Best Of: Stacey Abrams / Raphael Saadiq

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Speaker 2 From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today, Stacey Abrams.

Speaker 2 She's known as a voting rights activist, former candidate for Georgia governor, and founder of Fair Fight Action.

Speaker 2 But she's also a best-selling author and has a new novel, a thriller revolving around a former Supreme Court clerk investigating a murder inside an AI company.

Speaker 3 My approach whenever I write about a topic that's not my area of expertise, my mission is to sound smart enough about it in the book that the layperson believes me and the expert respects me.

Speaker 2 Also, we hear from musician and producer Rafael Sadiq. He's known as a member of Tony Tony Tony and as a solo artist.

Speaker 2 He's produced and written for artists like Solange, D'Angelo, Beyoncé, John Legend, and many more. And Maureen Corrigan recommends two summer non-fiction books.

Speaker 2 It's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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Speaker 2 This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley.
Our first guest today is Stacey Abrams, a name synonymous with political strategy, voting rights advocacy, and literary prowess.

Speaker 2 She's written dozens of books across genres from romance and thrillers to nonfiction and children's stories.

Speaker 2 Her latest thriller, Coded Justice, is the third installment in a series that centers on Avery Keene, a former Supreme Court clerk-turned corporate investigator who steps into the world of AI to examine a system designed to revolutionize veteran health care.

Speaker 2 But what begins as a promising innovation spirals into profound questions many of us are grappling with today about technology, ethics, and justice.

Speaker 2 Beyond her writing, Abrams served in the Georgia House of Representatives for more than a decade, including as a minority leader, becoming the first woman and first black American to lead either party in the Georgia General Assembly.

Speaker 2 She ran as the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia twice in 2018 and 2022, losing both races, but drawing national attention to issues of voter suppression, particularly during the remarkably close 2018 campaign.

Speaker 2 In response, she founded Fairfight Action, an organization credited with boosting voter turnout in Georgia and contributing to Democratic victories in the 2020 presidential and Senate elections.

Speaker 2 Stacey Abrams, welcome to Fresh Air.

Speaker 6 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 Stacey,

Speaker 2 people are surprised, even to this day when I was talking about the book.

Speaker 2 They're surprised to learn that even with all of your books, that you are a novelist and a fiction writer and a romance novelist.

Speaker 2 When did you realize you you could examine power structures through fiction?

Speaker 3 My very first novel was published right after law school, but my parents will tell you I started writing a lot earlier. My first attempt at a novel was when I was 12.
It was called The Diary of Angst.

Speaker 3 I was a very tortured 12-year-old, and I had to explain why this boy didn't like me and why my friends were cruel. And, you know, it was, it was very, very full of angst and gestalt.

Speaker 3 My mom actually had it bound for me when I was like 25 25 as a, I think, both a gag gift and a Christmas gift. Oh, you still have it.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I do.
I do.

Speaker 3 But I grew up with parents who loved storytelling and loved books, but they both understood in their way that they could expand our worlds

Speaker 3 even if they couldn't afford to give us the world. And so, you know, we grew up in Mississippi.

Speaker 3 My mom used to call us the genteel poor. We had no money, but we watched PBS and we read books.

Speaker 2 What did she mean by genteel?

Speaker 3 So she called us genteel poor because what she wanted us to know is that economically we were not capable or not, we couldn't access all of the riches of the world. But our gentility was that we could

Speaker 3 we could still enjoy and be refined and engage. And so we read widely and we watched PBS and we had tea parties.

Speaker 3 I mean, some of it was tongue-in-cheek, but you know, we're southern. And so the notions of gentility permeate all things.

Speaker 3 Where my dad came in was that, you know, my dad was a shipyard worker and he's also dyslexic.

Speaker 3 My dad didn't learn to read a functional level until he was in his 30s because he grew up in the Jim Crow South. And because he was dyslexic, they didn't.
diagnose dyslexia back then.

Speaker 3 And even if they had, there weren't the resources available.

Speaker 3 And so my dad memorized his way through school, gotten himself to college, eventually got himself to Emory University to do a master's degree.

Speaker 3 But he loved storytelling and he was just voracious and he, he, my mom, would share information. And I've watched my dad kind of work his way through a book.

Speaker 3 My dad has read everything I've written and I know it's hard for him, but he enjoys the challenge so much.

Speaker 3 And what that gave me was not just an appreciation of the information I could share, it was an appreciation of an audience that wanted something to consume. And so for me, the

Speaker 3 joy of my life has been that in every one of my books, my siblings siblings help me in some way. It is a shared project.
Sometimes it's just free labor for me, but I have

Speaker 3 to do it.

Speaker 6 Do they help you write? They do, literally.

