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I marvel at musicians and songwriters who sustain careers over decades and yet remain steadfastly outside of genre constrictions and assumptions. They work in service to song rather than persona, and as such don't ever seem to be repeating themselves, even as they develop and employ a consistent vocabulary of expression. They always seem to be listening for what is next, rather than imposing such a notion upon the music in advance.

This is as true for Meshell Ndegeocello as it is for any artist I have ever worked with. In the same way that Miles Davis can sound, album to album, wildly different yet always like himself, so Meshell has threaded every needle with an unmistakable sensibility, no matter the sonic landscape of any given project. Her albums each press forward with a point of view that is unique to itself, though her sound to me is always immediately identifiable, the continuum being that her humanity is always so viscerally on display.

Most of Weather was recorded in my basement studio near Los Angeles over a five-day period. Meshell and I have a friendship and a collaborative history dating back nearly fifteen years, and for this project I believe that we met on a plane that encouraged both of us to work from our individuals strengths, while also inviting each other out of our comfort zones: I pushed for songs to happen - as much as possible - as real-time "live" performances, while she reminded me just how much of recording can also be a seamless part of the writing process. I couldn't always hear what she was hearing take-to-take, because melody and lyric were often still unfolding for her - still evolving from one to the next; yet she continued to honor the moments of performance as true statements of singular discovery. She never once discounted my responses to the music as it stood, even if for her it remained unrealized, a song-in-progress.

One mark of an instinctive artist is that they can bear witness to the work and see it as a wholly living thing - separate and distinct from its creator. They stand outside of craft, ultimately - awake to the mystery of the process, and ready to disappear into it.

Time and again, I have watched Meshell stand open to what the work has to say to her. Even as the driving wheel behind it all, she leaves herself vulnerable to true revelation.