Jon Batiste talks about his new album and working with the late Prince
Jon Batiste has spoken about the incredible time he got to work with the legendary Prince.
Jon Baptiste has released his anticipated new album.
'World Music Radio' came out on Friday, 18 August.
The Grammy Award-winning artist featured some of the biggest stars in the music industry, including Lana Del Rey and Kenny G.
The album has been described as a masterpiece.
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Batiste spoke about the inspiration behind the new release with NME.
"This album is like a movie, it tells a story and the collaborators on here are like actors in a movie. It starts with this incredible introduction to ‘World Music Radio’, this radio frequency that’s broadcast across the universe and beyond. I was reading an article about this super-transmission that was discovered a couple of years ago in space and no one knew where it was coming from, or what it was broadcasting: it’s different to any other transmission that’s ever been discovered. That idea became an inspiration.
“I also was making music and thinking about how popular culture and world culture have become more and more synonymous with each other. The definition of what and who that can be is expanding in terms of age, race and demographics. It’s something that I was thinking about a lot,” he said.
The singer said his new album is a combination of different genres.
"I made the music based on the idea of blending all these styles and creating a picture of how the world could coexist by showing how the different genres coexist.”
The musician spoke about how his collaboration with Lana came about.
“We had a great first meeting after our mutual friend and musical collaborator Zach Dawes introduced us because he thought we would have a great creative spark. We met and it just turned into a beautiful collaboration. I met Rick Rubin in Italy and he suggested I go to Shangri-La [Rubin’s studio in Malibu, California]. I told him I was inspired to create a new album and I was creating with all types of different musicians and producers and in that creative spur, I had a lot of things that I was recording with Lana, and I recorded a lot of things with Lana that no one has even heard yet. But two of those things ended up on her last album [2023’s ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd’] and ‘Life Lesson’ on my album is like the palate cleanser after the credits roll in the movie. It’s a spiritual relative of the album sessions,” he told the publication.
The singer also shared about the incredible time he got to work with Prince.
“Oh it was so real [laughs]. I was literally in my dorm room in the year before meeting Prince and I was studying recordings. I was trying to dissect his album, ‘Dirty Mind’. I made a few songs inspired by that album and his approach to [making music], his own Prince style. The next year, I get the call. Prince had heard our band playing in a club: he’d been at the show the whole time – I didn’t know he was even in the audience! He said he wanted to take the band to do a collaboration on one of his tours and we ended up doing that. The first time I ever performed in a stadium aged 19 was with Prince and seeing how he curated his show, how he presented his music and just being around that was really inspiring.”
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