Grammy award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer Erykah Badu told Savvy her thoughts and ideas about how music software has changed the way she rocks your soul.

Badu, 37, was in Miami last week for the Winter Music Conference to promote her new album New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, a beat rich, two-part studio project which she describes as her “magnum opus.”

“The fourth world war is our war with self; for all of us to break from our fear of different things, whether it be addiction, fear of change, fear of success, fear of sexuality, being who you are, being yourself period. Some of the issues I touch on are the reasons we feel those ways: Consumerism, commercialism, and judgment on each other, racism, and separatism. I didn’t mean to put out this kind of album during a political year, but this is what happened,” she said.

New doors opened for her as an artist when her tech-savvy son, Seven (whose father is Andre 3000 of Outkast), showed her recording software on a Mac computer. She recorded much of the new music at home and accumulated dozens of new tracks.

“It just gave me a new freedom,” Badu said. “Like having a sound studio in my house. It’s such a big to-do to get an engineer to the studio to run the tape. Now I could just sit in bed and sing into the computer’s microphone. In three months, I had 76 songs. It was amazing how I downloaded so much information and lyrics.”

Quite the transition for an artist once dubbed “analog girl” (this name came from her habit of having an assistant hired especially to carry around her reels of taped recordings in a storage tub on wheels from airport to airport). She said she kept it with her at all times for fear of it being stolen. Today, she’s embracing new technology that allows massive storage of files on ever-smaller devices.

For New Amerykah, she bounced everything from MP3 files to Protunes software, and then transferred the sounds to tape.

“I compare the sound of it to how analog recordings sounded like in 1973,” she said.

She spoke with disdain toward the music industry’s current “obsession with personalities”, the way mainstream radio puts the songs by only a handful of artists on heavy rotation while ignoring the overwhelming majority of performers, and the tendency to push iconography such as the large and colourful head wraps she became recognisable for wearing early in her career.

“There needs to be more diversity on the radio, but I don’t know how we change that,” she admitted.

Badu gained fame in 1997 with her album Baduizm. The lead single On & On reached #1 on the singles charts in both the US and UK. Her albums Live and Mama’s Gun went platinum and 2003’s Worldwide Underground went gold.

She took some time off to raise her kids and because of a case of writer’s block. Badu said she now realises that inspiration is a cycle and her time spent procrastinating was just a case of “downloading” thoughts and ideas that would spark creativity later. She has three albums in the works over the course of 2007 and 2008. Part two of New Amerykah is slated for July 2008 release.

Badu talked about growing up dirt poor in South Dallas. Exposure to the arts at a youth center transformed her life; so today she runs a charity to provide community-driven development for inner-city youth through music, dance, theater, and visual arts.

“That was my salvation, having a chance to express myself through the arts,” she said. Seeing places like Israel expanded her perspective of the world, as did having children.

“When you have kids, you’re forced to relate to what things are like for them,” she said. “You’re the person responsible for feeding their minds. As a result, I discarded a lot of negative stuff out of my own mind. We don’t really have any rules in my house, just ‘do what I say and watch me.’”

_______

On the Web:

http://www.erykahbadu.com/

_______

Note: Savvy owes thanks to TravelWorm.com for sponsoring our presence at Winter Music Conference 2008. Founded in 1993, TravelWorm Inc. has been a leading online provider of casino and leisure travel, as well as event and tour tickets at premiere vacation destinations, for the past 15 years. Be sure to check out their special package destinations or call 1-888-770-8342 to get away from it all without a hassle.