The first thing Lady Blackbird does when she is introduced to me is turn around, lift her glorious white puffs of hair and show me the Band-Aid she is hiding under there. “I cut my head shaving,” she explains. Then she says she took her clothes off in the car on the way over to avoid getting makeup on the theatrical white cape/dress/wrap creation she is wearing. “But when I got here, the wind blew it across my face,” she says with zero irony. “I have my Tide stick right here.”
We are on The Sovereign, a yacht once owned by Judy Garland, which is docked at the California Yacht Club in Los Angeles’ seaside community of Marina del Rey. It’s the release week of Lady Blackbird’s second album, Slang Spirituals. Once we push off for our harbor cruise at sunset, she will be performing a handful of songs for the intimate group on board The Sovereign. Her selections include the precursor singles, the celebratory “Let Not (Your Heart Be Troubled),” sassy “Reborn” and folky “Man on a Boat”—the last one, again, without a stitch of irony.
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(Credit: Christine Schwan)
Before she steps up to the microphone, Lady Blackbird, or Marley as everyone calls her (her given name is Marley Munroe) casually hangs out, seemingly anxiety-free about singing to people in such close quarters. “Anytime there is a gathering of any kind because of music, it’s a ceremony of love, acceptance and gratitude,” she says. “To share Slang Spirituals with people is an incredible exchange of energy because of the personal nature of the work.”
Lady Blackbird’s first album, 2021’s Black Acid Soul, whose title is also her singular genre lane, is primarily covers of classics. Among them are Allen Toussaint’s “Ruler of my Heart,” Tim Hardin’s “It’ll Never Happen Again,” and Nine Simone’s “Blackbird,” from which Lady Blackbird took her nom de guerre. Created alongside her creative partner Chris Seefried, Black Acid Soul has less than a handful of original songs. But Lady Blackbird’s choices of covers and her interpretations made them her own.
“If I can’t relate to a song or feel I can’t offer something new, I won’t touch it,” she says. “Black Acid Soul’s covers are, for the most part, deep cuts, obscure soul tunes. That made it easier to not feel tied to the previous versions because some I’d never heard before, and others we reworked into our own versions.”
Under the protection of songs written by others, and aided by Seefried, Lady Blackbird was able to come into her own songwriting voice. She caught the ear of many musicians, among them, Moby, Billy Porter, Trevor Horn, Goldie, who tapped her for features. Their collaborations are elevated by Lady Blackbird’s emotive yet unaffected contributions. Lady Blackbird is Moby’s opener on his select UK and Europe dates this month, and if he’s smart, which he is, he will have her join him for a few songs in his set. This past June, she was handpicked by Chaka Khan who curated this year’s Meltdown Festival in London.
“To make art together is an enormously inspiring and very rewarding experience,” Lady Blackbird says of her collaborations. “It’s always amazing to share in someone else’s approach. Collaborations where you are going into another artist’s creative space feels like the old saying, ‘It takes a village.’ It’s very gratifying for me, and I hope the ones who have asked me to join their orbit feel the same.”
Even with all the affirmations she’s received by peers, critics and discerning fans, it took a long time for Lady Blackbird to shake off the punitive tenets of her strict religious upbringing. With Slang Spirituals, she claims her true queer self and sets herself free in the process.
“The vulnerability in Black Acid Soul is in the vocal performance and the choice to leave things very sparse and exposed,” Lady Blackbird says. “The stories on Slang Spirituals are from my earliest childhood memories all the way up to the present. The vulnerability is still in the story telling of the performance but also in the stories themselves.”
This same vulnerability is apparent in her performance on The Sovereign. Her banter is friendly, unselfconscious and grateful. When she effortlessly slips into singing, we slip away with her. The setting sun makes her glow externally as much as her inner soulful glow comes out through her songs. The rapt attention of us lucky passengers reminds me of kindergarteners sitting at the foot of a librarian who animatedly reads to them from a picture book, pointing to the illustrations while turning the pages.
Lady Blackbird’s aural stories are, in a way, all our stories. As she says, “Slang Spirituals is a psychedelic soul record. My hope is that it’s received as a piece of freedom by everyone.”
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