He might be regarded as one of the finest songwriter-producers working today, but Raphael Saadiq admits that he’s often reluctant to play other artists his material because he senses that they wouldn’t like it.
However, he’s also been able to identify a key shared trait among three of the “great” artists he’s worked with - Beyonce, D’Angelo and Solange - all of whom, he says, are able to spot the potential in a song that he’s played them and (on occasion) others have rejected.
"I wouldn't even play some things for people, because I know they might be like, Oh, that's just way too like [out there], you know. But the the great ones, they want to dive in."
Speaking on the Broken Record podcast, Saadiq says Beyonce has a great talent for getting “the right people in the room,” and praises both “her ear and decision making”. Saadiq worked across multiple tracks on the star’s 2024 album, Cowboy Carter, but says that he never intended for one of the songs he collaborated on, Bodyguard, to end up on the record.
“Bodyguard was pretty much a song that I did,” says Saadiq. “But I wasn't even going to play [her] that song. I was going through another song, and she heard [Bodyguard], and she said, ‘What's that?’ She got an ear like that. Not many artists could take a song like Bodyguard and say, ‘I like this song and I want to make it a record.’”
It was a similar story with D’Angelo’s 1996 single Lady, from his debut album, Brown Sugar, which Saadiq says was the first song that the two of them ever worked on. D’Angelo, it seems, spotted something in it that others hadn’t - and also something in Saadiq himself.
“It was supposed to be for [Tony! Toni! Toné!’s] record, the idea… but they didn’t like it,” says Saadiq. “They didn't like the initial idea. They never heard what it was going to be. Neither did I. But I played the guitar riff for D'Angelo. And he said, ‘I like it’. I said, ‘Cool’. So I was gonna call somebody over to play my guitar parts over. He said, ‘No, you should leave what you did’. And that's the first time my guitar playing ever got on a record.”
Of Lady’s slouchy groove, meanwhile, Saadiq says: “I think, how we came up with that, we were playing, and we were playing behind the beat, but I think we were just really trying to lock something in. So, he would fall back, and he would start laughing. Then I would fall back, and we started kind of smiling, laughing. We just kept going back and forth, but not talking about it, and it became sort of the style of his record.
“But that's the way he sings, that's the way he plays, and it was just natural for him, but he's a Dilla fan, yeah. I'm a Dilla fan, too. So I figured it out later - we were just mocking Dilla.”
Later in the interview, Saadiq discusses the origins of Cranes In The Sky, which he produced with Solange. The song would eventually win a Grammy, but Saadiq says that it actually sat around for eight years before it was finished, and that Solange’s vocals had to be recorded over a stereo mix of the instrumental because that’s all anyone had.
Saadiq also recalls jamming with Larry Graham - “he plays big boy bass” - and says that he’s currently taking a step back from recording his own music to focus on improving his piano playing skills.
“I haven't recorded anything in maybe, maybe it's close to six months, because I just want to practise and just play and not just loop everything,” he confirms. “Because, you know, when you’re recording now, you're in Ableton, you just loop everything, and you never get any practice time in on any instrument.”
Saadiq says that, as well as taking piano lessons, he’s also been learning to play some of his favourite songs, and he believes that his music will feel the benefit in the future.
“I love piano, he says. “I love chords, I love voicings. And I just want, I want to have so much artillery to write, to grab from. I can hear everything. I can hear it. But I just want to be able to go to it in like two seconds
“When I start writing music, I think it's gonna be a little different.”
