stylist and doing the thing and you know now everybody's looking at these retro photos from the 90s in the early 2000s and being like God what cool style and it's like people were just wearing they were yeah what was in the drawer there was no stylist there was none of this thank you for mentioning i need a dollar because that was an epic moment for me as well That was exactly what you said. I was just making music for the few fans that I knew I had who would appreciate it. And I was like, and I'll probably go get another job in a couple months.

Yes. And now for our sponsors. And can I ask just a technical question for the timeline? How long was this after you embarked as a solo artist? I need a dollar. hit in 2009 or so, I had been laid off in 2003, so six years of kind of solo artistry. I've always been engaged in art doing hip-hop music. I released, I think, 2005 maybe, the last the hip-hop album with my partner DJ Exile as Eminon.

and then released a solo album in 2006 or something like that. So this song hits and it's like, what? Yeah. I mean, when that beat starts and it just, the loop is so good. I think about walking down the street in New York and, like, I don't know. It's so, it's seminal. Oh, my goodness. You're right.

It has an essence of a really, really powerful emotive. sound to it and it does it does make me think of like the scene you know scene of staying alive where John Travolts was just walking down New York but I was you know I was at a moment where I had no expectations because I'd been doing music for so long and music really wasn't supposed to be my career it's just the hobby and I knew that I could always go back to corporate or go back to school and kind of be a career scholar or something. But I was lucky. I was lucky. And I've been chasing this luck, writing this luck for a little bit. Yeah. You said in an article, I suppose I should say an interview, it was an interview that an article was written from,

that you feel like serendipity lives on your front doorstep. Oh my goodness. can you can you say a little bit more about that as you talk about riding this wave yeah i feel like it's not fair you know i have a lot of friends who are struggling artists who um are incredibly talented but just haven't had what i consider the lucky breaks that i've had and i wish that i could share you know the sprinkles of of serendipity with them but But everywhere I look, there's something positive happening. And my goal is to just try to pay it forward as much as possible with philanthropy and with message and engagement.

But I was signed to an indie label. First of all, I wasn't signed to any label in the very beginning. I was going to work for a big corporation. And they pushed my start date back. And because they pushed my start date back, the opportunity to go to go on tour in Europe opened up because one of the members of this hip hop group decided to stay home. So there was an extra seat in the bus, an extra bed in the hotel rooms. And the idea was that I could join the tour if I paid my way. And I had just received, you know, just graduated from college, received this like exit scholar.

that I don't even, again, another serendipity, right? Yeah. Money on the way out? Okay, I'll take it. So I had some money to pay my way on this tour. Came home and started recording with the artists that I had toured with. And one of the recordings piqued the attention of the record label that that artist was signed to.

So they ended up signing me as a singer and not an MC. So all this time, this whole tour I'd done, I'm a rapper, and I'm writing hip-hop music, and I decide to sing on one track, and the label's considering me a vocalist, and now I'm signed as a singer. And so I had to really, like, bootstrap myself to become a vocalist and a singer, trying so many different sounds and styles over the years. And then by the time I started working on my second album, Good Things, which holds the I Need a Dollar song,

I kind of had figured out where the best place was to use my voice. So it wasn't in pop R&B. It wasn't alternative rock. It was in this kind of folk soul vocal. And it ended up being the hallmark of my early career. Yeah. It's amazing. And I, again, I think about that thing.

Would you have had the time and space to, find the best use of your voice. Had that moment in your early career been happening in this kind of algorithmic machine we're in now? No, I don't think so. Yeah. I think because of my attraction to process, I would be trying to figure out the algorithm how to beat it. And it wouldn't give me the opportunity to be my best artistic self. And I'm so lucky that in how to, in high school, I had the chance to put in 10,000 hours of free, expressive, artistic creation. Yeah. Without, again, without the repercussions of having to be perfect because it wasn't going online.

Right. It was being vetted by my very close associates. And once they approved, then it made it to, you know, mixed tapes that we then deliver to more people. I miss the mixtape when you talked earlier about like if you know you know when you finally when you're not a music maker but you love art you know artists of a different vertical like to go oh now I now I get the heads up when the mixtapes are coming like nothing was cooler you know as a as a young person finding the way in these creative scenes I'm like oh my god just to hear you talk about like you workshould it, then it goes on the mixtape, then it goes out, then people come to see you in the venue. It's like, I don't know if we'll get it again, but I'd be so thrilled if we could figure out a way. Yeah. Again, I'm going to try to figure out how that can be possible.

I think that there is a hunger for it, but I want to, you know, try to, my kids are a hop-skipping a jump away from high school, and so maybe, you know, I'll try to workshop it with them, a rental venue where they can go and, you know, have parties and be creative and explore. But one rule is that it has to happen offline. Yeah, phone free. Love it. I even think about what a big deal it was. in that era, when you'd hear about something after and then you'd see the, you know, the five

photos that came out because some great shooter was there. But that was it. It wasn't, you know, 600 grainy Instagram videos or whatever. And there's something, I think, really beautiful about all of that. And I do think it's why so many young people crave it. I hear from, you know, my friends with teenagers. We've kind of got two camps, like friends with little kids, like, you know, five and under, and then we've got friends with teenagers. And the teenagers want to ask questions about my first show, because they're like, everybody has a flip phone. They all talk to each other about how they're feeling.

No one's texting. And that kind of blows my mind. These kids are like, wait, we want that version of high school. Yeah. The beauty is the art of story. And so what is, you know, missing is that with all of this video and all of these photos available for every event that happens, and also the ability to watch and experience in real time, you lose the art of story. And so nobody tells the story in a way that is compelling. You're receiving it in real time and you get to interpret it at your own level with your own.

with your own, you know, intellectual curiosity and your own ability to really process deeply. And we all have different abilities. But when you have a storyteller that's coming to you and narrating, dictating really, what you should feel and how you should feel, that's a whole different experience. And I think that's what is missing.

is the great narrator. Yes, and what I miss about the great narrator is that it was being presented, as you said, with someone's story that also helped to encourage critical thinking and to question the story, to examine the facts of it rather than just to look at 100 images and decide you already know the story. the irony that we used to have narrators and that made us better critical thinkers is not lost on me and it it gets to the root of something I've always really admired about you as a you know a person in my age peer groupish like you're one of those people I'm like yeah we kind of came up together even though we never really knew each other and I'm so happy you're here but you've done something that I've seen be so important to so many artists in our generation which is use your platform, really spend the privilege of your platform for others as an advocate, as an activist, you know, you've focused on mental health, you've focused on criminal justice reform, you have so artfully told other people's stories to remind people that, if we don't have community, we don't have anything. when did that spark get lit for you as an artist or was it always part of who you are as a person and the artistry helps let it out?

Right. I think there's definitely a moment where it was lit and I would say right after I need a dollar, I was very, very excited to be, you know, kind of having this moment of visibility after being an obscure niche artist on an obscure niche record label. And I was asked to do some endorsements for different products, some luxury products.

And one of them was a liquor brand that happened to be a gin that was my dad's favorite gin. I am not a drinker, never was, but I thought, I'll take some photos and hold a martini and then I'll have some bottles sent to my dad and he'll get the posters and it'll be a nice little father-son moment. And the posters ended up being placed in the inner city across the country. And I got a phone call from one of my wife's friends who was an activist out of an organization called Community Coalition of South L.A., which was started by now Mayor Karen Bass,

but back she was just a citizen of her community trying to make it better and she started a non-profit organization the phone call was a reprimand of my use of my celebrity and influence to sell alcohol and liquor in a community where this organization

was trying to shut down liquor stores which had become a blight on the community and I had no connection and no idea and I was really taken back. So I use that as an opportunity to visit the org, learn what they were doing, and recognize how much my influence was a responsibility that I had to take seriously. And when I signed with a major record label after that, I promised that I'll use my music for positive social transformation and you know try to turn every music video into a PSA that could tell a story to

