[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On our show today, we continue our Pride Month series spotlighting banned books with author Juno Dawson, the author of the book, This book is Gay.

We'll talk about the Westport Public Library's recording studio. You heard me correctly. They have a recording studio and they've released an album. We'll talk about it and hear some tracks from it. We'll speak with fabric artist Bisa Butler whose beautiful solo show is up at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery through this Friday. That's our plan so let's get this started with Madison McFerrin.

MUSIC - Madison McFerrin: Stay Away from Me.

Alison Stewart: That's Madison McFerrin's new song Stay Away from Me. Madison has performed with Aretha Franklin and De La Soul plus toured with her father Bobby McFerrin, but now she has an album to call her own. This year she released her debut solo album titled I Hope You Can Forgive Me. The work is layered, literally, with the aid of a loop pedal in her voice. She makes beats, writes lyrics, and even produced a big chunk of this record.

Madison McFerrin is on tour with a sold-out show this Thursday at Zone One, Elsewhere in Bushwick. There is a waitlist, I did see that, and she's also participating in Afro-Punk in Brooklyn in later this summer in August, so you can see her then. Madison, welcome back to the studio.

Madison McFerrin: Hello, hello.

Alison Stewart: Before we hear a song, can you describe your setup for our audience?

Madison McFerrin: Well, right now I'm just doing the most minimal of all things. I just have my laptop so that I can trigger my little tracks and be like, "Hi."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: The song you've decided to start with is Please Don't Leave Me Now. What do you want people to know about this track?

Madison McFerrin: I wrote this song a week after getting into a horrific car accident. My fiance and I, we were driving from Brooklyn to Chicago which is a straight shot down 80. We've done it several times. When we were 90 minutes away in Elkhart, Indiana, I merged from the right lane into the left lane, hit a patch of black ice, spun out 360 on the highway, and we flipped upside down into a ditch, and walked away without a scratch.

Wear your seat belts. If you are listening to this in the car, wear your seat belts because it's probably the difference between me being here and not. As traumatic incidences often inspire, I had a new lease on life and wrote a song about it.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear it. This is, Please Don't Leave Me Now.

MUSIC - Please Don't Leave Me Now: Madison McFerrin.

What is all forgiven

When it's said and done

Could it be we're livin'

All wrong

Takin' it for granted 'til we're beggin'

Please don't leave me now

I ain't ready, I won't let you down, no

So, please don't leave me now

Leave me now

[music]

Do you think it's over

When you walk away

Time ain't movin' slower

So don't wait

'Til you meet your maker to be beggin'

Please don't leave me now

I ain't ready, I won't let you down, no

So, please don't leave me now

Leave me now

Told you that it ain't my time

Don't cross that line

I won't throw your love away

Won't let you down, no

So, please don't leave me now, leave me now

Don't leave me now

Please don't leave me now

I ain't ready, I won't let you down, no

So, please don't leave me now, leave me now

[music]

Please don't leave me now

Don't leave me now

Don't leave me now, no

Alison Stewart: That was Madison McFerrin performing live in Studio Five. Please Don't Leave Me Now from the new album I Hope You Can Forgive Me. When did you know you would feel like you could write a song about such a harrowing experience? Did it happen right away or was it something that was simmering inside of you? You almost died in a car wreck.

Madison McFerrin: It happened pretty instantly just thinking back about it. It was a pretty traumatic week honestly. The car accident happened on Sunday. This was right before, like, two weeks before Thanksgiving. Then we were in Chicago for a couple days. As we were getting ready to leave for the airport, we took a COVID test just to be safe and mine came back negative and my fiance's came back positive, and so we had to make a game-time decision of what to do.

He just dropped me off at the airport and we separated three days after getting into a traumatic car accident. [chuckles] I was in my parent's place just feeling all of the feels. I had worked with this producer Andrew Lappin. That's one of the three songs on the album that I didn't produce myself. We had been working on that track and I hadn't written any melody or lyrics to it yet, and I was like, "Let me write about this crazy experience I just went through." [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: That's a lot.

Madison McFerrin: Yes, it was a lot.

Alison Stewart: That's a lot. You wrote on your Facebook page, "My debut album is finally coming and guess what? Your girl produced 70% all by herself." When did you decide you really wanted to do most of the producing?

Madison McFerrin: Well, so I only started to produce during the pandemic. It was a thing that, all of a sudden, all of my gigs were gone and, like many of us, like most of us, I was stuck at home and trying to figure out what to do with my life and had another-- I realized I had all this equipment and I was like, "Let me just take a stab at this," and I really took to it. I really enjoyed just being able to explore music in that different way.