Speaker 3 No, no. So they're my resources.
So my first romantic suspense novel, my sister Leslie, was my editor. She read every word.

Speaker 3 And this latest novel, Coded Justice, my oldest sister Andrea is an anthropologist who specialized in DEI.

Speaker 3 And she helped me really think about how to tease out questions of social justice in the midst of this novel. My brother Richard was a social worker.

Speaker 3 And so when I'm writing those characters and I need to create complexity, I go to him. My brother Walter edited, he's edited three of my books, meaning I give it to him.

Speaker 3 I'm like, okay, I need you to read it. Tell me everything you don't like.
All of my siblings read different versions of it. My youngest sister, Janine, is a molecular systematist.

Speaker 3 So on my first Avery Keene novel, she was the one who helped me with all of the biogenetics. So I really have very smart siblings who don't charge me money and I just put them in the different books.

Speaker 3 But more than anything, they are my sounding boards. They are very comfortable with telling me this doesn't make sense.
This is a dumb idea. Sometimes they're that blunt about it.

Speaker 3 Usually though, it's a, well, Stacey, have you thought about doing it this way? It's a nice circle of trust, but also they are readers that I trust.

Speaker 3 So when they give me feedback, I believe what they were telling me and I believe what they say and I think I can make better product because of who they are.

Speaker 2 Let's get into Code It Justice because it dives into the world of AI. It's the third, as we said in the series that really explores,

Speaker 2 really after going through them, it feels like you're exploring this theme of trust or the lack of it in our institutions. So the Supreme Court, federal surveillance, big tech.

Speaker 2 What sparked the idea of AI? Of course, it's at the top of our minds now. It has been for the last few years, but it feels like what a timely topic to take on in this moment.

Speaker 3 I wanted to talk about a topic where, on its face, the technology is neutral. And I wanted to write a book where the lines are blurred because sometimes there's good intention, just

Speaker 3 problematic execution. And I think AI is emblematic of that.
In order to write my books, I do a lot of deep research. I did very deep dives.

Speaker 3 My approach, whenever I write about a topic that's not my area of expertise, my mission is to sound smart enough about it in the book that the layperson believes me and the expert respects me.

Speaker 3 They know I'm like, they don't know I know, they know I don't know everything, but they at least recognize that I tried really hard. And so I spent a lot of time doing deep dives.

Speaker 3 And the more I dove into the conversation of AI,

Speaker 3 I'd been fascinated about it because my niece was using it.

Speaker 3 My niece lived with me before she went off to college. And I was trying to understand

Speaker 3 how she was able to use AI and that line between

Speaker 3 it being a helpful tool and it being cheating. You know, Faith was raised with a very strong morality, and she knew that, you know, she wasn't going to be allowed to misuse it.

Speaker 3 And one day we had a conversation. I was like, talk to me about this.
And that really became part of the spark for code at justice. This tool that we intend to use for good can be misapplied.

Speaker 3 And when you expand out what we have watched AI do,

Speaker 3 I wanted to think about what happens when even the intentional pursuit of good can lead to challenges and

Speaker 3 murder.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's the thriller part of the book because

Speaker 2 the characters are grappling with the hope and the promise of a future where AI could truly benefit us.

Speaker 2 I mean, the book is really wrapped around this technology that can help veterans in healthcare and then be a broader source for others as well. But the human beings ultimately get in the way.

Speaker 2 They make the decisions about whether it helps or harms us. Has breathing life into Avery at all helped you work out any bigger issues or policies or ideas or steps for yourself?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 writing her, researching her first of all, is important to me. These are topics that matter.

Speaker 3 I care about public policy. It is, to me,

Speaker 3 one of the most important spaces that we have to grapple with because politics is a tool for policy. But too often we let our policy be a tool for our politics.

Speaker 3 And my grounding is always to come back to what is it we're trying to do? And then how do our politics help us make that happen?

Speaker 3 And having grown up in communities where the policies have been antithetical to the needs of my community I am always eager to understand the policies that can do the most harm or the most good if the people who are the least concerned or least considered are people of concern and so in every single story I do try to

Speaker 3 I try to incorporate my belief that I can't just think about this because it's exciting. I have to think about who could be helped or harmed.
And that makes me better at the work that I do.

Speaker 3 And then third, democracy demands that you deliver. And this goes back again to the autocracy conversation.

Speaker 3 Part of what I've been able to do, especially through coded justice, is think about authoritarianism. And I finished the book before

Speaker 3 the fall of democracy started in earnest.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 what she explores in this book,

Speaker 3 they matter to me. Authoritarianism takes steps.
and it starts with

Speaker 3 the curtailing of access to information, the marginalization of community. It happens when we give ourselves permission to quiet dissent and to not be frustrated by that.

