Earlier today I was on the phone with Brother Ali to talk about his recently released EP, The Bite-Marked Heart, his year-long break from heavy touring, and his forthcoming LP. I talked to Ali for about 40 minutes, and it’s always great interviewing him. If you saw our recent video piece on Brother Ali, “The Best Shit You’ve Never Saw #1“, then you saw Ali talk about the rough year he had in 2010. At the time of that interview, Ali also told us that he was debating whether or not to put all of that into a new album, something that’s easy for him to do, and an easy LP for him to make. In the year’s time since that first interview, Brother Ali finished his new album Mourning In America/Dreaming In Color. Today I asked him about the direction of the LP, and if his rough 201 made it in the songs.
“There’s some, but it’s not the bulk of the album,” Ali told me via phone about the album’s content. “To me, I feel like it’s time to get to work… As good as my intentions are when I make an album that’s completely autobiographical, you know, I didn’t really want to make an album like that, which I really could have. I could’ve made the song for Eyedea, the song for my dad, the song for all of these different things. I do have things on there where I talk abbot that stuff. I have a song that’s about 2010, and it just kind of tells that story. I have a song on there’s that kind of an updated thing with my son and the situation with him and his mom’s side of his family and all of that kind of stuff,” he said.
“There are personal things but I just didn’t want to remake the Undisputed Truth, even though I had a year where I could’ve definitely done that. That would’ve been the safe, easy thing to do. I know my key, core base of fans would’ve ate that up. I could’ve made some of these 30 year-old women cry… But it’s like, ‘Ok, that’s fine.’ But where I’m really at though is feeling like tying myself into the collective, tying my own despair, misery, sorrow, and anguish into the collective pain and tying my own hope and aspiration into the collective hope and aspiration. That’s where I’m at man. I can’t make that record when I was 25 again.”
Brother Ali’s new album will come out later this year on Rhymesayers, with a tour to follow right after that. Look for my full interview with Brother Ali soon in which he goes deeper into the making of the album, the role of social media, his feelings about album artwork, and much more.