Lauryn Hill: Trace Magazine Interview 7/15/05

As I do every morning, I probe the internet for music on my favorite artists to see whta they've been up to, what they are planning on doing and who they are planning on doing it with.

Most mornings are uneventful because many artists just don't have that many stories written about them from day to day, however today i found a goldmind of Lauryn Hill information.

Turns out last November she actually shot a video for what was supposed to be her first single from her new album titled "The Khulami Phase." But as I said that was from last November -- so I kept looking and kept looking and finally I found that this album is now scheduled for a November 2005 release (we will see how long this holds up).

So, I kept digging found some live performances on audio, some interviews on video and finally what I think to be the most up-to-date interview with her for Trace Magazine. Though, I've never heard of it, she is on the cover and they have an EXTENSIVE interview with her on their July 15,2005 edition.

I'm gonna release excerpts over the next couple of days, here are today's:

Lauryn Hill is one of the most relevant musicians in the world, but she may also be her own worst enemy.

After six year in self-imposed exile, how can the reclusive star return to a world she has abandoned, and wake the people up with songs of freedom?

“Fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need,” announces Lauryn Hill. “I’ve just retired from the fantasy part.” Reading into that confession, spoken candidly before a small, captive audience in a Times Square studio for the acoustic MTV UNPLUGGED recording in July 2001, any imaginative storyteller could have easily scripted the first chapter of Lauryn Hill’s chronicle of an exile foretold.

Her tense, uneven performance on that summer night – where she delivered soul-searching lines like “I find it hard to say that everything is alright” and “Please help me forget about him, he takes all my energy” – amounted to a public display of anguish. A desperate cry for help, the disappointing UNPLUGGED session signalled the unravelling of a major star whose seemingly glamorous life had secretly veered into disarray.

When the UNPLUGGED record and DVD were released to relatively modest commercial success in 2001, many admirers realised that Lauryn Hill had already sacrificed herself on the altar of celebrity. Further back in our collective consciousness, the first public incarnation, Lauryn Hill (aka L Boogie), had retired with the Fugees in the early summer of 1998.

The exuberant, freestyling hip hop princess the world had come to love for her sweet rendition of the song “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” had gradually cleared the stage for an emancipated, free-associating R&B queen, the one who emerged soon after the reggae-tinged battle rhymes of “Lost Ones” swept the streets of New York in the buildup to the total triumph that was THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL.

Five Grammys and 12 million album sales later, the endearing, devout young mother and auteur who had opened her heart to the public and sung about her devotion to her son Zion, made a timid MTV comeback on that summer night by rocking a stone-washed denim jacket with jeans and a New York Yankees baseball cap. She slung an acoustic guitar, avoided direct eye contact, and told her assembled fans that “I used to dress up for y’all: I don’t do that anymore.”

In May of this year, Ms Hill as she now insists on being called – walked, unaccompanied by publicists or assistants, two and a half hours late, into the Upper East Side Manhattan penthouse duplex that TRACE had rented for the cover shoot.

Almost immediately, she asked our assembled production and editorial crew to leave the main room, where hundreds of samples of high end designer clothing, jewelry and accessories had been frantically curated to create the ultra-sophisticated new looks she had requested.

“I have to take a lot of credit for introducing taste and style to the world,” she told me, without the slightest hint of irony. “I think my contributions, and what I projected through my own identity, changed a lot of things.

I remember wearing a skirt on stage, and that was illegal in hip hop. I introduced certain musical elements to hip hop that were not there before, and I used certain language that was deemed a little too articulate for hip hop, but at the time I wasn’t looking at it as a contribution. I was just being myself.”

Our editorial staffers, all huge fans of L Boogie and Lauryn Hill, were starting to wonder who this Ms Hill really was, and why she was acting like a paranoid, egotistical diva. A series of intense, enlightening and, at times, baffling interviews would follow that initial false start.

The interviews and conversations that fed this ten-chapter story were conducted over the two-week period that ended on Lauryn Hill’s 30 birthday, May 26th, 2005. I realised that Lauryn Hill was a young woman who refused to serve two masters. When everyone around her was telling her to chase the fame and fortune, she was looking to get closer to God.

When she fell in love, she found out that dysfunctional people love dysfunctionally. Although our conversations revealed many traits of a tortured, stimulated, brilliant mind, they would provide some invaluable clues into the contradictions and machinations behind one of modern music’s true geniuses.