Speaker 3 And how we code our future, how AI determines access, that is a gateway to authoritarianism. It's why it was so critical in the

Speaker 3 mega-bill that just passed. One of the few bright spots was that they stripped out the moratorium on AI

Speaker 3 regulation. You should always be concerned when so many powerful companies agree to work together to stop anyone else from telling them how to do their jobs.

Speaker 3 Anytime competitors are that unified, we should all be terrified. And it matters that they were saying, look,

Speaker 3 don't let any state regulate us. But they weren't at the same time saying, but here's the regulation that should happen at the federal level.

Speaker 2 Our guest today is Stacey Abrams. She's written a new novel called Code It Justice.
We'll be back with more after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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Speaker 2 All right, Stacey, let's get into politics. There are reports that you are weighing a third run for Georgia's governorship despite two tough defeats.
Are you planning to run for office again?

Speaker 3 Politics is a tool, and it's a very important one for getting good done, but it's not the only one. And I

Speaker 3 am really focused right now on the other tools in my toolbox. That is not to say I won't run for office again, but my focus right now is on sharing information.

Speaker 3 So I have Assembly Required, my podcast, and Assembly Notes, my sub stack. It's raising money for organizations and for candidates that I do believe right now are the right answers.

Speaker 3 It's doing the work of writing books like Code of Justice and Stacey Speaks Up so I can talk to kids. I'm not taking running for office off the table, but it's not right now top of mind.

Speaker 2 I think for many people when they hear right now, time is relative, you know, and as we are experiencing things changing in real time in profound ways that have all of our heads spinning, when you say right now, I mean we understand literally right now, but is it something that you would consider in the future?

Speaker 3 I always will look at standing for public office as one of the most important tools I can use. Where I am, though, on the very specific question of 2026 is that I truly have not made any decisions.

Speaker 3 And that is in part because there's an urgency to 2025 that we cannot ignore. My focus right now is on how do we ensure that we have free and fair elections in 2026.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of hope being pinned on the 26 midterms.

Speaker 3 My concern is that the speed at which we are advancing through the 10 steps to autocracy, the fact that the city of Miami changed the dates of its elections, and I think in North Carolina there are some date changes.

Speaker 3 Those can seem incredibly benign and may be, but I don't ignore harbingers. And so for me the urgency of now

Speaker 3 is explicit and is truly requiring the focus that I have.

Speaker 2 We do know you

Speaker 2 because of your voter suppression work and all that you had done over the last few years.

Speaker 2 And as you mentioned, these elections will continue to happen until the end of the year and into the next year. How are you thinking about voter suppression and how should we be thinking about it?

Speaker 3 So step 10 in the 10 steps to autocracy focuses on not having free and fair elections.

Speaker 3 If you look at the raft of executive orders issued, there was one that was issued that essentially would block free and fair elections.

Speaker 3 It was a voter suppression edict and it mimics behaviors that we have seen in Georgia, in Texas, in Ohio. It's responsive

Speaker 3 what New Hampshire has done to students who are trying to vote, what Arizona attempted to do, although we've got really great leadership in Arizona now pushing back.

Speaker 3 Voter suppression is all around us.

Speaker 3 And what we have to reset our minds towards, and this goes back to storytelling, many of us grew up with the stories of the civil rights movement and voter suppression of the 60s, guns and dogs and hoses.

Speaker 3 The voter suppression of the 21st century is administrative. It's refusing to allow the disabled to to use mail-in voting, making it more difficult, which is what they did in Georgia.

Speaker 3 The state added additional layers. It's shutting down early voting opportunities.
Early voting matters because in the 1960s, we didn't have on-call scheduling.

Speaker 3 So you need to be able to vote on some day or time that is not Tuesday in November.

Speaker 3 It is making certain that students who need to prove their identities can use the one form of ID they have, which are their student IDs.

Speaker 3 But multiple states like Georgia and Florida and Texas have made that illegal. And so voter suppression happens not in these grand, massive ways we're used to seeing.

Speaker 3 It happens in these insidious administrative ways that can be justified on paper, but can be villainous in reality. Voter suppression happens in three ways.

Speaker 3 It's can you register and stay on the rolls? If you make it hard to register or stay on the rolls, that is voter suppression. It's does the state allow you to cast your ballot?

Speaker 3 Well, if you can't get to a ballot box because they moved your polling place, but they didn't provide public transportation, that's voter suppression. And does your vote get counted?

Speaker 3 Well, in Georgia, we had to have the state Supreme Court step in because they were changing the rules up to the last minute here in Georgia in the 2024 election.

