Kelela’s new album doesn’t start with a ripple of aqueous keys, or a club-shaking bassline, or the abrupt whirr of a glitching synth—or whatever else you might expect from a musician you’d typically find hovering at the bleeding edge of dance music. Instead, you’ll hear a crowd chattering while a piano player warms up in the background, and a voice requesting those gathered to turn off the flash on their phones and keep their conversation to a whisper. Eventually, a harp begins to play a looping melody, and then in comes Kelela’s unmistakable, sensuous voice, gently distorted to sound like a choir, singing the melody of “Enemy” from her superb breakout mixtape, 2013’s Cut 4 Me. Where the song was previously a jagged, thunderous blast of metallic synths serving as a warning to a spurned lover, here it becomes something altogether more haunting and sumptuous: an elegiac ode to self-reliance.
It serves as a fitting introduction to In the Blue Light, which, though released just a few weeks ago, was recorded back in May 2024 during Kelela’s residency at the legendary Blue Note jazz club in New York City. Over the past 10 months, she’d gone back over her recordings to whittle down the setlist (consisting largely of reworked songs from her back catalog, as well as covers of Betty Carter’s “30 Years” and Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues”) and fine-tune their raw, emotive sound. “It was challenging trying to choose the songs, but then it was also challenging to really get into them and master them in a way that would feel like we’re locked as a band,” says Kelela. “But I think I did my best.”
The end product isn’t just a brilliant showcase for Kelela’s virtuosic songwriting—it’s rare that you’d find as many full-throttle dance bangers that are equally formidable when recast as piano-led jazz ballads—but also a window into some of her most formative influences. She recalls her childhood listening to jazz tapes while driving around Washington, DC, in her dad’s car, or playing records on the sound system of her mom’s apartment and watching her reflection in the speakers. “Those are really some of my earliest memories of music,” she says over Zoom from her home in New York, where she’s also just released a mini documentary highlighting the backstory to the residency and the process of making the album.
She notes that this more playful, itinerant approach to putting together a record makes her wish sometimes that she’d come up during a previous decade, when there was more freedom around release schedules and side projects—and when her interest in juggling multiple projects and genres at once would likely have been easier to grasp. “I have many things I could say at this point, but how do I find the thread between a group of songs that creates a world? It’s hard,” she says of the pressure to stick to a single lane. “I definitely have a relationship with a wide range of sounds, which is a blessing and a curse. For me, the challenge is narrowing down which of those sounds needs to be included and kind of homing in on the statement that I’m trying to make.”
Here, Kelela tells Vogue about how the residency initially came about, why her passion for jazz music runs deep, and the clues that In the Blue Light may offer regarding the sound of her (nearly completed) third studio album.
Vogue: Tell me about your first memories of visiting Blue Note, and of seeing Amel Larrieux perform there. What was it about that place and the music you were hearing that struck you in such a profound way?
Kelela: Well, I think there were several things. I was already coming from a place of listening to jazz—I grew up in DC, and the scene was quite robust, and I spent so many hours listening to music in person. Also, in high school—in grade school, in general—there were just very few alt Black women icons that I could see. Amel Larrieux was one of them. I feel like she was a blueprint for how I might be able to exist in this world. And at that time, I was also a secret singer. I was singing in the shower, not actually performing—I still felt like I had so much to learn. I was going back and forth asking, “Do I go to music school?” Everybody felt so ahead of me, and [when I heard Amel sing] I was just like, “I don’t know how this works, but I feel what you just did.” I think that was a big crossroads for me. She was just so sincere, so heartfelt, an incredibly skilled singer and musician and performer, and it rocked my world at the time. I was an Amel Larrieux groupie. I was just going to every show on the East Coast that I could go to. So that was kind of how I came to the Blue Note. I was familiar with the label, but not the venue, and it’s just iconic in terms of its roster and its history. It’s very rich.
You’ve always seemed to enjoy playing around with songs in different genres and formats. Do you think that restlessness and willingness to keep reinterpreting your own music led you to feel a special affinity with jazz musicians?
Absolutely. When I was growing up, it was the time of Dilla. There was a culture of breaking down what was happening in hip-hop—and with the production, in particular—during that time. One day I’d be at a beat battle, the next day I was listening to bebop… and at that time, because of the culture of breaking down what was going on with the beat, where does this sample come from, et cetera, it was a period of real musical discovery. When it came to rearranging or remaking your own tracks, the tradition obviously already exists within jazz, but the hip-hop life that I was living at the time was also a hybridized hip-hop life. So it almost seemed like everybody had to have this kind of range. It was also the time that The Streets came out. It was all happening at the same time. And this was before music became globalized in the way that we kind of know it right now, where you can’t stagger your releases. You’re releasing it worldwide today, and everybody knows about it today, wherever they are. And then just to add to that, my background as a person from Washington, DC, means that I grew up listening to R&B and hip hop, but also go-go music, which is a tape-dubbing culture. So then your cool currency in school is basically, “Do you have the tape or do you not have the tape?” I also grew up with Baltimore club, which has a lot of overlap with Jersey club—there were all these intersections. I didn’t even realize how much all this stuff is so formative for what I’m doing now, but I’m so grateful that I grew up in that time. And I would say that going to the Blue Note was another facet of this moment of discovery and learning for me.
