Erykah Badu Covers FADER Reveals New Production Company With Boyfriend Carl Jones & More:

Erykah Badu Evolving. ..

Erykah Badu recently covered FADER magazine and inside she talks music, motherhood, politics, and growth. The Queen of Neo-Soul recently released her mix-tape But You Caint Use My Phone and fans are still wanting her and ex-3-Stacks to do a music video for “Hello”, but during the interview with FADER she and her producers talk about how the project came to be;

She met the tape’s producer, Zach Witness, also 21, after he released a remix of “Bag Lady.” First the two created “Cel U Lar Device,” a remix of “Hotline Bling,” as a jokey birthday surprise for Big Mike, who loves the Drake song. Then, after an overwhelmingly positive reception on SoundCloud, Badu called Witness and asked him to work with her on an entire set of phone-related remakes. The two worked at a song-a-day pace in his modest studio, in the one-story Dallas house where he grew up, ultimately crafting a body of work that proves Badu’s ability to adapt her signature brand of songcraft to modern sounds, and offers a playful analysis of our technology-dependent present.

Even though Badu leads a particularly private life, which is respectable and understandable, she opened up in FADER revealing her not so new, but new love, Carl Jones. Carl Jones is a writer and producer best known for his work on the hit show the BOONDOCKS and creating Black Dynamite. Together the couple have shown their love publicly on Twitter for years now, but now its revealed they have a production company together;

It’s dark when Carl Jones shows up at the house. Jones worked as a producer on The Boondocks and created Black Dynamite, where he met Badu when she came in to do some voiceover work. Now they’re a couple with their own production company; their first project was Badu’s much-praised turn as host of the Soul Train Awards. ‘She’s got a great point of view,’ Jones tells me of Badu-as-comic. ‘She’s like a modern day Carol Burnett. She’s got so many characters that she does, and she’s such a witty writer.’

Erykah Badu is a beautiful representation of what it means to be a Queen, A Mother, and an artist who’s sensitive about her shit! And if her and boyfriend Carl Jones continue to produce such work as the Soul Train Awards, they’ll have an empire on their hands! But it seems like life appears to be so simple for her, which I can relate to in many ways as life isn’t so hard to me. I think we make life harder than it has to be, and it seems, through motherhood at least, that Erykah Badu gets it;

‘I love motherhood. It’s natural for me. Being a doula, or being a mom, or even, like, making food—it’s just breathing and trusting, and allowing the creativity to flow through…’

Photography – Jody Rogac: