Yahoo Lifestyle Raphael Saadiq Announces ‘No Bandwidth’ Tour, Plots New Album and Documentary (EXCLUSIVE)
Raphael Saadiq hasn’t put out a solo album since 2019’s “Jimmy Lee,” but anyone who’s kept tabs on the legendary musician knows he never idles. Over the past few years, he served as a key collaborator for Beyoncé on “Renaissance” and “Cowboy Carter,” picking up a Grammy win for album of the year earlier this month. In 2023, he hit the road for a reunion tour with Tony! Toni! Toné!, and he’s quietly etched a space in TV with scores for “Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” and Netflix’s “From Scratch.”
Now, the 58-year-old is bringing it back to basics with his “No Bandwidth: One Man, One Night, Three Decades of Hits” mini-tour, which Variety can exclusively announce. Saadiq plans to touch down in three cities for a series of one-man shows at Los Angeles’ United Theater on Broadway, New York City’s Apollo Theater and his native Oakland’s Fox Theater. It marks a first for Saadiq, who has never taken the stage by only himself.
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“It’s ‘No Bandwidth,’ it’s no band with me. That’s how I came up with the title,” says Saadiq. “It’s definitely challenging. I don’t know what to expect to be honest, but I need a new challenge and this is the one I chose.”
Before he heads out on the road, Saadiq, fresh off a performance at the NBA All-Star game, spoke with Variety about why he’s embarking on this new venture decades into his career, what to expect from his upcoming documentary and how he’s approaching his next studio album.
What inspired you to want to do this run of shows?
I always wanted to do it. I’ve always seen comedians walk on the stage with a stool and a glass of water since I was a kid. It’s like, I want to do that one day and it just kept coming back to me. And then I hooked up with Daniel J. Watts, who’s a Broadway actor. He’s a thespian guy, he acts, he tap dances. We became really good friends and he walked on stage with me and we did this bit on my record called “Jimmy Lee” in New York, we did it in a few places, and we got together backstage and freestyled what we were going to talk about, and when we did it, I was like I can do this. So that’s what really made me jump.
You’ve historically said that you love playing with bands. How does it feel going solo like this, and what pressure comes with that?
I love the band structure and I’m always going to have a band at some point, but this is something I wanted to do. Just walk out and nobody there, and I get a chance to be one-on-one with people and talk about things in my career, sing some songs acapella, maybe pick up a guitar, play something, sing. I started trying to play piano during the pandemic and I have this thing that I say, I’m only learning songs that I like. And so maybe during part of the show, I’m not really a piano player but if I was, these are some of the songs that I like. But just bring people to my world, to my living room, to my studio, how I create, and make them a part of what I’m doing, more like they’re in the session with me. It’ll be sort of like taking the stage on Broadway. And I always think Broadway is harder than acting, and I’m not a great actor at all. So if I start here, I can get better at maybe acting.
Have you already envisioned how you’re going to string all these decades of music together?
I’ve been working on it. It’s not there yet, but I’m working with Eisa Davis. She’s a writer and also Broadway actress and she’s from Oakland, she’s from the Bay. She’s Angela Davis’ niece. We’ve been putting pieces together and figuring it out, so she’s helped me coordinate everything. She’s really good, she’s making me feel comfortable with it. She’s got a lot of ideas, I’ve got a lot of ideas. I can’t wait to do one show to get it.
Your last tour was with Tony! Toni! Toné! and this seems like a pretty drastic shift. What is that like for you going from that experience to putting yourself out there in a way that you maybe haven’t done in a while?
I’ve never done it. I’m OK with it. I think it’s a challenge. It’s going to bring out a lot of different things that I don’t even know that are going to come out, some personal things that you know about, some of the breakups with groups and some relationships and my view on the record industry and how I see it and how people see me as being underrated. I hear that a lot. “Raphael Saadiq is very underrated,” maybe I could speak to that a little bit and my thoughts about a lot of things that people think and my vision of who I think I am as a person in the world — not as a person in the industry, just a person in the world. It’ll tell me a lot about myself and what I can pull off and what’s my timing like. But I think people in the world are really talking to each other right now because nobody understands what the hell is going on in politics, so I think everybody needs the one-on-one with real people.
