There’s rarely a lead vocal by itself on this album — you surround your voice with harmonies. What is that about for you?
I grew up teaching parts to choirs, and I love a whole group of voices singing as one. When I was young, I had an “aha” moment in church. There was a thing called testimony service, and somebody would sing a song, and everyone else would join in, finding a note where they fit. During one of those, a light went on in my head. In that moment, I heard everything — Parliament, the Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield, Prince — in there. That sound came out of the slave ships, straight from Africa, like in 12 Years a Slave when they’re singing “Roll Jordan Roll.” That’s why that shit resonates. I can just think about that and get chills. So when I got my first four-track recorder and started multitracking my own voice, that was the first thing I aspired to reproduce.
You had people from your church telling you not to play “the devil’s music” — that goes back to the days of Sam Cooke.
I never believed it. They were trying to make me afraid of something I just wasn’t afraid of. And my grandmother, who was like a saint, never said that to me. Just the contrary. She would say, “Go out there and do your thing.”
Someone like Marvin Gaye saw spirituality and sexuality in conflict, but Prince seems to see them as one thing.
That’s the correct way to look at it to me. Marvin might’ve been more conflicted because he was brought up that way. I see making love as a form of worship.
How did you start doing R&B in a hip-hop context?
To me, it’s not melding the two worlds so much as it is exposing where they meet in the middle. To me, Teddy Riley did it with New Jack Swing, which was the bread-and-butter of my high school band Precise. And when I started making hip-hop beats and digging in the crates, I heard things that made me know that shit was there — the Meters and Band of Gypsys sounded like brand-new hip-hop to me. So I started putting the dots together. And my quest was always to take it a step further.