Speaker 3 The insidious nature of voter suppression often escapes recognition because it doesn't look like what we were used to.

Speaker 2 So, Stacey, you grew up in Mississippi and Georgia, and you mentioned to us that your mother called called your family the genteel poor.

Speaker 2 Your parents were also people of faith. They were ministers as well.
And I just wonder how that factors into your worldview, your own sense of identity as it relates to your religion and your faith.

Speaker 3 One of the lessons I learned from my parents, my mom was a librarian and my dad was a shipyard worker. They both were called into the ministry.

Speaker 3 And at the age of 40, they left their jobs and moved myself and my five brothers and sisters from Mississippi to Georgia so they could attend Emory University and do their Masters of Divinity.

Speaker 3 When we were growing up, my parents said, you had three jobs, go to church, go to school, take care of each other. And they didn't just tell us, they lived those values.

Speaker 3 Watching your parents go back to school at the age of 40, your father, who is not the strongest reader, didn't like writing reports.

Speaker 3 I watched my dad struggle through graduate school because it was so important to him to serve his faith by getting the education necessary to teach his parishioners.

Speaker 3 My mom had a master's degree in library science already and in some ways was the opposite of my dad when it comes to her approach to school.

Speaker 3 But watching my mom, you know, come home as my dad did after a full day's work and a full day's lessons and still help raise. my siblings and myself.

Speaker 3 Like I watched my parents live those values that education matters, that faith matters, and that helping people matter.

Speaker 3 And for me, those are the values that guide me, my faith first and foremost.

Speaker 3 I cannot call myself a Christian and not believe that it is my responsibility to help the stranger, to help the immigrant, to help the dispossessed.

Speaker 3 I cannot say that my faith justifies the venom that has been turned against the LGBTQIA community, the way we have demonized the transgender community.

Speaker 3 I cannot be a woman of faith who has read the Bible and just conveniently picked the passages I like. I have to understand, and I learned that from my parents.

Speaker 3 But I also learned that education is part of my faith because I'm not expected to simply blindly behave.

Speaker 3 The notion of free will exists, because faith is when you have the information and you make the decision to do anyway, to do the things you need to do.

Speaker 3 And then ultimately, what ties it all together for me is is the responsibility to serve others.

Speaker 2 You've been so open over the years.

Speaker 2 Your love of Star Trek, through your fiction, we're also able to get a glimpse into your creative mind. You've written about your financial struggles, your brother's incarceration.

Speaker 2 Politics, though, has a way sometimes of turning authenticity into a kind of performance, almost like creating a packaged version of ourselves. And I wonder how you think about that tension.

Speaker 2 Is it something that you wrestle with?

Speaker 3 The people in my world who have to navigate the world with me will tell you that I am not at all packaged. I defy my labeling way too often for their taste, but it's part of who I am.

Speaker 3 I think it's hard to tell a story over and over again without there being lines that you understand and shorthand that you develop so people can grasp who you are.

Speaker 3 Performative happens when you start to believe the mythology versus the reality. I've met me, I am not overly impressed, and I do not take myself so seriously.

Speaker 3 I make mistakes, I have malapropisms, and I make decisions that in hindsight probably should have done something else.

Speaker 3 I try my best when that happens to be honest with myself, to be honest with my teams, to be honest with the public.

Speaker 3 Part of what can sometimes seem performative is, I think, the unusual behavior that I have sometimes of taking public responsibility.

Speaker 3 Because I don't think you can ask someone to trust you with their lives if they can't trust you with yours. And so I try to tell the truth.

Speaker 3 Now, I enjoy my privacy and I will be as transparent as I can, but transparency doesn't give me either the obligation or I think the responsibility to not be contemplative

Speaker 3 and to not weigh and measure what has to happen.

Speaker 3 And so I think sometimes what people expect from politicians is sort of an instantaneous response, or what you expect from someone in the public eye is an instantaneous reaction. I don't do that.

Speaker 3 I think hard about what I say and what I do because people are affected by what I do, their paychecks, their livelihoods, their voting rights.

Speaker 3 And so my obligation is to try to weigh the performance that's necessary for people to understand me versus the integrity and authenticity that makes me capable of doing the work.

Speaker 2 Stacey Abrams, thank you so much for this conversation.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Tanya, for having me and for some very thoughtful questions.

Speaker 2 Stacey Abrams' new thriller is called Code It Justice. Now, if it's non-fiction you're after, our book critic Maureen Corrigan offers two titles she says are standouts.

Speaker 7 I like the country, but I wouldn't want to live there. My husband and I are of one mind about that.

Speaker 7 Years ago, when we were house hunting, we opened the kitchen door of a little city row house and surveyed not a grassy backyard, but a concrete slab that formed a grim little patio.

