First time I ever met Erykah Badu was at Grinders, the late Lower Greenville coffee house where she'd worked till a mere four months before our sitdown in February 1996. Twelve years later, she's back working the coffee-house circuit: In a not-yet-online Billboard piece previewing her forthcoming 18-track two-fer Nu AmErykah, there's word of yet another Badu disc getting released toward the end of the year available in venti or grande, perchance. As in:
In fourth-quarter 2008, Universal hopes to extend Badu's reach with coffee drinkers by releasing a live album, Loretta Brown, exclusively via Starbucks. Details have yet to be confirmed, and knowing Badu, they'll be decided on her own time.
"I don't always make the best decisions when it comes to timing between my records," she says. "I could be seen as a poor decision-maker when it comes to those things. But it sure feels good to me, and that's the only thing I can really go with."If you haven't guessed, we'll have an interview with Badu in the paper version of Unfair Park in the issue out February 21. --Robert Wilonsky
