Cover Story: Soul mates

It’s been about two months since India.Arie last saw her old friend and soul-brother-in-arms, Donnie. He was performing at this summer’s National Black Arts Festival, and Arie, back home for a rare break between recording, touring and promotional work, came around to hear him sing.

Though they see each other occasionally, Donnie admits, “I haven’t had too many conversations with India in the last three years, especially when her album came out.”

In the three years, that is, since Arie signed with Motown Records, and the year-and-a-half since her debut, Acoustic Soul, propelled her out of the tight-knit local scene and into the waiting arms of Grammy voters nationwide.

There was a time when India and Donnie used to hang together all the time: back in the late ’90s, when they were the queen and king of the Atlanta soul revival going down weekly at Midtown’s now-defunct Yin Yang Cafe. They were members of an artist collective known as Earthseed — “planting seeds of positive music in the earth,” the slogan went.

But things have changed. Arie became a near-instant superstar, appearing in Gap ads, on MTV and alongside the likes of Stevie Wonder and Bill Clinton in Save The Music campaigns. Now the demands of fame keep her away for a good part of the year. And when she’s home, she’d just as soon keep a low profile. Today, on her way to meet Donnie for a late-afternoon lunch at Teaspace — one of her favorite food-and-drink spots, tucked behind a strip in Little Five Points — Arie is identified no less than three times by fans. And this is before she even gets out of her car.

Donnie, meanwhile, has cultivated a relatively large following considering his lack of full-length recordings, his limited promotional budget and the passionate — at times, confrontational — social messages laced through some of his songs. Still, he lives at subsistence level, sharing a place out in Riverdale and eluding the majority of his potential audience. The same audience, in fact, that has embraced India.Arie, as well as Macy Gray, Jill Scott, Maxwell, Musiq Soulchild and D’Angelo, as part of the retro-tinted neo-soul movement that has emerged in the mainstream in recent years.

It will have taken Donnie an extra few years to find national exposure — if he finds it at all. And the reasons for the delay are the subject of much head scratching and finger-pointing. The short answer: Donnie has been waiting for the right time, and the right offer. In the meantime, the artist has spent some time battling through an identity crisis he likens to “the whole divided soul issue that people like Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway went through” — existential and aesthetic questions like, “Is God pleased with my work?”

But there’s reason to suspect that India’s and Donnie’s paths will cross more frequently once again, now that they both have new albums to promote. Arie’s Voyage to India, her follow-up to the platinum-selling debut, comes out this week. Donnie’s The Colored Section, his long-awaited debut album, arrives Oct. 29 on New York independent label Giant Step.

Case in point: They’ve come together at Teaspace, presumably for a joint interview and photo shoot — reuniting in the name of publicity. Except that Arie’s management has requested no photographer be present, since she is dealing with a skin problem and wouldn’t be wearing makeup to the interview. (For the record, Arie looks as beautiful in person as she does in any doctored-up image out there, with no skin problem in sight.) So it’s just an interview.

Donnie brings his manager, Anasa Troutman, the woman who founded Earthseed and its offshoot, neo-soul promoter Groovement — and who once managed Arie as well. India brings a music-industry friend and a piece of solicited advice, delivered from the established star to the artist about to embark on the music industry’s raging seas:

Turning toward Donnie, who’s seated next to her, Arie says, “Know your boundaries, and just be calm about it. Like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ If they ask you 50 times, just be like, ‘No ... no ... no thanks.’ Just be cool with it and you can keep yourself from a lot of physical ailments. I worked my stomach into an ulcer, like, ‘They don’t understand! They’re not doing what I want and I can’t take this anymore!’ At one point I just was like, ‘I don’t accept any more pressure.’ And I’d just keep saying it every time someone would say something like, ‘You have to get on the flight right now!’ and I know there’s three more flights after that. I’d be like, ‘I don’t accept any more pressure, call him back and tell him I’ll be on the 10 o’clock. ... Oh, they said no? Well I’ll be on the 10 o’clock anyway.’”

“Oh, I can do that real good,” Donnie says with a laugh.

“But be calm, at all costs,” Arie repeats, acknowledging how easy her friend’s steadfastness can turn self-destructive. “Because if anything affects your voice, then they’ve got you.”

“The only thing constant in the world is change/That’s why today I take life as it comes.”

-- India.Arie, “Growth”

By coincidence, India and Donnie first met right across the street from Teaspace in 1997.

“Everybody kept telling me about this dude Donnie who could sing,” Arie says. “And they told me how he looked, and I saw him from way down the street. I was like, ‘There he goes,’ and I started walking fast. ‘Are you Donnie?’”