humanize the most vulnerable yeah that's beautiful and you know from from learning lessons and I think it's also very vulnerable if I may say to be willing to learn out loud I think it's incredibly important to to push back against this sort of weird algorithmic perfect to say, oh, yeah, I did something that seemed fun, and it turned out to have an impact that was terrible. FYI, this was my lesson. If you're ever in this position, ask these questions, you know, nobody gives us a handbook on how to do these things right and how to how to pull the thread till you get to the end of it. And it's so interesting to hear about that feedback and the way you chose to receive it, and then to think about what you've done with all of this since, you know,

as you said, the way you use your music, the way that you've stepped up. And I mean, even helped join the president, you know, join President Biden to talk about him and Kamala Harris' national strategy for suicide prevention, you know, to take a crisis for our community. And and say this is something a lot of people keep hidden out of pain and shame and let's go talk about it literally from the most powerful you know stage in America what was that like for you was that unnerving in any way or as you've built this sort of series of learnings and um voicings for others did it just feel like the next right thing I would say the latter.

It feels like the next right thing. I don't feel any real trepidation. And I look to my mentors and also heroes from the past that have basically educated me on what's possible. I think about, you know, I was fortunate to meet Quakou and Endaba Mandela. These are the grandsons of Nelson Mandela. And the stories that I hear from them and understanding Nelson Mandela's story. also Winnie Mandela's story, that in the face of the most tremendous and horrendous adversity, torture, incarceration, that he still was able to maintain a level of humanity and

compassion, not just for himself, but for perceivably his enemies, which, you know, he wouldn't call them his enemies because he didn't punish them when he came out of prison. He embraced everyone and moved forward with dignity. And I think about Harry Belafonte, who was a mentor of mine, someone that I had a chance to sit with and learn from, and how. he used his voice and celebrity in a way to encourage, you know, transformation that otherwise might not have happened without his very privileged position. And there certainly was fear, you know, death threats, physical altercations, but somebody's got to do the work.

you're in that position and you have that access, then the job is yours. And you have to rise to the occasion. So I don't know, I just think I felt, I feel like I've had the right guides along the way. That's beautiful. And now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy, and I think you will too. the, you know, the Harry's, the Jane Fonda's, the folks who came before all of us, that when the pushback comes and the fear kind of sinks in of like, oh, God, what does it mean to say this out loud and to keep beating this drum and to refuse to be quiet when you fill in terrible thing that, you know,

someone out there does that falls under the category of threat? But I think in moments, especially like this one, you know, this many days into this new all-hands-on-deck administration, I just think, well, they did it. They did this work. We don't get to do less. There is no world in which we can do less because we, for all the negative aspects of how interconnected we are, we do have the ability to do this. You and I can be in community from different sides of the country. We can get on a phone and speak to people and remind people

of what's good and true. And yeah, when I get scared, I try to think about those people. Are there like leaders and mentors or folks you call? Like, who do you turn to when you get Scared. It's mostly community. Mostly community. You know, what reassures me is that Harry Belafonte was in the middle of all of the civil rights struggle. And many of his peers were murdered, Dr. King. You know, many were beaten.

But he was able to also survive, and for decades and decades later. to be able to tell the story and to tool up and train a whole new generational artists. So, but there are others, you know, that in my circle, who are the folks that I go to. When I'm trying to think through how we position ourselves for the next four years and beyond, what are the what are the strategies what is the goal you know and what are how do we triage what are the things that are not as important as what are our highest priorities and how do we make sure we maximize those highest priorities yes and how do we do it in a way in this very um information

sensitive or hyper informed society how do we do it in a way that is information

sensitive in ways that doesn't make our strategy and concepts vulnerable to

to being thwarted so there are lessons and from the past there are technologies that

exist that didn't exist then and we've just got to be thoughtful about how we manage but really what it comes down to is as well making sure that we are using our influence

for the betterment of humanity all humanity and we are standing up for the rights and dignity of the most vulnerable movable. The weight of it feels very immense and close to me right now, but I do feel very grateful that so many of us in our little worlds that all kind of Venn diagram together in the ways that they do

