Photo by Sesse Lind
Today, The Roots’ lyricist Black Thought and cinematic soul group led by New York-based musician Leon Michel, El Michels Affair, hand-delivered a bouquet of water-kissed roses in the form of their new single “That Girl” right on time for Valentine’s Day.
The track marks the second off Black Thought and El Michels Affair’s upcoming collaborative LP Glorious Game, set to arrive on April 14, following their lead single “Grateful.” The track is rooted in Black Thought’s reflective bars, which are at times layered, pairing with El Michels Affair’s rattling polyrhythms.
At first, Black Thought contemplates love lost; he raps, “At first love was elusive, this old heart was icy/ The cold part, I thought the final wifey wasn’t likely/My lover, friend, my spiritual twin, yet nothing like me.” But as the psychedelic warmth settles in and Michels taps a repeating soul sample that croons, “That girl, break your heart / That girl, tear you apart,” Black Thought allows the warmth of a love that’s true to crack through his calcified ticker and lets his feelings go rogue: “No way I could ever be right if loving her was wrong,” and “…I never met somebody/More striking than you.”
The song is yet another example of the two artists’ complementary styles and skills: lyrics from deep within the well of the soul coupled with samples and loops found in the most abundant of crates. As for how The Roots member found the lyrics for the song, he said simply in a previously released statement, “What I write about is determined by the equation of the producer’s energy and my energy, it’s about where we meet. To me, these songs are like scenes from a film that is my life. That’s the way it evolved.”
Listen to “That Girl” below.
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