Speaker 7 No mowing, my husband cried ecstatically. We bid on that house, still our home, the very next day.

Speaker 7 Clearly, I'm not the target audience for Helen Wybrow's memoir, The Saltstones, yet I was transported by it.

Speaker 7 Wybrow, a former editor, has lived for over 20 years with her family on Knoll Farm in Vermont.

Speaker 7 There she tends a flock of some 90 Icelandic sheep known for their double ply coats and disinclination to docility.

Speaker 7 Wybrow's closely observed accounts of her working life as a shepherd are filled with muck, sweat, and a hard-won sense of the interconnectedness of the natural world.

Speaker 7 Here are snippets from an extended passage where Wybrow, along with her then-three-year-old daughter Wren, release the sheep from their paddock to munch their way through a spring meadow.

Speaker 7 Even as she leads her sheep, Wybrow leads her readers into a deeper recognition of how the sublime and the sinister grow side by side.

Speaker 7 Our pant legs are drenched and heavy with dew. The sheep stream ahead of us, calling to each other in the yellow butter cups.
We walk after them, as if through a light-filled doorway in a dream.

Speaker 7 Nearby I show Wren the diminutive plant called Shepherd's Purse with its tiny white flowers, helpful for diarrhea.

Speaker 7 Next to it, I spot one of those tiny, thin-skinned snails, inside which is an invisible worm that can find its way into the brain of a sheep and drive it mad.

Speaker 7 Lobo, the farm's guard llama, who protects the flock against predators like coyotes, will later be felled by one of those worms, carried in those tiny, gleaming golden snails in the grass, deliverers of death.

Speaker 7 Reading about Wybrow's life has made me more aware of the teeming environment above and below that backyard concrete slab that I normally don't notice.

Speaker 7 A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst is a true story that's part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on the mystery of a loving partnership.

Speaker 7 Morris and Marilyn Bailey were a lower middle-class English couple bored with their lives in the early 1970s.

Speaker 7 Marilyn, the go-getter of the two, decided they should sell their suburban bungalow, buy a boat, and sail round the world.

Speaker 7 In June 1972, the couple set off on a 31-foot wooden sloop called the Oralin.

Speaker 7 A year later, in the middle of the the Pacific, a whale breached out of the briny deep and knocked a hole in the Oralin.

Speaker 7 It sank within minutes. Marilyn, who couldn't swim, and Morris spent four months adrift on a rubber raft.

Speaker 7 They survived barely by catching and eating raw fish and birds, sucking water out of turtles' eyeballs, and, in depressive Morris's case, fighting the temptation to tip himself overboard.

Speaker 7 Elmhurst, who writes for The Guardian and the New Yorker, knows how to tell a perfect storm of a story, relying in part on Marilyn's diary.

Speaker 7 Here, for instance, is the day when the pair woke to find themselves sunk in a hollow in the middle of the raft.

Speaker 7 The bottom of the rubber raft had been pierced by the spines of tiny fish and needed patching. Afterwards, to stay afloat, the couple had to pump two or three times an hour.

Speaker 7 Elmhurst then uses poetic license to enter into Morris's thoughts.

Speaker 7 Now and then, in brighter moments, Morris liked to entertain the idea that they had become at one with the Pacific. But times like this expose the absurdity of such a view.

Speaker 7 Boats, like like humans, are in a state of permanent decline. Every time a boat touches the water, it degrades.
They were not meant to be here.

Speaker 7 I'm only skimming the surface of the existential depths of a marriage at sea. This is a tale that makes you understand the lure of the open water and why it's best, perhaps, that most of us resist it.

Speaker 2 Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed The Salt Stones and a Marriage at Sea.

Speaker 2 Coming up, Grammy-winning musician and producer Raphael Sadiq. He's known for his work as a member of Tony Tony Tony.
And as a solo artist, he's helped define the sound of modern R ⁇ B and soul.

Speaker 2 I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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Speaker 2 My next guest is Raphael Sadiq, a Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer.

Speaker 2 He just announced an extended national tour of his one-man show, No Bandwidth, One Man, One Night, Three Decades of Hits.

Speaker 2 It started at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with sold-out performances in Los Angeles and Oakland, and now extends through the fall.

Speaker 2 With nothing more than a mic, a few instruments, and his stories, Sadiq instructed that everyone in the audience lock their phones away as he revisited the highlights, heartbreaks, and hits that have shaped his music career.

Speaker 2 From his early days with Tony Tony Tony to his work with Lucy Pearl and through solo albums like Instant Vintage and Jimmy Lee. Here's a cut from his 2002 autobiographical hit, Still Ray.

Speaker 6 never come

Speaker 6 soon enough for me.

