Andre 3000 Talks Atlanta, Recording With Aretha Franklin: 'That Was Amazing'

Andre 3000 is busy promoting his new Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side, so he decided to stop by the NPR studios and do a podcast with co-hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest) and Frannie Kelley.

Instead of focusing on the movie, though, they jumped right into a conversation about Aretha Franklin, for whom Andre just produced a song.

"It's like a covers album," Andre said. "And we actually picked a song. We picked a Prince song and she killed it.

"It's kinda weird because I hadn't been on the scene, you know, producing, since I've produced OutKast records. So it's not like I'm a hot producer or anything right now, I have all hits on the radio, so when I got the call I was honestly surprised. Clive Davis, he just reached out of nowhere and said, 'Hey, we're doing this Aretha album and I want you to work on it.' And I was kinda, like, happy, grateful, you know. Like, 'Hell yeah, I'll try it.'

Andre and Aretha eventually settled on the Prince song "Nothing Compares 2 U."

"It's a completely different take on the song," he said. "You'll - it doesn't sound like any other of the - it doesn't sound like the Prince version. It doesn't sound like the Sinead O'Connor version either. It's Aretha in a different element, but something she's familiar with. But it was really really fun doing it. And just to hear her use her voice like this instrument. She just came in the studio and really just knocked it out in about an hour. I think it was about an hour, yeah."

Asked about representing Atlanta with Outkast, Andre broke down the process of becoming ATL's signature group.

"As a crew, we knew, in our heads, that we definitely wanted to represent the city," he said. "And not just the city, we wanted to represent the Southern lifestyle. It was strategic in naming the album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, cause we knew - we all grew up on New York hip-hop. I remember being in the 8th and 9th grade, and we were so into New York hip-hop that we had learned the accents and everything, and trying to imitate New York hip-hop.

"Because no one expected anything from the South, except, you know, maybe fast, booty-shake club music. The door was wide open, so we had an open palette. And one thing I can say about Atlanta is you can do anything from Atlanta. Like, I think it would've been harder for us to come out from New York because they would've expected us to do a certain thing. We would have to be bound to a certain thing. We would have to rap a certain way, you know. So I think Atlanta is almost like a freedom land because we had no ties to anything. It was just open, like, open field."

Then, he offered some advice to up-and-coming artists trying to make names for themselves and rep their own regions.

"Here's my thing about representing a place: The best way to represent the places where you from is be yourself, completely," Andre said. "And just say, 'I'm from this place.' It doesn't mean I have to cater to that place, you know, cause my thing is taking the city on its back and going beyond. It's not staying in - just in - the city sound. My thing is just pushing it as much as I can cause that's how - that's what gets me off. That's what I do."

Read the entire interview here.

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