Meshell Ndegeocello didn’t plan on making a covers record. “It was such a weird time in my life,” she told me. “I had some pressure to hand in [a record], so it kind of saved my life.” The result was Ventriloquism, a set of reimagined late-80s and early-90s R&B tracks that felt less like nostalgia and more like a séance.
It started with “Tender Love.” After her father died, Ndegeocello found herself driving back home, the radio tuned to an oldies station. “It was like a time machine. It took me straight back to the first time I ever heard it.” Soon she was trading stories with friends about their favorite songs from that period—Ralph Tresvant’s “Sensitivity,” Al B. Sure!’s “Night and Day”—regional East Coast hits that weren’t universal, but were deeply personal.
She laughs about the fans who get angry when she dares to flip something sacred. “I had an interviewer who thought it was wrong of me to change the intention of ‘Atomic Dog,’” she says. Her version slows the funk into something spectral, a shift she sees less as betrayal than geography. “Instead of being in Detroit, I think it feels more like we’re in the car,” she explains. What mattered most to her wasn’t the party groove but the line I’m an untied dog in a dogmatic society. “One of the places I’ve really experienced dogma is music itself—having to choose a genre, or always be ‘funky.’”
Then there’s “Sometimes It Snows in April,” already haunted before Prince’s death, now nearly unbearable. “There’s a ghost in that song,” she says. “He’s the reason I play music. I remember getting his first record and that’s when it became concrete—I wanted to be a musician.”
Ventriloquism arrived as a refuge, a balm, a way of connecting when the world felt like “one storm too many.” But Meshell is no wide-eyed optimist. She talks bluntly about inequality, about how America’s refusal to reckon with class underlies everything else. “I feel guilty sometimes. I’m far from rich, but I’m so far from poor. That’s the issue we don’t deal with. It affects all races, but most of all it affects children.”
Twenty-five years after her debut Plantation Lullabies, Ndegeocello still resists easy labels—jazz, R&B, protest singer—but she knows the doors she’s pushed open. “I’m one of many women who opened the door for other women to participate in music not just as singers, but as musicians and producers.” She pauses, then adds with a mix of pride and weariness: “That record gave me a career. It allowed me to see things, to get out of my neighborhood. It gave me this life I have now.”
She worries about the future—clean water, her kids, what’s left for the next generation—but insists music is the one true unifier. “Put four or five people in a room and give them one song. They’re unified—by playing it, dancing to it, or arguing about it. That’s the power of music. I don’t take it for granted.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Tender Love" below!