Technically, I produced my acapella stuff, but that's not including all of these other instruments and just getting out these different sounds. It was really Stay Away From Me, that was the first song that I finished on the record. There are beats that I made before that that actually do end up on the record or did end up on the record, but that was the first full song that I'd written where I was like, "You know what? I think I want to do this. I think I want to go after tackling my debut album in this way."

Alison Stewart: What was a production decision you made that you were really pleased with?

Madison McFerrin: With that song in particular or--

Alison Stewart: Just across the album. Just a moment when you hear it now and you're like, "I'm really glad I did that," or, "That was a tough decision, but it was a right one."

Madison McFerrin: I added live percussion to Stay Away from Me. This guy, Kofi Hunter, he did that, and I think it helped really round out the song. Also, with the song God Herself, the way that I arranged it ended up being something-- That is the most unique acapella song that I've written, and there were some arrangement things where I was like, "Oh, that was definitely right."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Madison McFerrin and her new album is called, I Hope You Can Forgive Me. I want to play the opening track from the album. It opens with a minute-long atmospheric track called Deep Sea and it rolls right into the next track. Let's listen to a little bit of it. This is Deep Sea. [MUSIC - Madison McFerrin: Deep Sea]

Alison Stewart: Madison, how does this track set up the listener for the rest of the record?

Madison McFerrin: I had an interviewer recently referred to my music as meditative soul, and I was like, "That feels pretty good." I wrote this album intentionally as an album. It's meant to be listened from top to bottom.

Alison Stewart: You can tell.

Madison McFerrin: Also, it's a tight 27 minutes which I intentionally was thinking about the subway commuter just being like what's something that they can listen to on their subway commute because I rode all of it while I was still living in Brooklyn. I really wanted people to settle in for that kind of experience and not just hit them with a song from the top in the most traditional way. I just wanted people to really ease into it and be ready to accept the music that I was giving them.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask about the length because some tracks are super short. There's only about two or three songs that are traditional length songs. What went into the idea of having these shorter-- Are they pieces, are they songs, are they interstitials? What do you call them?

Madison McFerrin: Well, people have the attention span of a goldfish now so [laughter] I didn't want to bog people down. Also, I wanted there to be a flow with the album that would make it the case that you could really listen from one song to the next. They're definitely all complete ideas, and I just wanted to be mindful of, even if I grew up listening to longer songs, a lot of people are not listening to longer songs now. There were a couple songs where I was like, "It's not going past three minutes [laughter] then we're capping it." It's also a challenge to be able to write a full idea out and create a full idea with a little bit of time constraint, so it's all a challenge.

Alison Stewart: The next song you're going to perform for us is titled Run, and it has a personal backstory. Will you share with people the inspiration for Run?

Madison McFerrin: At the top of the pandemic, I was contacted by a distant cousin who was like, "Hey, I have some stories about our family. If you want to learn about them let's hop on the phone." Like many Black Americans, I don't know a lot about way back deep into my own personal history, and so to hear that somebody was willing to share some stuff I was like, "Yes, totally."

We got on the phone and he- His name's Malcolm. -Malcolm told me about how our great-great-great grandmother Maria escaped enslavement. There are three potential stories, nobody really knows which one is the right one, but they just know that she ran away. I learned this bit of information right in that time, in the beginning. If you can take yourself back to like May, 2020. It was when it was clear it wasn't two weeks, it wasn't two months. All the gigs that I had in the summer weren't being postponed to the fall, they were being indefinitely postponed.

Nobody knew what was happening, and I was, like many of us, feeling very lost and just confused not knowing what was going to happen with my career. I had just released my last EP in December of 2019, so 2020 was packed with tours, and I was like, "This is my year." It all just went away in a poof. Learning this bit of information right at that point helped bring massive perspective that I come from this legacy of resilience.

If she could escape such a horrific traumatic situation, if she could find that strength to do that, I could get through this. I wanted to write something to honor her legacy and I thought that it would be really special to have my dad on it because he is also her descendant. This is also the first time we've collaborated in this way. I arranged his vocals which I never thought that I would ever be in that position [laughter] so that was pretty cool, but yes, I just wanted to honor her and so this is that song.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear Run from Madison McFerrin. All right. I'm going to take a sip of tea.