At that time, Donnie Johnson was just a few years out of a stint in the Atlanta Super Choir. He was 8 when his family moved from Lexington, Ky., to Atlanta so his mother could take her first job as a minister in the Hebrew Pentecostal Church, a highly expressive sect (from which Marvin Gaye also emerged) that melds Jewish and Yoruban traditions to Christian faith. While Donnie’s family was largely secular up to that point, eventually his father became a pastor as well, and Donnie found himself caught between his more liberal early years and the church’s conservative leanings. While gospel was a major part of his musical upbringing, Donnie also cherished his parents’ soul records — in particular, the holy trinity of Gaye, Hathaway and Stevie Wonder.

India Arie Simpson was 11 when she moved to Atlanta from Colorado, where her father, Ralph Simpson, played basketball for the Denver Nuggets. Though her parents divorced, India felt the second-hand glare of fan accolades and media attention at a young age. An interest in jewelry design and art history led her to the Savannah College of Art and Design, where, at 21, she first picked up the guitar and started writing songs. Returning to Atlanta, Arie and her friend Anthony David, another aspiring guitarist/songwriter, fell in with the scene brewing around live soul act The Chronicle, the house band at Yin Yang Cafe.

Soon, Arie, David and the Earthseed collective — which included acts like Sirius B and Jiva — had taken up a biweekly Friday residency at the club and invited Donnie into the fold. Donnie, who’d started singing professionally a few years earlier, doing mostly covers in second-rate establishments, welcomed the opportunity. “I was really just a homeless person going up on stage, hopefully to get a plate so I could eat,” he says.

With Earthseed’s emergence, the Yin Yang scene took off creatively. The collective’s artists would take turns headlining, while the others appeared as backup. One month, Earthseed artists did entire sets focusing on a classic soul artist. Troutman remembers people crying in the audience the night India and Donnie dueted on a cover of Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack’s “Be Real Black for Me.”

“It was like potential becoming kinetic,” recalls David, who also plays guitar in alt-rap band El Pus. “Everyone was like, ‘I think I can do that’ or, ‘I want to try that.’ [India and I] watched The Chronicle play, and we didn’t play instruments. And by the time it was over, we both were both playing. And we used to talk about writing songs, and before it was over, we were writing them — and people liked them. So it was like a little place to figure all that stuff out.”

After Earthseed evolved into Groovement and put out a compilation CD, out-of-towners began to take note as well. In 1998, female R&B trio Divine approached Arie about recording one of her songs. They ended up with “Sweet Essence” — the first song she’d ever written, penned just a year earlier — and invited Arie up to New York to produce the track. Though she didn’t know the first thing about producing, Arie took them up on it. Along with Troutman and keyboardist James White, Donnie joined Arie on the trip, and he made arrangements to appear on “Showtime at the Apollo,” the televised talent show staged in the historic Harlem theater.

While the others hit the studio, Donnie traveled uptown to discover the show had been cancelled because of a strike. So he roamed Harlem and came across a dress and some fabric, which he bought for India. “He was the first man who ever gave me a gift,” Arie says.

Makes me wanna holler, now I know what Marvin meant/The industry’s so cold, give me the things to my ancestors you owe/ ... Said American music was built upon my back/R&B, soul, your rock ‘n’ roll, your blues, your ragtime and your jazz/Yes, I herald the gospel, funk, hip-hop, techno/And I’ll sing forever in the name of the American Negro.”

-- Donnie, “Beautiful Me”

Things moved quickly for India.Arie. The compilation and a professional songwriting/producing credit led to two dates on the female-oriented summer festival tour Lilith Fair, where she established connections in the Nashville music industry. That led to her finding a producer and making some demos, which got her noticed by record executives — notably, Motown’s Kedar Massenburg, who signed her in the spring of 1999.

Meanwhile, Donnie’s rise stalled. Thanks to his magnetic stage presence, he continued to grow a live following, and his classic soul style — the effortless swoon, the Afro-and-bellbottoms look — was immediately appealing. But none of it translated into the kind of offers he wanted, the kind that would unconditionally preserve his authentic, almost anti-modern, sound.

In late 1999, the latest in a string of major-label A&R reps flew to Atlanta to hear Donnie. With no show scheduled, Troutman arranged a one-on-one showcase — just Donnie, accompanied by White on keyboards, singing without a mic in White’s basement. In a forum where it would be impossible to hide even the slightest vocal flaws, Donnie nailed every song. The record executive — a fan of gospel-inspired ’70s soul crooner Donny Hathaway — was stunned.

They got to talking. Donnie’s vocal skill was a no-brainer. His look was cool. Then, the exec asked how would Donnie feel if his songs were subjected to the modern production standards required on a major label? Not anything drastic, just something a little more contemporary — neo-soul rather than classic soul? A tinge of hip-hop production, perhaps?

