Meshell Ndegeocello

Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead

By Wesley Morris

The bassist, singer and composer’s 1993 debut jolted the industry — then she decided to change. Now she is releasing a powerful album inspired by James Baldwin.

A good musician’s relationship with the past is tricky. You want to move forward without entirely forsaking what you’ve already done. You don’t want it defining you when so much future defining lies ahead. It’s a dilemma Meshell Ndegeocello was thinking through at her dining room table in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, on a recent afternoon.

Ndegeocello happens to be much more than merely a good musician. She’s been playing professionally since the early 1990s and, at 55, is about to release her 14th album, a collection of songs that excites her. The past — the repertoire, the old stuff, the hits — can start to feel like “karaoke of myself,” she said, even if that’s never what it’s been like for us folks in the audience. Take her performances earlier this year at the Blue Note, the essential Greenwich Village jazz club.

Over the course of a month, she and the six assiduous, deliriously skilled musicians in her band turned a rush-hour subway car of a venue into their hearth. To fuel these shows, Ndegeocello could have reached into three decades of her own music, an eclectic body of work whose spine is funk — she’s all but synonymous with the bass — and guided by her insinuating baritone. Yet on one January night, her ensemble’s layered mantras and lacquered grooves were the fruit of a long-gestating project built around the existential straits of being Black in America that now comprise this new album, “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.”

The room swayed and rhythmically nodded as rapt, reverent congregants. More than halfway through: a change-up. A jewel from the Ndegeocello trove, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” off her 31-year-old debut album, “Plantation Lullabies.” The song had essentially been reconsidered, infused with the solemnity and rumination befitting the rest of the set. But the women at the table inches behind mine flipped out with the gratitude of recognition. They were at a party and had run into an old friend who kicked things up a notch. (“It’s her birthday!” one of the women exclaimed to me, about her pal.)

That moment at the Blue Note came back to me watching Ndegeocello and her band rehearse one afternoon last month at her studio in Long Island City, in Queens. They were getting ready for an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Ndegeocello had planned to stock it with selections from “No More Water,” which arrives on Friday. (Its release coincides with Baldwin’s centennial.) Running through the set list, she mentioned “Outside Your Door,” a quiet-storm slow burn from “Plantation Lullabies” that a casual Ndegeocellist might be expecting. Then she reconsidered, wary of NPR’s request that she perform a hit.

Were she going to cave, it would be for “Virgo,” a distinctly unclassifiable entry on “The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams,” an exhilarating, ontological, genre-faring adventure from 2007. “Virgo,” she concluded, is “an old song now.”

A few days later, we were back at the dining room table in the open, homey apartment she shares with her wife of almost 20 years, Alison Riley, who’s also her manager. Ndegeocello was mulling over the dilemma of her substantial catalog. She wore an oversized blue Oxford button-down and had been keeping her hair in cornrows that open atop her head like a flower. She served an intense espresso with a splash of coconut cream. The entire afternoon was lively, chummy, a little gossipy. She was reflective, funny.

Help! I’ve Been Ripped Off. I Want My Money Back!

Wondering what it meant to do karaoke of yourself produced her performance of an answer. “Here I am. Outside your door,” she said, deadpanning her own lyrics in a style comically close to William Shatner. “More drinks!” she said, laughing. “Get more drinks!” In her version of karaoke, it’s not even singing from a teleprompter. It’s reading. A kind of hell.

NDEGEOCELLO CANNOT BE blamed for preferring the musical present. She had a memorable 1990s. “Plantation Lullabies” arrived in 1993, and was the kind of album that broke molds and made mosaics of the pieces. “Neo-soul,” the unimaginative music writers called it. She gave it some polemics and some provocation (“Shoot’n Up and Gett’n High,” “Step Into the Projects,” “Soul on Ice”). She put herself on the streets and between the sheets. The sensibility swaggered.

Ndegeocello’s look seemed daring, too. She kept her head bald; she wore tank tops with suspenders and baggy pants; makeup glistened her lips; she slung her bass from behind her back as if it were loaded. This person was butch and femme and for real. Her style matched the rambunctious hip-hop androgyny that felt both defiant and kind of normal for all kinds of Black pop stars in the early 1990s (Janet Jackson, TLC, MC Lyte, SWV, Jade): Queer studies hiding in plain sight and storming the charts. Ndegeocello was distinct among the gender colliders. She sounded the part. It wasn’t a part at all.