MUSIC - Madison McFerrin: Run

Run away

You can stay tonight

But disappear before the dawn

Take my hand

Let's sing the stars

There's a plan, I wrote it all just for you

But I need you to trust me

Let me take you from this place

You don't have to wait, but I need you to trust me

When the end is said and done

You won't have to wish that you knew how to run

When the end is said and done

You won't have to wish that you knew how to run

That you know how to run

[music]

But I need you to trust me

Let me take you from this place

You don't have to wait, but I need to trust me

When the end is said and done

You won't have to wish that you knew how to run

Lеt me take you from this place

You don't havе to wait, but I need you to trust me

When the end is said and done

You won't have to wish that you knew how to run

When the end is said and done

You won't have to wish that you knew how to run

That you know how to run

Run

Run

Alison Stewart: That was Run from Madison McFerrin. The new album is called I Hope You Can Forgive Me. We'll have more with Madison after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Madison McFerrin. Her solo debut album is out now. It's called I Hope You Can Forgive Me. She's playing in Brooklyn on Thursday. That one's sold out, but also playing Afropunk at the end of August so you can see her there. I read somewhere you said that this album was a result of a lot of growth. In what areas did you find growth?

Madison McFerrin: Well, the biggest one was learning how to produce. That was number one growth situation for sure. I think also because I wrote all of it during the ongoing pandemic, I learned so many lessons just from that experience, and I think the biggest one was learning how to let go. Like I said, I had multiple tours lined up for 2020. They started March 13th-

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow. Yes.

Madison McFerrin: -so it was like-- [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Rug out from under.

Madison McFerrin: Totally, 100%. That idea of things aren't always going to go the way that you imagine them to go and they can be an extremely different thing. Learning how to let go in that way I think is probably the other biggest thing that I learned in this process.

Alison Stewart: At your album release party you wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, that said love yourself.

Madison McFerrin: I did.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned that that wasn't always easy for you. Why did you choose that shirt that day?

Madison McFerrin: This album is a huge part of me learning how to love myself. That's part of why the title is I Hope You Can Forgive Me. I'm asking for my own forgiveness for the things that I've done growing up that were probably survival mechanisms as a kid, but they don't serve me as an adult. Instead of beating myself about the fact that they no longer serve me, just honoring the fact that they once did, and it's okay to change. I think we all can love ourselves a little bit more, so it was a reminder to myself.

Alison Stewart: The last track you're going to play for us is God Herself and this is a song about being a bad B-word. [laughter] Can't say it. Being a boss.

Madison McFerrin: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What prompted the song and when was the time when you felt like this?

Madison McFerrin: This is the last song that I wrote on the album, and I knew that I wanted that kind of content on it. I had written a beat that was more like in the savage feeling myself type vibe but it wasn't working, I wasn't getting anything. I was like, "You know what? I feel like the baddest B when I sang a capella," so I made this a capella song. It's one of my favorite songs I've ever written. Every bit of music I heard in my head I got out, and I think that's really special. That's when I felt like a bad B.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: All right. This is God Herself from Madison McFerrin.

MUSIC - Madison McFerrin: God Herself

You gon' see me and believe

Ooh-ooh

Ooh-ooh-ooh

Ooh-ooh

Ooh-ooh, umm

I can change your mind, yeah

Keep ya satisfied

My kind don't grow on trees

Like the high I’m feelin'

You might need me to believe

Oh, I can save you time

Make you wanna come inside and

Pray to stay for life

My kind don't grow on trees

Like the high I'm feelin'

You gon' see me and believe

In God herself

God herself

In God herself, baby

God herself

You gon' see me and believe in God herself

God herself

You gon' see me and bеlieve in God hersеlf

Oh, believe in God herself

God herself

You gon' see me and believe

God herself

You gon' see me and believe in God herself

God herself

In God herself

You gon' see me and believe

Alison Stewart: That was Madison McFerrin, God Herself from the album I Hope You Can Forgive Me. How's the tour going before we have to wrap?

Madison McFerrin: It's going great.

Alison Stewart: Who's on tour with you?

Madison McFerrin: It's just me. I don't have an opener [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Madison McFerrin: It's me and my fiancé. He's also my manager, and we just travel. We're going to Europe after this and lots of stuff.

Alison Stewart: Then what do you have planned for Afropunk if I can ask?

Madison McFerrin: I have a [unintelligible 00:25:46] band from Chicago, bunch of young cats that I love and adore, and we're going to have a really good time.

Alison Stewart: Madison McFerrin's new album is called I Hope You Can Forgive Me. You can catch her at Afropunk later on this summer or you can get on the wait list for Thursday night. [laughter] That's exciting that it's sold out. Madison, thank you for coming to the studio and for singing. You sounded great.

Madison McFerrin: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

 

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