Donnie was friendly and positive, but he hedged on his openness to any form of tinkering. With some polite thank-you’s and encouraging words, the executive headed back to L.A., awed by Donnie’s talent but unconvinced he could make a case to his bosses for investing potentially millions of dollars on someone with an aversion to the label’s practical requirements.

“People want to hear this stuff, but you gotta let them hear it. I think we disrespect their ears,” Donnie says now — three years later and still awaiting the release of his first album. “It’s too much work trying to be something that you ain’t.”

“Running round in circles I lost my focus, lost sight of my goals/I do this for the love of music, not for the glitter and gold.”

-- India.Arie, “Little Things”

While Arie got her record deal at a lightening pace, making Acoustic Soul was much slower going. Having made her mark as a stripped-down guitar-and-voice singer/songwriter, even the slightest beefing-up of production and arrangements seemed to betray her vision. And since Motown wasn’t interested in releasing a folk album, there was a potential conflict in the works.

“India had to make some adjustments in what she was doing,” says Troutman, who remained close to Arie after she left the Groovement fold. “Because what was most natural was just guitar and voice. The production and recording part of it was foreign to her. At her core, she’s singer/songwriter. So all the extra stuff she wasn’t concerned with, it wasn’t even in her frame of reference. All her production before Motown got involved was very minimal, brushes instead of a full drum kit, or just a bass added. But Motown is an urban label, so you can’t sign to an urban label and not expect to have urban-sounding music. That’s why it took so long to get her album out, because they tried so many things she just wasn’t comfortable with.”

Says Arie, “I thought I was compromising by just trying to do what everyone else wanted me to do with the production. I tried a lot of stuff and was like, ‘Well, after I get through this album, the next album I can have more control’ — people kept telling me that and I believed them. But at a certain point I listened to all the songs and was like, ‘I don’t like this.’ Then I just took control. I was and still am doing it for the love of music. If they said tomorrow, ‘We’re going to take all this stuff away that we gave you if you don’t make the album we want you to make, whether you like it or not,’ I’d be like, ‘Take it away.’ I want to like what I do.”

In all, it took about two years of remixing and working with various producers to get Acoustic Soul to where Arie was satisfied. She had to re-do “Strength, Courage & Wisdom” three times; she recorded “Back to the Middle” twice before eventually putting the song’s original demo version on the album. In the end, Arie says, she got what she wanted.

Around the same time, Donnie’s pursuit of a home for his music brought him to what would seem like a natural fit — here in Atlanta, at LaFace Records. The commercial urban industry, dominated locally by LaFace and So So Def Records, rarely overlapped with the more alternative, college-oriented neo-soul scene around Yin Yang and its successor, Apache Cafe. But LaFace acts OutKast and Goodie Mob have served as something of a bridge between the bizzers and the bohemians, and it was Goodie Mob’s Big Gipp who took Donnie to Buckhead to sing for LaFace president L.A. Reid.

Again, Donnie did his thing perfectly. “L.A. acted like he liked it,” Donnie recalls, “and that was it.”

He never heard from Reid again.

“L.A. was like, ‘We got some leftover Donell Jones songs we can give him,” Troutman says, laughing at the implausibility of throwing the scraps of a B-list R&B bump-and-grinder to an artist like Donnie. “But I’m not mad at L.A. for trying to get Donnie to sing Donell Jones songs, because that’s what he’s comfortable with. And you can’t sell what you’re not comfortable with.”

Donnie isn’t so charitable. “It’s like, ‘If I can’t fit him into this formula, I’m not going to try and do anything outside of that,’” he says, banging his hand on the table for emphasis. “All I see on BET is a bunch of ghetto fabulous stuff. There are no guys in soul music — or there are so few that they don’t have a voice. All the guys I see that are singing have gotta be a sex symbol, gotta be rubbing on girls. And there’s nothing wrong with love songs, but there is no black male consciousness in the mass media. Nobody’s crying about what’s really going on. I came from gospel music, so we were always taught that when you get up in front of the public, you have to tell them something they can live by.”

“People say, ‘You have a chip on your shoulder,’” he adds, “but you want to talk about your life!”

“Give me Atlanta, give me Savannah, give me my piece of mind/Give me some Stevie, give me some Donny, give me my daddy, give me my mommy/Pour me some sweet tea, spoonful of honey/I don’t need no Hollywood.”

-- India.Arie, “Little Things”

When Acoustic Soul finally came out in the spring of last year, success came quickly. Critics embraced India.Arie’s mix of Tracy Chapman-style guitar-slinging and Erykah Badu-like earth-mother soul. After earning seven Grammy nominations (more than any other artist, though she didn’t win any), the record wound up selling well over a million copies.

And with fame, of course, everything changes. Though Arie says she still “feels like the same person inside,” Troutman has seen her grow into someone she says is “more sure of herself and what she wants.”