Her jammiest jam is “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” It hails from that first album and stands as a Happy Meal of musical urges (rap, jazz, rock, R&B; screws and silk) all of which you can dance to, all of which are fun for a listener to inhabit (“If that’s your boyfriend, he wasn’t … last night”). Its comedy arose from that baritone sticking its tongue out (“Boyfriend, boyfriend/yes I had your boyfriend”). The song got read as straight. But its longevity owes less to sexual orientation than colossal nerve.

The industry noticed. At the urging, she said, of the executive and manager Benny Medina, Ndegeocello signed with Madonna’s new Maverick label and, later, rapped the bridge on her “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” with swaggy lassitude. Ndegeocello duetted with John Mellencamp and played bass on a ubiquitous cover of “Wild Night,” whose popularity has superseded Van Morrison’s original. In 1995, she was up for four Grammys; the year before, two MTV Video Music Awards, when those were still a prize. She was on a path to stardom. She was a thing.

“I was shocked that they really weren’t noticing the lyrics,” she recalled of the executives in her midst. “I got to musically do what I wanted. It was really a great time, but when I listen back I’m like, there’s a lot of bravado. A lot of lesbo machismo.”

But she was also in her mid-20s and was still unsure what kind of artist to be. “You don’t trust in yourself. You’re waiting for the crowd that you’ve assembled,” she said about paying audiences, “to affirm you. And it’s painful.” What she’s now learned that she’d been missing from that period in her life was candor. People yessed her a lot. And, as a young person, she craved it.

“I’ve never had a cheerleader. My mother was depressed most of her life, and I just grew up in a really heavy, dark, dogmatic, violent household,” Ndegeocello said of her upbringing in Virginia, where everybody knew her as Michelle Johnson. Her father, Jacques Johnson, embodied the dogma. He, too, was a musician, a saxophonist — he was other things, too. Moody, for one. Punitive, for another.

Going from a household of volatility to show business had its therapeutic benefits. “Once you feel people clap for you, you play, and I got to travel and tour and make music,” she said. There was some obvious practical benefit, too. “It helped me care for a son,” she added, mentioning the first of her two children, who are 35 and 15 now. “I didn’t have to depend on anyone because I was making money.”

But by the end of the 1990s and the start of the 2000s, after she’d reached her 30s, a wide cohort of singer-songwriter peers had come up with and around her (Sarah McLachlan, K.D. Lang, Tori Amos, Dionne Farris, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, Jill Scott, Macy Gray). She knew better what her strengths were.

The albums she made during the period after “Plantation Lullabies” — “Peace Beyond Passion” (1996), “Bitter” (1999), “Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape” (2002) — were bolder, more ambitious, yet more considered as albums. “Peace” roves and jabs and meditates and wonders; “Bitter” is dusky and subdued. Both are superb. None yielded a conventional hit.

A white executive told Ndegeocello she needed Blacker music. She meant “Cookie” (2002), with its flexing racial declamations, as comic revenge. (Its opening track is a stuttering, Timbaland-esque thump called “Dead Nigga Blvd, Pt.1.”) The album never sounded like satire. But at the time, I heard an artist backed into a Blackety Black corner. Now I can hear catharsis, too. By the end of this stretch, epiphany had dawned. “I’m a musician,” Ndegeocello recalled realizing. “I don’t want to be a star. I just want to be a working musician. I want to have a career. I don’t want to have one hit.”

The sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll didn’t mess with her. Attention did. “I mean, I got laid before I got a record deal,” she said. “But the power of being admired can make you lose your way.” There is, she learned, “a price for being popular. But I wasn’t popular in high school. My own mother didn’t like me.”

Ndegeocello’s drummer Abe Rounds said of early recordings, “That music comes from a very traumatic place for her.” She was so young, he added, “and she’s evolved so much as a human being that I don’t think she feels as connected to that music.”

A significant part of that human evolution includes Ndegeocello’s relationship to gender. When I inquired how she’d like to be identified for this piece, whether that relationship has changed over the years, she marveled that she rarely asked and left the matter of pronouns for me to decide, while making clear that the binary has never personally applied. She invoked Daoism and African and Native American cultures, Big Freedia and Prince. “I’m not a woman. I’m not a man. I am something that you’ll never understand,” she said, quoting the opening lyrics of “I Would Die 4 U” as if they were scripture. For now, the pronouns are less crucial than how Ndegeocello experiences gender, as kaleidoscopic as much as telegraphic: “I’m here to show you another way. I don’t need the language.”

