Pro Motion Interviews Divine Brown

  • divinebrown Pro Motion Interviews Divine Brown

    Last week I got the opportunity to speak with the lovely Divine Brown. Her single Sunglasses that features Nelly Furtado has just been given the remix treatment and serviced to Billboard DJs (I hope you caught the Cajjmere Wray remix of the track I posted the other week!) Divine tells me about the follow up to the Love Chronicles album from which Sunglasses is taken, where she finds her inspiration and what working with Nelly Furtado is like. Check it out below!

    Camille:  How are you today?

    Divine:  I’m good, I’m good.

    Camille:  What have you been doing?  Anything exciting?

    Divine:  Yes, absolutely.  Working on a new record.

    Camille:  Oh, wow.  That’s cool.  Is it early stages or are you in the studio and putting stuff together?

    Divine:  I’m in the studio putting stuff together now, yeah.

    Camille:  What can you share with us about that new release?

    Divine:  It’s going to be a really fun record and in general my projects tend to be pretty well rounded, I guess.  The last project that I did, which was only released in Canada, unfortunately, was sort of meant to take people on a musical journey through different periods of soul music, but then I always throw something in there that’s a little different which was the recording of a song called “Sunglasses”, which was sort of spawned from the song “Sunglasses at Night”, inspired by it.  So this one is pretty cool, it’s gonna be pretty cool, I think.

    Camille:  Well that’s something to look forward to because the last album came out, was it last year?  “The Love Chronicles”?

    Divine:  “The Love Chronicles” came out in 2008.

    Camille:  So that was the CD that “Sunglasses” was taken from?

    Divine:  Yes.

    Camille:  Tell us a little bit about that last release for people that may not have gotten to hear it.

    Divine:  Well the last release- the album, like I said, was meant to take people on a musical journey through different periods of soul music.  It’s soul, it’s pop, there’s a bit of doo-wop elements; it’s sort of a nice little trip through music in general, like American music.  And then “Sunglasses”, how that kind of came about was, the actual keyboard line from the “Sunglasses at Night” was, while I was recording that record, was really, it just kept haunting me.  Like, it haunted me for a good two weeks and I finally said to myself, “you know what?  I’m gonna have to something with this.”  So, I went to this producer, Slakah the Beatchild, and I told him about the concept and everything and I was very specific about the sounds I wanted to use and I wanted to recreate a sound that was very similar to the synth line that was used in “Sunglasses at Night”, so I didn’t sample anything, I just wanted to replay that line and use that as the starting point to build this track.  And then I called Nelly Furtado, because I had done backgrounds for her for a few years for the first record and then her last release on “Loose”, so we got to know each other through that and I said, “Nelly, I have this tune and I’d really like to write it with you” and she was open to that and we did it and we basically wrote and tracked the song in one night.

    Camille:  Wow, that’s pretty impressive!

    Divine:  Yeah, it was sort of meant to be, I guess.

    Camille:  So, you have a good chemistry working with her?

    Divine:  Yeah, she’s incredibly creative, incredibly easy to work with, just laid back, and it was fun, there were a lot of jokes that happened in that session, as well.  It was just fun all around.

    Camille:  Do you think there will be future collaborations with her also?

    Divine:  I hope so.  She’s really busy right now, working on a new project and she’s been doing quite a bit of acting stuff as well, so for this particular album that I have coming out, I don’t think I’ll be able to work with her, but definitely in the future, I’d like to work with her again.

    Camille:  Is there anyone besides Nelly that you would like to work with at some point in you career?

    Divine:  There are so many people it doesn’t even make sense to list them off.  But, I think that any opportunities I have to work with people will just kind of happen organically in that list of people that I’d love to collaborate with.

    Camille:  How would you best describe your sound?

    Divine:  I’m a very versatile artist so it’s hard to put my sound in a very specific genre or bracket.  If I were to put it together, I’d call it r&b/soul/pop.  I love a good pop track, I love my r&b, I love my soul.  The very first record that I did, which was self-titled, was really based in sort of a neo-soul/pop sound.  The second record had some pop elements to it as well, but, again based in more r&b and pop, with soul elements, for sure, and this particular record is gonna be a lot of fun.  There’s gonna be more dance, like club-driven, tracks.

    Camille:  Do you think you will be doing any live dates anytime soon or are you mainly focusing on working out that album?

    Divine:  I’m mainly focusing on working out the album.  I have a few live dates coming up, one live date at the end of August, here in Toronto.

    Camille:  I know that you write your own music and everything.  How is the process of doing that?  When you go to create an album, where does your inspiration come from when you sit down to write tracks?

    Divine:  It could come from anything.  I always base my inspiration from life experiences, conversations with friends and family.  It’s very driven by that.  Sometimes the creative process, for me, happens when I might here a bass line first, I might hear the melody first, I might hear the actual chorus melody first, so it’s different depending on the track itself.  Sometimes I’ll get a track that I’ll really like from a producer and then I end up writing to it.  I love collaborating, though.

    Camille:  Do you ever have an idea that’s presented to you by somebody else and you have to kind of fit around and go for it with them, something you wouldn’t usually think of yourself?

    Divine:  Yeah, absolutely.  It happened a couple of times with this new project I’m working on.  One of the producers, Herb Middleton, he’s great because he always comes with a concept in mind and then we work around that based on the concept that he has for a particular track that he might present to me, but it’s great because no matter how the collaboration happens, whether I present an idea or an idea is presented to me, I love the collaborating and the creative process of collaborating with someone.

    Camille:  Must be fun to get together in the studio and come up with some different ideas.

    Divine:  Absolutely.  And I crack a lot of jokes in the studio too.  I have a lot of different character voices that I do- they come out naturally, so I’m trying to find a way to be able to utilize that on this record to bring an even more fun aspect to it.

    Camille:  Sounds interesting.  Sounds like it will be a good mix of stuff there.  Do you have a name in mind yet?

    Divine:  Yeah, the name of the album’s going to be “Something Fresh”.

    Camille:  Alright, so we’ll definitely be looking out for that one in the next- maybe next year, we’ll see that?  Or the end of this one?

    Divine:  Definitely by next year.  My plan is to kind of get separate distribution situations in different markets.  That way I have a lot more control over records get seeped into other markets.  A part of the frustrating part for me is that I haven’t really been able to infiltrate other markets being signed to labels within Canada.  So if I do it from more of a distribution stand point so that I can have control over creating a distribution or signing distribution deals within different territories, then that definitely opens up the opportunities for me a lot.

    Thanks Divine!



    August 27th, 2010 | Admin | No Comments | Tags: , ,

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