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the blues. I didn’t know why I said “Take me in your arms tonight.” It just came out. I was just a vessel. how ryan told the story, I’m like, “This is my life.” My actual dad, Charlie Wiggins, sang blues. So for me to write a blues song in a film, it came natural.
You wrote the song just days before production began,right?
Yeah,I whent over,they pitched me the story,and the next thing you know I’m sitting in front of the board singing. I left and never heard the song again until Ryan invited me to watch it at IMAX in Culver city. It was so beautifully done. It was threaded through the whole film.
Did they just say “We need a blues song”?
Nothing else. They really trusted me. Ryan explained his [bluesman] uncle to me. People looked down on blues players, but the blues was these men’s church. They got a bad rap. That connected to me – in my neighborhood, the church told me I was going to hell for singing secular music. My dad said, “The key of E-flat in the blues is the same E-flat they play at church.” that set me free. I’ve always had it in my music. I’ve never made a song that didn’t have some type of blues in it.And this showed me that respecting the history of all types of music pays off.That the Academy acknowledged a blues song – win, lose, or draw, that’s amazing to me. The song, “It Never Felt Like Home,” co-written with Raphael Saadiq, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2023 for the film Till.
D’Angelo told me he heard the “devil’s music” stuff growing up, too.
That’s why we were really good friends. We both grew up with [gospel singers] the Hawkins Family. When we found out we were both from that cloth – I had an album of theirs in my studio. D was in my studio for a year while I was touring. when I came back, he’d taken that album and blown it up and made a poster and framed it for me. I still have it. When people see that picture, they know what cloth we’re cut from.
Questlove talked about possible posthumous D’Angelo music coming. Do you know anything about that?
I don’t know that he has enough to make an album. But he did have a lot of jams that are better than albums. If you got Pino [Palladino] Pino, Questlove, [guitarist Isaiah] sharkey, and D – that’s all you need. If D is just mumbling and humming, that’s a record. So hopefully they do have something they could pull into it. D’Angelo’s real name is Michael Eugene archer.
What’s next from you?
I’m working on four projects for my vinyl club. Two [live albums]and two more records – one is a band that’s gonna feel like Chic, with
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