Speaker 6 I watch the sky all day.

Speaker 6 Night is where I find

Speaker 6 you and peace of mind.

Speaker 6 My days are filled with grief.

Speaker 6 That's why I truly

Speaker 6 give you what you need

Speaker 6 because you love me

Speaker 2 Raphael Sadiq has also built a career writing and collaborating with some of the biggest names in music, including Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, Solange, D'Angelo, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Erica Badou.

Speaker 2 Most recently, he co-wrote the song I Lied to You for Ryan Kugler's film Sinners, a gospel blues ballot that served as the emotional centerpiece of the film, inspired by his own church roots and gospel upbringing.

Speaker 2 Rafael Sadiq, welcome to Fresh Air.

Speaker 6 Thank you. Good to be here.

Speaker 2 No phones, a one-man show. Yeah.
Several hours, just you locked into the audience. Why did you want the audience to put away their phones?

Speaker 6 Taking the phones away just made it so I can give people the same opportunity that I had as a young, as a shorty going to the Oakland Coliseum and watching the OJs.

Speaker 6 I mean, I could see them walking up the stairs. I could see the lights on the shoes.
I could see the lights on the amps.

Speaker 6 I paid attention to so much detail now when you when you have phones in front of you it's just sort of uh you see people stiff and nobody's moving in the crowd yes it looks look like it's robots it's not really real people

Speaker 6 so when there's no phones you know i don't know i don't i just i just i like it the testimonies i heard people said well

Speaker 6 They got a chance to hug, kiss, dance with each other, and things that they don't do. Like it was, you know, see Earthman and Fire, the show.
You're singing, you know,

Speaker 6 you got your fists pumping, you dancing, you have your hands are free. Trying to give people a free moment.
Hope they enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 When did you find your voice? When did you know that you could sing?

Speaker 6 I found my voice probably in a Union Baptist, this church on 71st Avenue in Oakland, California.

Speaker 6 I was asked to sing a song with all the tiny tots. I had to sing a song on Easter Sunday.

Speaker 6 And this lady named

Speaker 6 Caller Sister Nation, she was the pastor's wife. She handed me a piece of paper and said, you're singing this song on Sunday.
We got a chance to rehearse it one time.

Speaker 6 And then on Sunday, you're singing. How old were you? I don't know, seven.
Yeah. And I was singing the song and people started responding when I was singing.

Speaker 6 The song was embarrassing in that the words. It was this gospel song.
It was like, you know, if I was Nickelode without bread or meat. And my friends was like in the audience crying, laughing.

Speaker 6 But when I sung it at church, people responded like, go, go, you know.

Speaker 6 And I heard it, but it it more or less made me more nervous. You know, because they kept responding like I was doing a good job.
And then I didn't do it anymore. I didn't do it anymore until

Speaker 6 I played in some local bands and I was playing cover songs. I would sing

Speaker 6 a song by Mr. Mr.
called Broken Wings. I sang that like in the 12th grade, playing bass and singing.
I sang the single Life by Cameo.

Speaker 6 Those were the next songs I sang and then pretty much I didn't like being a front guy. I didn't want to be a front guy.

Speaker 6 No, I was playing in a band where there were two other lead singers, and those are the two songs that I sang in the band. And when the Tony started, ended up singing

Speaker 6 Lil Walter. And the producers, Danny and Tommy, thought that I should sing more songs, and that's how I became a front guy.

Speaker 2 You've always gravitated to music of previous generations. You're like an old soul, like in modern packaging.

Speaker 6 What is it about that older music that you feel like it's just always you've tapped into it has a feeling it has a feeling and um the late grade isaac hayes told me there's no such thing of old school it's either you've been to school or you didn't right i was schooled music the feeling of music doesn't change so you want to get the feeling from way way back and you want to take that feeling and inject it to something new.

Speaker 6 I didn't know that I was doing that. It's just something that I got turned out on on when I was a kid.
You know, it's whatever you get turned out by when you're young is what you end up being.

Speaker 2 What do you love about the bass in particular?

Speaker 6 Bass made me feel big. I was so little.

Speaker 6 No, probably 99 pounds when I was that age.

Speaker 6 Space has had this big sound.

Speaker 6 I heard it on Motown records like Pride and Joy by Marvin Gaye. And I didn't know what I was hearing.
And later on, I would find out I was listening to one of the greatest bass players of

Speaker 6 James Jamerson.

Speaker 2 I want to ask you about a project that you just got done completing that we've all experienced sinners.

Speaker 2 What a movie. And you co-wrote the film's signature song, I Lied to You, with Ludwig Gorensen.

Speaker 2 It's performed by Miles Canton. He's got like this deep, resonant voice that feels like it's come from another time.
He's so young, but he's got like this really rich voice.

