We all know it takes a village — to raise a child, tend a garden, or create art — but first someone has to make the village. Talibah Safiya, the Memphis singer-songwriter with a recording career now spanning almost a decade, is one of those people, drawing scores of collaborators around her by dint of her vision and voice, pulling disparate threads together to craft her unique neo-soul/trap hybrid music.
That sonic identity seemed to arrive fully formed with her 2015 debut single, “Rise,” and is just as powerful today, her collaborations only growing deeper and wider. Not only does her 2024 album, Black Magic, feature some notable co-producers, she’s worked with even more since its release in February, as several remixes, the latest of which dropped last Friday, have shown.
And, as she points out, she’s been “working mostly with producers who have Memphis roots, even if some of them don’t live here anymore,” proving that you can still go big while going local. One case in point: “I worked with Brandon Deener, who is from Memphis but based in L.A. He’s actually an incredible visual artist who is currently working on a solo show in Paris that’s happening this summer. But he’s a producer as well.” Indeed, his painting was the focus of The Guardian’s profile of Deener last year, where he was called the “former producer for hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Lil Wayne … now known more as a visual artist.”
Yet the album’s title song proves Deener is still in the music game. A bold opening shot, it builds on a vintage loop of stinging, soul-blues guitar before Safiyah’s voice decries, “We come from a Black-ass city/Black Magic … We said our pledge of allegiance/To the capital of Egypt!” It’s an anthem of sorts for Safiyah’s hometown, and the vintage soul stew loop only puts a finer historical point on it.
Deener also worked on “Jack and Jill” and “Have Mercy” (the latter featuring Marcella Simien), and both also play with locally-derived samples of roots guitar. Those flavors were very intentional, growing, Safiyah explains, from her time as artist-in-residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music last year. “The Rudi Scheidt School has the High Water Recording Company catalog, and I did a deep dive into some of that music, singing along with my guy Brandon Deener at Ari’s studio.” That would be producer/engineer Ari Morris, profiled in these pages last year as “Memphis music’s secret weapon,” who was also deeply involved in Black Magic.
“That was when I first met Ari, and how Ari and I ended up locking in,” Safiyah adds, “but I found myself really inspired by, firstly, R.L. Burnside’s ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song had me really immersed in the sound of R.L. Burnside’s voice — it sounded to me like he was improvising the song, and I loved that. It sounds like he was just making it up on the spot. And it got me thinking about Memphis. So I was super inspired by ‘Bad Luck City,’ which we sampled for the single ‘Black Magic,’ and that’s how the whole project got that name.”
Another High Water artist that Safiyah found inspiring was Jessie Mae Hemphill, though her music was not sampled for the project. “She was my guiding light for the energy of the composition of music,” Safiyah says. “My husband Bertram and I were at A. Schwab’s and he bought me a book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Y. Davis, which talks about how Black women have freed up the way we tell our stories through the blues.”
Hemphill would be a prime example of that process, but she has modern-day analogs. As part of her village, Safiyah enlisted a current feminist hero of the local neo-soul/hip-hop scene, MadameFraankie, for the track, “Papa Please!” Even that was touched by R.L. Burnside.
“For ‘Papa Please!’ specifically, I played Fraankie ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song is such a huge influence on a lot of the songs on the project, even if everything didn’t sample it. So I told Fraankie about a friend of mine and her relationship with her dad. I gave her a whole visual story and played her ‘Bad Luck City,’ and she went off and made the beat for ‘Papa Please!’ And when sent me that track, I was inspired right away. I wrote the song immediately, sang it for her, and that was the first one that we composed for the project.”
The track features MadameFraankie’s trademark liquid rhythm/solo guitar, but that’s not all. “She played the bass. She played the drums. She did everything on that song, there’s nobody else playing,” Safiyah enthuses.
Meanwhile, there are still more collaborations going down as Safiyah issues remixes of the album’s key tracks. The first was a brilliant reimagining of “Jack and Jill” by another soon-to-be-iconic Memphis figure, Jess Jackson, aka DJ BLINGG, who originally built a name with her sisters in the band JCKSN AVE. And as of Friday we have the album’s closer, “Delicious,” remixed by A.N.T.E. “He plays the keys and he’s done a couple other remixes for me,” notes Safiyah. “It’s really fun, and has a soulful, jazzy kind of vibe. But it feels totally different than the other version.”
True to form, “totally different” is something Safiyah will always be pursuing as she taps into her very disparate networks. “My theme throughout has been genre-bending,” she says. “I grew up listening to a lot of different types of things, and I love a lot of different types of music. I don’t think that they should be separate.”
