Solange Knowles found her album ‘A Seat at the Table’ “draining”.
The 30-year-old singer has opened up about the strenuous process of making the critically-acclaimed 2016 record and how she “lost perspective” during the “f***ing long” studio sessions. The younger sister of R&B legend Beyonce, 35, also revealed how she traveled to their grandmother’s hometown Of New Iberia, Louisiana to seek inspiration.
She shared: “For this album, I actually went to my grandmother’s birth town of New Iberia, Louisiana. I rented this house, and I had my computer and I had my engineer, and I just kind of figured it out. And in terms of the writing process, it was a hell of a journey. It was a long f***ing time, and it was draining at times, and I lost perspective and context many times.”
She also said being a parent to 12-year-old Daniel Julez Smith, Jr – whom she has with ex-husband Daniel Smith – limited her options of where she could record. She said: “I’m also a mother, and so I don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to go away and write this album.’ I have to be conscientious of both of our times.”
The ‘Cranes in the Sky’ singer says she feels “blessed” to have been surrounded by musicians in her family as it made her curious about every aspect of the producing and recording process and want to learn how to do everything herself.
According to Nylon.com, she said: “I wanted to be involved in every facet, and I was really lucky and really blessed enough to have grown up in a musical family and have access to women like Missy Elliott, where I watched women produce and write their own music and kill it. So, I felt really inspired to learn how to do everything. And I would always kind of straddle the line. I would tell a producer, ‘I don’t like that bass line, let’s take it here, let’s go to this chord progression.’”