are both preparing and slowing down just enough to ask these kinds of of questions. That has been one of the great lessons for me is that in the immediate, you know, fury or heartbreak that can come to witnessing injustice, like, I have a spicy Italian lady in me. Like, I can just get out there and start screaming and to hold that passion, but also take a breath and go to a friend and say, okay, what's the plan? How do I scream effectively? How do I instill the fear my grandmother knew how to instill in me effectively. And how do I also enter the spaces that require immense empathy with that empathy on my sleeve and just be present to support people? And I wonder if maybe the root of that willingness to be curious

is from the thing we all share, which is being a storyteller. Yeah. I believe that we all have the storytelling capacity. And we all have to, those of us who are recognized for it, have to lead with it. And we've got to lead with it in a way that's going to empower others to use their storytelling. You know, quite often we'll be at some public event and my wife and I. I kind of retreat because I feel like. Like, if it's not my show, I don't need to be on stage. And it's an opportunity for other people to be seen and on stage.

And my wife always reminds me, she's like, but this is, people love your voice and is, you know, why would you restrict them of it? And part of me is like, well, they haven't asked for it, so I don't want to impose. But she's right, though, there's, you know, there is. always an opportunity with the right intention and with with humility to uh quote unquote impose if you can do something good with it i like that impose for good yeah that feels nice you can use your your fiery italian voice um at in some moments yeah And as long as you're doing it for good, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's, I think it's crucial, you know. I know it gets said a lot, but truly now more than ever. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier, you know, about how you began to realize that even a music video in a way could be a PSA. Because the new album, I'm so excited, it's here. We've waited. as of I'm leaving and like coming back as a fan

and then she'll exit stage left and your interviewer will be back but you know when you wait and you're so excited as someone who loves someone else's art like oh my God it's here and then of course I was like of course every song is tied

specifically to an action you can take for positive social change of course it is And I just think it's so cool. So I'll join the chorus of people saying bravo, but can you talk about how you, how first of all, do you say this is the album I want to release after, you know, six years noodling and finding this version of this year's voice? And then how do you kind of layer this larger mission so that we're not just your. listeners, but we're also becoming a community of folks doing something. Right. Well, I would say that, you know, again, the serendipity on my doorstep. I'm not a bleeding heart artist. There's plenty

of tragedy and things in my life to be sad about, but I have a very optimistic and positive of outlook. And I enjoy this opportunity to create and share with this megaphone that I have for the whole world. And I recognize that in the marketplace, there's so much darkness, lots of, you know, depression and anxiety and misogyny and violence and substance abuse. and that's I don't think I need to contribute to any of that and I could tell an album worth of stories about myself and and glorify myself in a way that would probably make me more popular than I am but I also I'm not compelled to do that I don't feel that it's necessary I have to think we have enough self-promoting narcissists in the music business and I feel like

okay well what can i do let me show up in the way on music on tape on record as i show up in community and how is that that is whenever i get a phone call or um i get invited to engage with a non-profit organization i try to find a way and i thought well posting your media assets online is certainly helpful to my fan base. That works. Maybe shooting a PSA for a video or showing up to the gala and performing at the gala for you can raise funds. That, I'm sure, is very helpful. But if my forte is storytelling and songwriting, how can I lean in heavily on my passion, and expertise, using your messaging and work in the community so that 2 plus 2 equals 5. And it's not that I came up with this idea. I know there's been the We Are the Worlds of the

past. There's, there have been the Bono and U2, you know, one. There's Bob Marley with redemption songs there's so many artists in the past have done the message music or the positive social mission but I thought why not really lean in with an album that

suggests to my peers that that era is not over and that we can continue to do that and here's an album full of songs the least you can do is one yes you know and so each song is inspired by a non-profit organization or a positive social mission.

One of the songs is called Breakthrough. It was inspired by a nonprofit organization called Breakthrough that is helping returning citizens matriculate back into society with jobs, education, housing to reduce recidivism. Another song on the album is called Don't Go Alone. It's written inspired by an African proverb. But really, I'm promoting it in service of the Phoenix, which is an addiction recovery organization that uses collective activity, like exercise or hiking as a modality to combat substance abuse.

