Some songs are rooms within rooms, vast interconnected musical systems. Meshell Ndegeocello gets this; many of her own compositions end at a considerable distance from where they began, teleporting freely from chord to chord. But Ndegeocello understands that songs can also be rooms unto themselves. Sometimes they are even less than a room—they can be a closet, or a corner.
Over the last 25 years Ndegeocello has merged soul, rock, and hip-hop to make a kind of R&B that is at once cerebral and interstellar. She has devoted space on each of her last three studio albums to taking another artist’s song and bending it into new configurations, inverting its structure, seeing how much she might alter its appearance without disturbing its inner grooves. She doesn’t perform these songs as much as she renovates them from surface to center, peeling away wallpaper, pushing furniture around, crumpling and discarding any unnecessary dimensional space until she figures out what kind of room the song is.
Almost 10 years ago, during the sessions for her 2009 album Devil’s Halo, she revisited Ready for the World’s crystalline slow jam “Love You Down.” The original recording of the song is a lovely and faithful replica of a slow-motion Prince ballad; it delivers itself to the listener as a shelf of dry ice delivers fog into the air. For her own version, Ndegeocello shaved down all of the fog and extra space and filled it with silence. Then she shaved the vocal itself down, carving a soft, defeated sigh from Melvin Riley’s shivery tenor. She ruthlessly edited out every unnecessary gesture, removed every distraction and ornament until only the original feeling remained. A desperate plea disintegrated into a whisper; a room was reduced to a corner. As a result, the “Love You Down” that appears on Devil’s Halo occupies an extremely narrow and tender inch of emotional space.
Ndegeocello’s newest record, Ventriloquism, adds 11 new R&B and R&B-adjacent covers to her catalog; in its song selection, it examines a period of music from 1982 to 1994, during which the genre expanded and contracted itself into several different forms—disco shrank down into boogie, new jack swing slit electro-funk into narrow strips and stapled them back together out of order. The songs Ndegeocello studies on Ventriloquism aren’t deep cuts. They’re radio hits, some of which crossed over and most of which still radiate softly in throwback quiet-storm playlists. Ndegeocello refrains from adjusting the pronouns in her covers, so the songs written by men for male singers generally end up queerer than they started—the sensibility that inspired her to preserve the lyric “All that really mattered was you were my girrrlfriend” in “Love You Down” is also felt in her cover of Ralph Tresvant’s “Sensitivity”: “You need a man with sensitivity/A man like me.” (“Sensitivity” is one of three songs on the record, along with the Force MD’s “Tender Love” and Janet Jackson’s “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun),” that were written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who at one point in the 1980s were on the verge of fusing R&B and synth pop forever.)
The greater transformations on the record are structural, as on Al B. Sure!’s “Nite and Day,” a breezy, fluttery new jack swing song that Ndegeocello converts into an ocean. She softens the hits of percussion until they glow and tremble like distant beacons. Without the discrete drum-machine thwacks establishing the song’s boundaries, it flows shapelessly into the space beyond them. It’s as if Ndegeocello picked up on the song’s inner buoyancy, tore out its floor, and installed a pool.
Covers, when they surface over the course of an album or an artist’s career, may seem unnecessarily digressive—light filler, in other words—or even opportunistic; how better to add a sense of legitimacy to your project than by quoting someone who already passed through the same territory? But as soon as you begin to sing someone else’s song, there are innumerable unconscious and invisible adaptations that the song must immediately go through. How can you convey an established idea with a different voice, different instruments, different sensibilities, in a different time and space? How do the words of a song change when, instead of being sung, they are spoken, or whispered?
Some of the covers on Ventriloquism are as cubist in approach as Ndegeocello’s “Love You Down.” Her version of “Sensitivity” seems to have spliced in some DNA from the Beatles’ “Wild Honey Pie,” particularly in the insistent, arthritic banjo strum that underpins the chorus; her cover of Sade’s “Smooth Operator” sounds as if she knocked the song to the ground just to see what fractals would form when it shattered. Her cover of TLC’s “Waterfalls” most directly realizes the ambitions of the album’s title, of Ndegeocello trying to reanimate compositions and characters she didn’t originally design. The song’s primary bass riff is rerouted through an acoustic guitar; the rest of the arrangement gradually paints itself around Ndegeocello’s voice. What sort of room is “Waterfalls”? Well, it’s probably an island, maybe even a particularly isolated neighborhood—it could function as any shrunken microcosm of society. Ndegeocello swivels between the different perspectives embedded in the lyrics, sinking through each window of the neighborhood: a mother who can’t reach her son; a son who is murdered in the midst of a drug deal; a pair of lovers, one of whom has inadvertently transmitted AIDS to the other. “I’m so sorry I hurt you so much,” she sings as the boy. His words are immediately countered by his mother: “Can’t keep yourself out of trouble,” Ndegeocello repeats gnomically, as if sighing and shaking her head at the meaningless circularity of the scene, the way these individual human dramas continually replay themselves on radio and in reality.
The most striking variation on the record is one in which Ndegeocello’s adjustments are minor but mood-expanding. Her recording of “Sometimes It Snows in April” is relatively faithful to Prince’s original; it merely transposes the notes Prince played on the piano, each of which sounded gently stirred out of sleep, to the electric guitar, which makes the song not only blurrier but somehow lonelier. “April” is a different song now. It changed when it migrated from Prince’s mind to the piano, and it changed again when Prince died almost two years ago. When I listen to it now, it sounds like a monument to a suddenly blank space. Ndegeocello’s cover is first and foremost a recording of this change. “Always cry for love,” she sings, and then her voice drops, loosening from the rhythm of the verse and slowing into speech, as if the song were too painful to resume singing. “Never cry for pain,” she says, her voice crumbled into a trembling husk. Throughout the length of Ventriloquism, in Ndegeocello’s hands, no cover is ever mere lip service. A cover is an act of scholarship, an act of criticism, an act of intimacy. An act of love.