Speaker 2 And that song that you co-wrote, it really serves as this emotional centerpiece for the film. It's a pivotal moment.
First off, I want to know how did that opportunity come your way?

Speaker 6 Well, Ryan Kooglish from Oakland. I'm a huge fan of, you know, of the person that guy is.

Speaker 6 And then when this opportunity came, he called me and told me about it and told me what he was thinking about, gave me a synopsis of the film.

Speaker 6 And it was about blues and right up my alley, you know, it's my background, too.

Speaker 6 And they were about to leave the New Orleans to shoot it. And they gave me the story, and I'm thinking, when do you want it done? And they was like, Can we do it now?

Speaker 6 So I just started playing a guitar lick, and I just wrote the lyrics right there.

Speaker 2 Let's listen to a little bit of it.

Speaker 6 Something I've been wanting to tell you

Speaker 6 for a long time.

Speaker 7 It might hurt you.

Speaker 6 Hope you don't lose your mind.

Speaker 6 Well, I was just a boy,

Speaker 6 about eight years old.

Speaker 6 You threw me a Bible

Speaker 7 on that Mississippi Road.

Speaker 6 See, I love you, Papa.

Speaker 6 You did all you could do.

Speaker 7 And they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you.

Speaker 6 Yes, I lied to you.

Speaker 6 I love the girls.

Speaker 2 That was the song I Lied to You from the movie Sinners, which my guest today, Raphael Sadiqo, wrote. Tell me about that line.
They say the truth hurts, so I lied to you. You wrote that, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I did, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, tell me about that line.

Speaker 6 Well, that's a little mischievous boy

Speaker 6 line. You know, I should think about if you lied to your girlfriend, and it's like you're like, well, they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you.
I didn't want to hurt you. So I just lied.

Speaker 6 I've always had that in my head, that concept of a song. Why? Why do you think? Yeah.
Because I thought it would always be a great blue song to take that big voice of Miles.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Miles sounds like he's 60. Right? I know.
He's a young dude, like 19 or something. Right.
So once Ryan told me about the movie, sort of, changed the words around from what I thought I could say.

Speaker 6 Because now I'm thinking about a pastor, a father.

Speaker 2 Right, because in the storyline, it is Miles talking to his father, who's a pastor. Right.

Speaker 6 So not telling the truth, but he's lost. About his music.
He loves his dad, but he loves music.

Speaker 6 Doesn't want to hurt his dad to say, I want to go play in this club because I still love the Lord. I still love church.
But dad, I got to go.

Speaker 6 Maybe I'll make it back.

Speaker 2 Is it true? I heard this. I don't know if it's true, but that you love soundtracks and scoring.

Speaker 2 Like Like you'll be at home watching a movie or a show and then just start for yourself to think about a soundtrack or a song that'd be like the score.

Speaker 6 Yeah, if I'm watching a movie, I'll just turn the volume completely down and I'll start scoring. Like start seeing what I would do versus what they're doing.
That's how I kind of learned.

Speaker 2 I want to talk to you just a little bit about... Your process and writing songs for other people too.

Speaker 2 Beyonce's album, Cowboy Carter, won Best Country Album and Album of the Year at the Grammys and you produced and wrote two of the songs, 16 Carriages and Bodyguard. Congratulations.
Thank you.

Speaker 6 You know, working with a Miss Beyonce

Speaker 6 is,

Speaker 6 I know what hard work is, and I respect people that work hard. You know, you don't even have to be around them to know.

Speaker 6 You could just look at the production, amount of work they put into a show or when they come out with music or whatever.

Speaker 6 But being in the room and working with people, you really get to see like how hard they work.

Speaker 2 I've heard you say you don't remember the experience, but one thing you do remember is that you guys had a lot of fun.

Speaker 6 The good time is you're around a lot of great people, a lot of great thinkers. Everybody's a thinker in the room.
It's sort of like I was at my studio for a lot of it on my own.

Speaker 6 But sometimes I went to the studio where it was like five or six rooms and different people working in different studios.

Speaker 6 And you can go grab, you know, the dream out of a room, which is an amazing songwriter, producer. Any musician is

Speaker 6 uncalled.

Speaker 6 I would just dream up, like, call this guy, call this guy. And that's how Quincy Jones would do it.
You got to be able to have that book, that black book to call the right musicians.

Speaker 6 And that's why music suffers to me now.

Speaker 6 You're not making a phone call, so everything sounds the same. You're not giving different...

Speaker 6 energy, different spirits, different personalities on music. You need different personalities.
It's not about you. It's about

Speaker 6 everybody else and then you. That's what made great records.
And that's what the fun thing about Beyonce's record was.

