When Lady Wray Started recording her fourth studio album “Cover Girl”, she realized that she needed to go back to where it all started. At that time, she was far away from her debut from 1998 “Make It Hot”, a structured R&B record that was released as Nicole Wray whose title track reached No. 5 on Billboard Hot 100. Eight years ticked off before finally putting out her solo album, 2016’s “Queen”, which transformed her as one as a one, which renowned her as a one, which renowned her as one as a one, which re-formed her as a one, which renovated her as a one, which re-formed her as a hungry “, which renown souls.
“Cover Girl”, out on Friday, keeps her sound anchored in the soul, where she mostly comes alive and infuses it with the rich and spiritual Pekstens in the gospel. “I grew up in a Pinse Baptist Church,” says Wray Amount. “I wanted to take that hand patted, have a good (feeling), but still with a little funk and soul and a little hip-hop influence. There were many things that I have always wanted to do, and this album has been the most fun of all the projects I have worked with.”
Now 46, Wray has unlocked the kind of creative liberation that artists with decades long term can often fight to reach. “Cover Girl” is directly positioning himself as one of the best R&B albums of the year, which is lively with deeply passionate, freewheeling love songs that tip between mature soul, futuristic funk and Motown ride. Wray sings with abandonment but is completely in control: on the doo-soping “hard times”, for example, she celebrates having come out at the other end of her relationship toughest attempts, her soprano is enough for the sky when she belts, “stopped right by my side, I can’t lie.” On “What that means” she takes the baton from Delfonics and goes back to the pulpit at Stevie Wonder-Linded Ballad “Calm”, turned down “The Lord knows I’m Hans.”
“Cover Girl” sees Wray Redeaming with Leon Michels, the Nostalgia whiskey who was a founding member of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and Lee Fields & The Expressions. She first met Michels after working with Black Keys on their album 2009 “Blakroc”, later provided background song on Tour for Lee Fields as half of Lady with Terri Walker. “Queen Alone” marked its first collaboration at full length, with Wray which found himself again as a recently coined solo artist. Six years later they refined their process with the more mature “bit of me”, recorded while Wray was pregnant with his first child.
Wray credits the loose but accurate dynamics of “Cover Girl” to her relationship with Michels, who previously signed her to her Big Crown Records print. Previously, she has worked with some of the biggest names in music and listed Timbaland, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis and Pharrell Williams, but still revolve back to family dynamics that she has developed with Michels as a key ingredient for their creative partnership. “I think it goes hand in hand: producer, artist, marriage, do you know what means?” she says. “And that’s what you get when you get Leon and myself in the creative process for all the projects we worked with. It has only been beautiful that he knows who I am, that he knows what I feel.”
She was inspired to name the album after the title track, an almost hypocrisy confrontation of the standard for beauty that was placed on her and find self -love in a cynical world. She was inspired by her youth, when her mother’s friend would stop at the house and give her and her two siblings $ 10 for each A they earned. Each time he would say to her, “Cover Girl, you did it again.” “I always asked my mom, ‘What is cover girl?'” She reminds. “And she was like, it’s beauty. It’s like a magazine. She told me it was about me just beautiful at a young age. And Laugh and Go to a Party. And it’s Also About Self-Care, Taking Care of Yourself, Self-Love, and the Sacrifices of Love. In a Nutshell, That’s The Whole Identity (album).
If something is “cover girl” a lesson in ambition and endurance, to achieve your potential after years of setbacks. When she debuted, Wray was a 19-year-old invoiced as a Missy Elliott-Protege, and immediately achieved success as a solo artist and spreads his vocalo magic over Elliottt’s second album “Da Real World”. But after her second album “Electric Blue” was hailed, she broke from Elliott and signed with Roc-A-Fella Records 2003 at the top of its forces, just to be lost in the mixture once again after her single “If I was your girlfriend” stopped on the lists. Through Dash, she joined the black keys, with which she worked at “Blakroc” and the 2010 follow-up “Brothers”.
Today she reflects on her path with clarity, grateful for the lessons that led her to her present. She has a tour upwards through November and has learned not to set great expectations on her future. “Of course I am a fighter. It has gone over many seas and I have been swimming, I have stayed,” she says. “I’ve been around for a long time. You can’t fake this. So I want to be a little longer. I told my daughter that I’m 80 and I will still be on stage and she will sing and be like,” here is my mom, Lady Wray! “
“Being in the limelight, that’s good and dandy. But for me it’s a love thing,” she says. “If I don’t have fun anymore, I’ll probably be done. But I definitely have so fun and I love it.”
