The Giving Tree - what a wonderful story. What has it been like to revisit older albums like 2000’s Who Is Jill Scott? Your needs compared to your wants is big, because you don’t know what you need until you grow up. It’s about making decisions for yourself and learning the difference between having a maintenance man - the one who services your needs at the moment - and having a partner. It’s wonderful to be a girl and feel that love, but when you become a woman! I thought I was a woman when I was 30. When it gets hot, things get hot because there is nothing holding them down. I’d say for about 96 percent of girls, love can be like water. I want it to be music for people to live by, and I also want to show that there’s a difference between girls and women. The only thing that crossed my mind is making stories that you can feel. Was the idea of genre on your mind during the making of Woman? So often people define me as, “You’re an R&B singer,” instead of, “You do jazz, blues, classical, funk, country, everything.” Then to add fire to that with classic soul, like what Philadelphia brings, and then hip-hop elements - it’s all storytelling. Nothing tells a story like a country song it really paints pictures. You’ve described Woman‘s sound as “Philly soul meets country rhythm.” How did you arrive there? When asked about her initial defense and harsher follow-up critiques of Bill Cosby in light of the sexual-assault allegations against him, her publicist cut in: “Right now her Twitter is what her emotions are on the situation.” Scott did, however, talk openly about love and how she plans to continue connecting with listeners in an era of diminishing album sales. When we caught up with Scott during her current tour, she wasn’t exactly an open book.
Whether setting her voice to hypnotic, adult-contemporary R&B (lead single “Fool’s Gold”) or letting it loose in the context of deep Southern soul (“You Don’t Know”), Scott chronicles a lifetime of loving fearlessly, and at times recklessly, relishing the pain along with the payoff. But Scott has never sounded as authoritative as she does on her fifth album, Woman, out July 24. A sharp, candid lyricist, Jill Scott has explored love from every possible angle, often drawing on her own experiences: from the thrill of courtship to the pain of divorce, the radical act of self-love and the humbling birth of a first child.