Speaker 2 This particular song, Bodyguard, though,

Speaker 2 you presented that to Beyoncé, but that wasn't necessarily the song she can choose, and she chose that of yours.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that song, I was going through my Dropbox and I was playing songs in a room with her. She was in the room, Jay-Z's in the room, Jay, and a few, some of the staff.
And I was looking for a song.

Speaker 6 I don't think the phone was even hooked up to the speakers. And I played it, and I stopped it real quick because that's not the song I wanted to play.

Speaker 6 And I didn't think it was something she even liked. But she caught it in like two seconds.
She goes, what's that?

Speaker 6 And I'm going, oh, that's just this idea that I had. And I played it, and

Speaker 6 she's like. What are you doing with it? And that's how it got on the record.

Speaker 2 I want to play a little bit of bodyguard, and it actually is at the point where there's like this solo guitar. Let's listen.

Speaker 2 I could be your bodyguard.

Speaker 2 Let me be your cabal.

Speaker 2 Let me be your life guard.

Speaker 2 Would you let me ride, Sharkhood?

Speaker 2 Sharkuno.

Speaker 2 That was Beyonce singing her award-winning song, Bodyguard, written by my guest today, Raphael Sadiq.

Speaker 2 That guitar at the end, that was also not planned, right? That's, is that you?

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's me. Yeah.

Speaker 6 She wanted a solo. B wanted a solo.
And

Speaker 6 I did a solo and she was like, can we make it longer? And you never hear that from an artist in 2025 playing a guitar solo. They want it longer, but she knows her audience, and she knows that is rare.

Speaker 6 And I think we could do that.

Speaker 6 We can have a 16-bar solo on this record. So that was a little bit of pressure to go back in there and play like a 16-bar solo.

Speaker 6 Because I would have called my boy, I would have called Eric Gells. Who is Eric Gells? Eric Gells is one of the most amazing guitar players in the world today.
He's from Memphis, Delta Blues.

Speaker 6 He was the guy that's playing. He played a lot of guitar and centers.

Speaker 6 But I would have called him to play, but he was on tour. So I had to play it.
And it came out good.

Speaker 2 I love how I had to play it.

Speaker 3 I had to play it.

Speaker 6 I like spreading it around. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that like

Speaker 2 something about that, about Beyoncé choosing that song where you mistakenly played it, but then you're like, oh, and she says, no, what is that?

Speaker 2 I've heard you say, both she and Solange, because you wrote Cranes in the Sky for A Seat at the Table, her album, that they make choices like that.

Speaker 2 It's sort of like the mark of a great musician is to go outside the box, the places that aren't safe. It just made me very interested to know more about how you write these songs.

Speaker 2 Many, many times, they're for yourself. And then many years later, you might present them to an artist like Beyoncé or Solange.

Speaker 2 You can tell about just how brave they are and how far they're going to go with it based on the choices they make on your songs.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um,

Speaker 6 I don't know. I guess it's in the water in Houston.
That family, both of them are like, um,

Speaker 6 really particular about what they like as far as design, style,

Speaker 6 you know, staging.

Speaker 6 And you know what you can pull off. And

Speaker 6 it's not a lot of artists that take those chances. They take chances.
And music is about taking chances, taking risks,

Speaker 6 lasting longer than your teacher or your executives or labels or anything like that. You know, for me, it's like, what chance are you going to take if you're...
if you if you're playing music um

Speaker 6 you have to be you have to dare to suck And a lot of people don't

Speaker 6 do that. I don't fault people that don't do that.
But when you run into people that do, you have to know like,

Speaker 6 I'm going to try myself. I'm going to try to not be different.
I'm going to try to do something that I like first.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 secondly, I hope it's the audience that likes it also. But first, I have to like it.

Speaker 2 Have you always been like that for yourself as an artist? dare to suck?

Speaker 6 I've always been like that. I didn't know what I was doing until I had to find the words later on through different people.

Speaker 6 You know, dare to suck came from this

Speaker 6 acting coach that I was working with one time. And she's like, you got to dare to suck.
And I'm like, wow, that's pretty good. Because I did suck at acting.
So

Speaker 6 I was like, so that's a good point.

Speaker 6 And I just took that and ran with that. Then I realized in music, I did that a lot because, you know,

Speaker 6 you're not always going to be good.

Speaker 2 Well, Rafael Sadiq, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you.
Rafael Sadiq is a Grammy Award-winning musician and producer.

Speaker 2 His one-man show, No Bandwidth, One Man, One Night, Three Decades of Hits, will continue touring the country this fall.

Speaker 2 Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Speaker 2 Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorak, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krinzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman.

Speaker 2 Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper.
With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

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