In the band, she’s assumed what, of late, could be described as a recessive role, less the star of a show and more an integral element of a sound that incorporates the ingenuity, skill and imagination of the fellow players. Rounds, whom Ndegeocello brought on while he was a student at Berklee College of Music; Christopher Bruce, a guitarist and producer, who’s been working with her since “Bitter”; a veteran keyboardist, Jebin Bruni.

Ndegeocello’s vocals aren’t always the most prominent in this configuration. That role goes to Justin Hicks, who can soar as high as Ndegeocello can luxuriate in her lower comfort zone. Kenita Miller-Hicks, his wife, fleshes out the harmonies. “My energy has changed,” Ndegeocello said, “and being up front doesn’t really appeal to me as much. I have here a lot of music in my head, things I can’t sing.” Hicks realizes her visions; now, she’s producing an album of his music.

For a few of her formative years, Ndegeocello was on the road with male musicians who wanted to play one way — theirs. “None of us are trying to tell her, ‘Oh, you should be doing this or doing that,’ you know?” Bruce said.

I asked Rounds what word suits Ndegeocello’s role in the band? Leader? “We’re all leaders in that band honestly,” he said. She is “the team captain perhaps, or like the coach,” he explained. “The coach doesn’t have to be on the field playing all the time.”

Working this way has always suited Ndegeocello. “No one does anything alone,” she said. “There are artists like Prince and Stevie Wonder who can do that all themselves. I just like band experience. I just think it just it’s something very African about it. It makes the music feel a certain way.”

THERE’S A VERSION of Ndegeocello’s story in which she remains frozen in, say, 1995, retreading. What happened instead is freedom and constant discovery. She’s pushing forward. The strength and depth of the music reaches in every direction, ripples outward, compounds itself. She seems open to the possibilities of what can be revealed or advanced — or exorcised. Especially with a band that wants to make the past somehow fun for her, healing. “Make peace with the pain” is an instruction from “Virgo” that she has embraced.

During the pandemic, she deepened her connection to James Baldwin. “No More Water” is the culmination of that rekindling. It’s an expansive, adventurous piece that turns Baldwin into an organizing principle but also features the thinking of Audre Lorde and calls-to arms from the poet Staceyann Chin that leave a third-degree burn. The critic Hilton Als wrote the liner notes. It’s some of the most hauntingly, melodically beautifully work she’s made — intelligent, sincere, funny, enraged, queer, sexy, intensely pleasing music, the spoken intonement mingling with the Hickses’ harmonizing and call-and-response. (We don’t hear Ndegeocello’s voice in the clear until the fifth song.)

The album is vivid about the ways in which the American past recurs in the present. It also feels like a reckoning with how true peace could sound. There is Donny Hathaway in there, church cellar, too. It’s tear-inducing. You’ve heard of house music. This is home music — a garden, a porch, in a community.

Take “Thus Sayeth the Lorde,” which arrives on the album’s second half, where the Hickses’ voices are distinct rays of clarity — a beacon — climbing up, then down. The lyrics concern the patiently anticipated arrival of a moment to break free, from enslavement but perhaps from any oppressive force.

My open eyes to the right
Even the fallow
Waits for it
Waits for the right
Wait for the right time
You and I
In the mire
Here it is shallow

During the Tiny Desk show, you can see Ndegeocello giggle with pleasure as the couple scales the notes together, holding hands with their voices. Rounds maintains a rumbling drum. Bruce’s picking here is leafy; it flickers. Jake Sherman’s organ work crests and falls and gurgles with mischief. Kyle Miles was a second bass (he and Ndegeocello trade off) and has yet to seem fazed by playing alongside her.

I spent about 90 minutes eavesdropping at the run-through. Ndegeocello stopped to check on each person in the room. She held the Hickses’ toddler. She was, as she is offstage, vivacious, active and attentive.

At the Tiny Desk performance itself, she was all of that, plus inviting and sage, marching in place, grooving, in a dashiki, a kaffiyeh draped unmistakably over her microphone. The set just about ended with her sing-speaking, “I’m learning how to give,” during “Virgo,” from her 2023 album “The Omnichord Real Book.” She introduced the band, mentioned the release date for “No More Water,” then thanked the audience for its audible engagement and “for listening to something new. It means so much to me.”

Then she presented her bonus, “just for you,” she said, before wading into “Outside Your Door.” Bruce had barely begun the shimmering opening bar, and people in the room were moaning in ecstasy. That old thing? It is a gift that Ndegeocello has learned to give. And anytime she graces us with one is somebody’s birthday.