GOAPELE (Gwa-pa-lay)
In the glass menagerie of contemporary Black music, rife with coquettish cookie cutter dolls and R&B thugs, it’s apparent that Goapele stands alone. With an incomparable ethereal vocal flair that has garnered her years of critical acclaim, she is an anomaly in a marketplace incessantly focused on commodities. Ask devout soul aficionados and they will tell you she possesses one of the most alluring voices, comprised of signature throaty moans injecting poignant words with both passion and substance invoking all things old yet somehow manages to be refreshingly new. She is quietly Seductive, Sexy, Galvanizing and Sweet. In an industry that advocates monotony, Goapele is an autonomist - a poster girl for individualism and perhaps because of her cultural heritage, a non-conformist. Her exiled South African political activist father met her New York-born Jewish mother and married while in Nairobi, Kenya. Their union and the Bay Area’s progressive liberal climate may explain why Goapele’s music is considered almost subversive to some, the songstress being well known and awarded for her global activism and human rights work. Equally influenced by Stevie Wonder, Etta James, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley and Portishead as she was by Miriam Makeba, Zulu Spears and Hugh Masekela, the Oakland native brings a well-needed enigmatic presence to a mundane industry that is devoid of innovative magic and fascination, but thick with semblance.
Though it’s said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, that idiom is rarely applicable in the climate of today’s supersaturated music industry. Goapele is anything but reticent about her momentary hiatus after her stellar first two albums Even Closer and Change it All. “Over the past couple years, I had a daughter, I lost some loved ones, and the world has shifted,” she explains. “And somehow, I'm more open.” As the tectonic plates of musical trends began to shift during that period, Goapele observed the changes and made adjustments according to her own standards. There is a new power and confidence to her sound that balances out the coy sensitivity she often seduces us with. It seems motherhood and music have conspired to birth a bold femininity she is eager to strut.
After nearly a decade spent in a comfort zone, Goapele is sporting a chic new savoir-faire. Gone are the denim and dreadlocks. In their stead lies a lush musical valley of sensuality, lyrical vulnerability, and fantasy. Milk & Honey is an aural wonderland of sweet, soulful delights with a splash of futurism. This time around she’s crowning the soulful heartbreak and rumbling soliloquies of her previous albums with epic synths, old school feel good and a bolder voice. Milk & Honey doesn’t linger on R&B’s lackluster clichés, it hypes you up, kicks you in the stomach, drives you to tears, and then reels you back in on a sunny Sunday morning.
Eschewing the big recording studio environment, Goapele went through a period of water shedding at the Oakland, California studio The Zoo where she began to shed her skin, peeling back yesteryear’s obsolete layers of neo-soul. At Prince’s suggestion she even started recording alone to capture her most honest emotions and inflections, unfettered by self-censorship---which led to feeling less inhibited about the way she expressed herself vocally and lyrically. That empowered perspective is summarized in the song “Breakthrough,” brimming with sun-lit elation as it extols the joy of moving on into one’s destiny.
M&H traverses a wide spectrum of tales, from sticky seduction (“Milk & Honey”) to heartbreak (“Tears On My Pillow”). On the bass-laden “For Love,” Goapele skillfully illustrates a metaphorical ode to the love of her life: music. The cumulative result is a slick, mellifluous mélange of rhythmic rapture and melodic bliss. Goapele reflects. “I’m not afraid to belt or be more sensual and intimate vocally.” This can be evidenced on the sublime, mandolin-driven ballad “Pieces,” as her lithe vocals caress and skillfully convey the emotions of a lover in disarray at the curtain call of a relationship. You can hear a wistful, lilting cascade of a melody about heartache and loneliness.“Tears On My Pillow” is its stark flipside, a brooding, percussive glimpse into a broken heart that is coming to terms with a love that may have never meant to be: “I saw you slip away, long before you gave reasons/couldn’t hold you down, if you wanted to go.” In fact when the first chords of Goapele’s “Tears on My Pillow” tumbled down from the rafters during a recent show in San Francisco, the capacity crowd looked at each other with twisted faces of knowing expectation. And when she uttered, “I finally understand how you can love someone and leave them,” she elicited understanding nods and heavy exhales.
With M&H the woman with the voice of silk and smoke is going bigger, collaborating with both old and new producers including Kanye West, Bedrock, Drumma Boy (Young Jeezy, Souljah Boy, Rick Ross, Gucci Mane), Bobby Ozuna (Raphael Saadiq, D’Angelo, Anthony Hamilton), Jeff Bhasker (Jay-Z, Kanye West, Alicia Keys, Rihanna) and others, compiling a diverse album that fuses her insightful song writing with A-List production. Ironically, one of the last songs to be recorded, the effervescent “Right Here,” will be the lead single, produced by much sought after hip-hop beatmaker Drumma Boy. Although some fans might find it an odd collaboration, pairing soaring synthesizers on a track probably meant for T.I. or Three-6-Mafia with sultry vocals, Goapele manages to cleverly repurpose a love song into a metaphor for that expansion, representing contentment with both love and life.
But don’t get it confused, Milk & Honey is not a cure-all to the pixie stick and corn syrup world of R&B. It does not even carry with it a cease-and-desist order on all pigeon holed neo-soul categorizations. But it is pure Goapele, from the tearjerkers to the boom-bap ballads. She has somehow fashioned a body of work that can ignite arenas, rattle license plates and rub you down all at once.
Although she has appeared in Marie Claire, VIBE, Entertainment Weekly & Billboard it was in 2001 at the very beginning of her career trajectory that an editor at a small time underground Bay Area Newspaper once summed it up the best, "Her vocals shatter souls.” When Goapele parts her lips, she doesn't just sing, she rips it. She can’t hold back. But then again, moving forward, according to her grandmother is what Goapele is all about.