Tell me a little more about how your Blue Note residency actually came about.
Well, I did a Tiny Desk a little over a year ago, and I remember as soon as we started rehearsing, my friend Aya, who was the harpist on the record, started playing “Raven.” I was listening to her solo at the top of Raven and I just locked in. I was like, “Oh, my God.” I had a visceral reaction to it. I have to say that when I’m writing songs, I do try to make them…not foolproof, I don’t know… flip-proof? I have to make up a term, but I want to make sure the song’s so good compositionally, that you could take it to any instrument and it will sound good. So that was one of the moments that made me feel really proud of the song. And I was like, “Oh, this can’t just be a Tiny Desk. We need to make this a moment!” And so I thought, how can we figure out a Blue Note moment for this? Because I’ve always had that in my head—at some point in my career, I have to do a Blue Note thing and maybe it needs to be recorded. So that was kind of how it came about. I always wanted it, and I just felt like this was the right moment, because I already knew what I’d be doing for the next record, and it felt like a good thing to happen in between, sonically.
I did feel that “flip-proof” quality when listening to the record—when I was listening to “All the Way Down,” in particular, I was struck by what a brilliant song it is, even outside of the production on the Hallucinogen EP. It feels like it could have been written in any era, in any genre, in any context. Was that versatility something you were always striving for in your songwriting?
I think so. One version of a song is only so diverse, is only so varied. It only has so many functions. And I think during the composition, the test of how strong it is, how rich it is, is like, “How many places can I take it?” The ultimate goal isn’t to arrive at a certain place. The ultimate goal is to just be like, “Wow.” It’s just the sense of wonder, I think, in a certain amount of familiarity—and then the context around the familiar thing, which is the voice, flipping completely, so that it’s like, I don’t know where I am. I remember Amel at the Blue Note doing Hole’s “Celebrity Skin,” and slowing it all the way down. It was just this jazzy bass moment. That left an indelible mark on my brain, because it was this experience where I was hearing the bass line, and I was like, “Wait, what is this song? What is this song?” She’s singing, “Don’t make me over…” and dragging it in this way that I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to pull my hair out right now.” That is the excitement of live music for me: I know this, but I also don’t know this. Is she singing Hole? It took me and my friends out. It was so crazy. I think that’s always been so exhilarating for me—to experience music in a new way by finding the familiar thing and recontextualizing it completely. I’ve been addicted to that since I was really young, and it’s come out in so many different ways.
Throughout the residency and making this recording, were there any songs that were especially challenging to reinterpret? Or that revealed new aspects of themselves to you in that process?
I would say a lot of them. Even when you just slow something down and sing it over a real instrument, it’s crazy how much that does. I, myself, will be like, “Damn, did I say that? Is that what I said? This feels so much more emotional.” “Bankhead” is one of those songs where I think people can be in the club and go, “Oh, I love this song. It’s so cute.” But then when you take it to piano, so many friends, when they heard it for the first time, cried. I think I cried. It feels completely different, and I think that’s such an amazing thing. There are lyrics that I would just pass through and not really sit with. “All the Way Down,” the lyrics do hit different when we’re slowing it down and it’s just me and the bass. You’re like, “Damn.” And the “damn” factor is a big factor. There has to be a sense of discovery, and a reason to listen to this version. Ultimately, I’m not trying to sell you something that you already have.
Choosing the track list and choosing the songs was very hard, I will say. I had a hard time narrowing it down. I was like, “I want to do all the songs!” And I was also trying to figure out a way to make business sense out of traveling with a band like this. My hope and wish is that I could do more shows, but it’s not the most viable thing. And typically people put out a live record at the end of a tour, having recorded the entire tour and being able to choose the best take. So there was a lot of pressure. I was also trying to deal with my perfectionism and use this project as an opportunity to let go and just be like, “Yeah, I messed up right there.” That’s kind of the mood I wanted to be in, to acknowledge the mistakes, because that’s part of the experience, and part of what it was in real life. I need you to know that it’s real.
Clearly this was an important project for you, and something you’ve wanted to do for a long time. How does it feel now to put a line under it?
Well, it’s extremely fulfilling, because the truth of the matter is nobody asked me to make this record, you know what I mean? It really is a labor of love. And I want my audience to know this about me. I want them to be able to sit with this part of myself and also see the relationship between this part of myself and all the shit that they have engaged with already and that they’re attached to. And it would be a bonus and just so incredible if that led to moments of discovery for them—into all the ways that people have experimented in this way, and I guess jazz in general. I want to help encourage this culture of remixing, and keep bringing that to the surface. This project is really all about encouraging people to grow into a relationship with this music and encouraging my peers to reveal that part of themselves as well.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
