Badu thought of other songs about phones: “Mr. The joke, if it was a joke, quickly grew more ambitious.
If you’re calling to ask for some free tickets in a city near you, and know she don’t really fuck with you like that, press seven. If you’ve already made that pre-call, and this is the actual call to beg, press six. If you’re calling to beg for some shit, but this is that pre-call before the actual begging, press five. While Drake moaned that his ex was “wearing less and going out more,” Badu seemed happy to report that hers was “getting dressed and going out more.” Eventually, she and Witness created a musical diptych, with two versions of “Hotline Bling,” a semitone apart, separated by a spoken interlude, purportedly the outgoing message on Badu’s cell phone: With a few lyrical edits, she made the song seem teasing and affectionate, as if she were both taking part in a dating ritual and observing it fondly from afar. The first session took about twenty minutes Badu sang the words a few times, and before she finished warming up Witness had captured what became the final version.
She took him out for vegan food, and then they got to work. Although she sometimes calls herself Analog Girl, she is adept at social media, and when she heard Witness’s remix she responded, on Twitter, with a four-letter word of praise: “Oooh.” Badu and Witness traded messages, and she told him that she had been thinking about recording a version of “Hotline Bling,” the viral hit by Drake, built around a passive-aggressive reminder to an old flame: “You used to call me on my cell phone.” This exchange scarcely prepared Witness for the shock of seeing Badu, a few days later, at the front door of his house-the same house where he had once watched her on television. The remix was just one small sign of Badu’s enduring appeal and influence. called White Chocolate, he entertained black and Latino crowds at the local skating rink.) Last year, he paid tribute to Badu with a faintly psychedelic remix of one of her best-loved songs, “Bag Lady,” which he posted online, along with a note in which he confessed that he viewed her as “a second mother.” Badu had come of age in the late nineteen-eighties, in Dallas’s embryonic hip-hop scene two decades later, as Witness nursed his own obsession with hip-hop, he tried to live up to her example. No doubt many Nickelodeon viewers were confused, but Witness was converted, especially once he discovered that the singer was also a local. Oh, my, my, my, I’m feeling high My money’s gone, I’m all alone Too much to see The world keeps turning Oh, what a day, what a day, what a day She was impossibly elegant, intoning lyrics that sounded like a dreamy distant cousin of the blues: “This woman came on with incense, a head wrap, and tea,” he remembers. Witness is twenty-three, and he had been a fan of Badu ever since he was five years old, when he saw her surreal appearance on “All That,” a comedy show on the kids’ channel Nickelodeon.
The word people used back then was “neo-soul,” but nowadays it seems appropriate to omit the “neo”-not because her music has grown more old-fashioned but because it has grown harder to categorize, and maybe even easier to enjoy.
But she spends a considerable part of every year on the road, as has been her custom since 1997, when she released her début album, “Baduizm,” which sold millions of copies, earned her a pair of Grammys, and made her one of the most celebrated soul singers of the modern era. Badu, who is forty-five, has lived in Dallas all her life. When Erykah Badu told Zach Witness, an unheralded producer from East Dallas, that she might like to come to his home studio and work on some music, he didn’t dare believe her. Photograph by Amanda Demme for The New Yorker Badu calls herself “super mutable,” and, as a musician, she sometimes seems to be aging in reverse.