What inspired you to make a new album, Evolution, after calling 2019’s Threads your “final” album? Jade99
I’m raising two teenage boys who ask a lot of hard questions, and after we started talking about AI I found myself writing a lot in the mornings after they go to school. I wound up with seven songs that were halfway between a diary and venting. I called my producer friend Mike Elizondo and said, “I have these songs. I don’t want to produce myself. Can I send them?” He was blown away and excited, so we wrote two more and then we had an album.
It’s my response to what’s happening in my country, in my little world, and I guess in humanity at large. In Mike’s studio this young songwriter said she couldn’t get any traction from male singers unless she had a guy singing on the demo, so she paid $5 to have John Mayer’s voice singing on it, using AI. When she played it for us I almost started crying. It was so real, it felt like an assault on my spirit. We have to protect ourselves. So the album’s full of all this light and fluffy stuff [laughter].
