Andre 3000 is busy promoting his new Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side, so he decided to stop by the NPR studios and do a podcast with co-hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest) and Frannie Kelley.
Instead of focusing on the movie, though, they jumped right into a conversation about Aretha Franklin, for whom Andre just produced a song.
“It’s like a covers album,” Andre said. “And we actually picked a song. We picked a Prince song and she killed it.
Andre and Aretha eventually settled on the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
“It’s a completely different take on the song,” he said. “You’ll – it doesn’t sound like any other of the – it doesn’t sound like the Prince version. It doesn’t sound like the Sinead O’Connor version either. It’s Aretha in a different element, but something she’s familiar with. But it was really really fun doing it. And just to hear her use her voice like this instrument. She just came in the studio and really just knocked it out in about an hour. I think it was about an hour, yeah.”