This is your accountability family, your accountability team, and you just find new friends and new ways to engage to avoid going to the bottle. or the pill and so each song is built around that concept and I would be remiss to not mention that my wife was probably the

most inspiring factor in making this decision because we were the spokes for an organization called Peace Over Violence here in Los Angeles that does awareness for domestic abuse and there was a

campaign every year there's There's an annual campaign called Denham Day, which is messaging around sexual violence and how it's important for men just as much as anyone to recognize that our role in sexual violence. My wife wrote a song after watching The Hunting Grounds, I think is the name of the film. about rape on campus called Never Said Yes because the conversation around, you know, sexual violence is always very directed and pointed at blaming the victim and saying, well, you know, did you say no? did you lead the perpetrator on it's never a question of

did you say yes right and if you didn't say yes so she wrote a song called Never Said Yes and I thought it was brilliant and you know great idea to take the

the social mission put it into a mantra that can become the language to support that mission in the absence of, you know, a narrator. You know, now you have this quick, easy soundbite that helps to tell the story in a way that people can digest quickly. It's really beautiful. And now a word from our wonderful sponsors.

One of the things that strikes me about the opportunity that you've created here is with an album's worth of songs, each song having a focus for a cause, you offer up a board to an audience to say, which of these things resonates with you the most deeply? Which of these things will you join the call for? because, you know, I remember early in my career, people would always say to me, we have to pick something, pick a cause. I'm like, how is working on a more civil society going to be accomplished with one thing? That seems ridiculous to me. And I actually think one of our greatest strengths is the fact that when we get to speak to so many people, the more you can teach or showcase how interconnected these things are, the more likely you are to inspire each person paying attention to what you're sharing

with the thing that most inspires them because not every fan is going to have the same cause but everyone's going to be inspired by something so what an amazing what an amazing thing to layer this creative process with so many opportunities for real passion and connection I thank you

I'm really happy about it I think it's just a volume one of many to come and I'm going to keep exploiting this method for the long haul Do you have a favorite song on the album? Very hard to say Don't go alone is so infectious to me

the message being about if you want to go fast, you can go alone. If you want to go far, you go together. And that being this African proverb that really makes so much sense about how society and communities can operate. And then deep inside the music is everything that I grew up with, parents coming from Central America via the Caribbean. So lots of Latin and...

and Caribbean sounds, and then African diaspora, African sounds in the music. But then there's on the other side of that sonic landscape is this very calm and relaxed kind of story of father and son, which is daddy told me so, the concept of my relationship with my dad and the lessons that I learned from him. And there's a, I guess there's a favorite moment or reason for every song on the project. But those are two highlights for sure. Do you write a whole slew of songs and then start to narrow them down for the album? Or are you a person who finds each sort of concept that you're processing in songs? and then you have an album?

I think that putting an album together is a sculpting activity. So I build up a whole mountain full of songs. And then I peel away the layers so that the remaining songs are the ones that tell the story I feel is most necessary. And that's the general way of... a way of writing for me. Just keep writing all the time and then piece together the, put together the album based on

what the theme, overall theme, should be. So interesting. My last and favorite question to ask everyone, and I'm curious from where you're sitting and all these things you're thinking about and this repertoire, this new repertoire of music, you're about to give to us. Today, what feels like your work in progress?

What comes to mind is yesterday, last night, in conversation with my kids. We did cuddle time just before they go to bed and thinking about their eagerness to engage in the art world and this work in progress is you know building kids that are resilient

and thoughtful and full of heart and intelligent and fearless artistic and executive. So, you know, just before they went to bed, they spent a few minutes

coming up with some songs that they might end up being their first project together. Wow. As a brother and sister, I'd say that's my work in progress. It's like these beautiful lives that my wife and I have been fortunate enough to receive and steward to adulthood. Stewardship.

That's major to watch your babies creating in front of you and looking at you like, Dad, is this good? What a trip that has to be. I just love that for you. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for this today. You know, as I said earlier,

as a fan for so long it's such a joy to be able to talk to you not just about the work but about the way you see the world and I'm so thrilled for the new record and I will say on behalf of many many people I know who are amped about it we all thank you thank you appreciate yeah yeah this has been such a joy likewise This is an I-Heart podcast.