André Benjamin, as the hip-hop legend is legally named, announced his foray into ambient New Age jazz in an NPR interview: “I don’t want to troll people,” he said. “I don’t want people to think, Oh, this André 3000 album is coming! And you play it and like, Oh man, no verses. So even actually on the packaging, you’ll see it says, ‘Warning: no bars.’”
André 3000 has worked on a few projects since he stopped making music with his OutKast partner, Big Boi, nearly two decades ago. He was featured on songs by Beyoncé (2011) and John Legend (2008), and he dropped an EP in 2018. Of late, he’s mostly been visible on social media, where fans document sightings of him playing the flute in seemingly random places such as New York and Japan.
“I’ve been interested in winds for a long time, so it was just a natural progression for me to go into flutes,” he said in a news release. “I just like messing with instruments and I gravitated mostly toward wind.”
He added that he owns “about 30, 40 flutes” and will be showcasing his wood, bamboo and Mayan flute-playing skills in the album co-produced by prolific experimental jazz artist Carlos Niño.
The album will feature eight tracks, with titles as unconventional as the hip-hop artist. “New Blue Sun” will open with a 12-minute song called “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time” and other melodies named “Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C. / Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy” — which the announcement says “has a haunted aura,” and “Ants to You, Gods to Who?”
André 3000 acknowledged that the album will be a departure from the work that catapulted him to fame. OutKast, the Grammy-winning hip-hop duo best known for 1990s and 2000s hits such as “Hey Ya!,” “ATLiens” and “Ms. Jackson,” split after the release of their sixth album, “Idlewild,” in 2006. Their ambiguous end, widely rumored to be because of creative differences, was once parodied in a “Key & Peele” sketch.
André 3000 doesn’t plan to never rap again, according to his news release, but he wants listeners to “slow down, reset and sit still.”
“It’s therapeutic to be in that setting and playing and having to be fully in the moment,” he said. “Don’t think about the future, don’t think about the past. There’s something about knowing that this was created without any of the people knowing what was coming. It’s just beautiful to hear a natural happening.”