Do you feel that you’re underrated?
I never felt underappreciated, but I can understand why people would say that because most people are celebrated by a lot of other things besides their music, right? You see them on commercials, you see them on this. I’m not the person that they see a lot. I’m not keeping a lot of the jargon up with all the noise. I’m indebted to the music and that’s what got me here and I pay attention to that. So music people, music lovers like yourself, you can figure that out, but I don’t knock people that know how to get publicity and on the cast of all the Grammys, the cast of all the award shows. I’m not a part of the cast.
There is a duality in that sense, being visible but only to a certain extent.
Yeah, it is. I love it. I love that part of my career. I love that I could work with artists like Beyoncé and her sister Solange, and be on stage with Mick Jagger and be a part of Sheila E. and Prince when I was younger and John Cougar Mellencamp and the Bee Gees. So many people that I’ve worked with. And that’s a love letter to myself. I don’t think I did it for the awards. I think the rewards and awards for me is I get to be around some of the best people in the business and I feel like I already won so many awards and I get to sit in the room and have so many ideas about what people are hearing. All that is fun. If it happens organically, I’m with it. Right now, everything is sort of happening in a cool way. I’ve got a cool team around me. That’s helping me build and it feels natural working with Beyoncé, it was super cool, super natural. I don’t honestly remember too many things about all the sessions we did because if you’re working, if you enjoy what you do, you don’t take tabs. I don’t take pictures of me working with people in the studio. I really get so into the work, just trying to work with the people you work with and it meets that point of what they need for this part of their career. That’s been my trajectory the whole time. I can be an artist and I can also be a person that can facilitate anything you need, and for me that’s more important than anything else.
It’s been six years since you put out a solo record. Last we spoke, you said you were working on “Saadiq and Shaheed,” your collaborative album with Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Whatever happened to that project?
You know what? We haven’t done it, but we see each other. It’ll probably pop back up, but right now that’s not happening. Now, I’m planning on making a record that has every instrument in the world on it. Woodwind, strings, a lot of instrumentation. Just making something really big, something in the light of Earth, Wind & Fire. Not leaving out any instrumentation. Everything has to fit, but it doesn’t stop, a continuous record. That’s one of the things I really want to do. It’ll be with a lot of session players, lot of different people from every walk of life. African instruments to classical instruments, jazz, all different cultures. That’s what Earth, Wind & Fire was. It had so many different people in it. That’s what I plan to do.
Have you begun working on it?
That’s something I’m keeping in mind for the future.
Aside from these shows, what are you excited about?
Just getting back to work really, just getting back in the studio. Spending some time in my mom, who’s 92. So that’s one of the first things that I’m doing. When I’m not doing that, I’m at the studio creating, waiting for the next score, film something. I’m working on a documentary right now. It’s the span of my career and it’ll have the Tony’s last tour. I took the phones so nobody really saw the tour.
Who are you working with for the documentary?
I’m working with Paul Hall, he did work with John Singleton a lot. He’s from the Oakland area. I have footage from Lucy Pearl, “Instant Vintage.” A buddy of mine Conrad Montgomery, also Bob McCracken, they’re two of the people who have been around me for so many years. We have so much footage. I collected all the footage already, everything’s in one place. And I’m directing it, we just putting everything together. We started editing last week for the first time.
You bring up Lucy Pearl. Is that a group you’d consider revisiting? Especially considering it’s the 25th anniversary of the album in May.
Honestly I would love to but it’s not really possible. You know how groups are. Groups are like Spinal Tap. Lucy Pearl was, in the nicest way I can say, definitely a Spinal tap kind of band.
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