“I miss the knucklehead in her sometimes,” says Anthony David, who remains her closest friend. “But she’s in a phase where you realize that everything ain’t a game, and she’s gotten really disciplined. It’s a trip.”

The most dramatic changes brought by fame come in the range of experiences to which she’s now open. She traveled to Brazil to film an episode of MTV’s “Music in High Places.” She sang with puppets on PBS kids’ show “Reading Between the Lines.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when Elton John would say my album is his favorite of the year,” Arie says. “I grew up listening to Elton John. I’ve met Stevie a lot times now, we talk on the phone about music. It doesn’t freak me out because he’s a person to me. But God works in mysterious ways.”

One of many such divine revelations came when she found herself back in Savannah to film a video with John Mellencamp. Looking down off the balcony of her hotel, she spotted the college coffeehouse where she first performed five years earlier. “I remember being like, ‘I can’t believe I’m here doing this song with John Mellencamp — at my college.’ This is the same college that was pestering me for years about, ‘Pay us our money back.’ When I left college, I was like, ‘Give me some time and I’ll pay you all your money in a lump sum, as soon as I make some money,’ and they didn’t believe me.”

A few months after the shoot, the Savannah College of Art and Design invited Arie to do a show at the school. “I said, ‘Erase my debt and I’ll come.’ And they did. I never would’ve thought I’d see that day.”

Around that same time last year, as Donnie’s fans began to wonder if they’d ever see the day when he’d put out anything other than an EP, he decided to take indie label Giant Step up on its longstanding offer. The company doesn’t have anywhere near the promotional resources of a major label, but in terms of putting out neo-soul, rare groove, acid jazz and other classic and alternative urban sounds, Giant Step’s reputation is unsurpassed.

“Finally he came to me and said, ‘I’m ready,’” says Giant Step President Maurice Bernstein.

Donnie wanted to make a record that wasn’t afraid to jump between smooth R&B, classic soul and jazz flavors. A record single-minded enough to embrace terms like “Negro” and “colored” as points of pride (“I’m not a nigger, I’m a Negro. If I become a nigger, I’ll let you know,” he sings in “Beautiful Me”). A record ballsy enough to offer “Our New National Anthem” (“Maybe we can come to overstand/9-11-01 happened just to get our attention”).

Donnie asked if Bernstein was OK with putting a record like that. “I was like, ‘Hell, yeah. Finally somebody who’s saying something,’” Bernstein says. “It always takes one person to come along to break the mold.”

While The Colored Section features its share of love songs, it’s what else the album offers that makes it so refreshing.

“I get tired of hearing love songs,” Donnie says, his intensity centering in his clenched fist. “We don’t live in a world where love songs should be sung every day. This world is hard, and nobody wants to admit it. Little girls disappearing every day, you find them raped and killed. This is not a cool world. And we sing all these love songs like we really love each other. That’s why I didn’t go into the industry right away. If they would just let us sing the things we want to sing, and the things that really matter to the public.”

“Welcome to the colored section/Welcome to the Negro leagues/Sign your name on the blacklist and know this/It’s American history.”

-- Donnie, “The Colored Section”

The recording process was smoother for Arie’s just-released second album, Voyage to India. The product of Arie touring with a steady band for a year, the songs were written and arranged more organically. While the first single, “Little Things,” doesn’t feature any guitar at all, for the most part the record isn’t a significant departure from Acoustic Soul’s mix of guitar-based folksy soul and self-affirming lyrics.

Meanwhile, no one sitting at the table at Teaspace has any illusions that success for Donnie will come as quickly as it did for India. Not Anasa Troutman, who oozes so thoroughly with a belief in these two artists that she calls the Yin Yang years “a pivotal point in American music ... you’ll understand in 10 years — don’t worry.”

Not India’s friend Taiye Samuel, a local independent music promoter who recently worked fellow Atlantan Cee-Lo’s solo debut, but ended up discouraged after the album’s consciousness and musical dynamism didn’t translate into big sales.

Not the artists themselves, though both are going to do their share to help make it happen. In fact, before coming to meet India today, Donnie got final confirmation of his plans to serve as an opening act on Arie’s upcoming national tour, which hits the Atlanta Civic Center Nov. 9.

After Donnie gets up from the table to do the photo shoot alone, India addresses the dynamic between the two of them.

“We definitely have different temperaments,” she says. “I think we share a lot of the same ideas, it’s just the way it is said. Donnie has a way of writing songs that are not only honest, but blunt. Donnie’s definitely a male view, and I’m definitely a feminine view. But there’s an audience for Donnie. I don’t know that it’s the same audience that’s for me. There’s an audience for Donnie because of his voice and his passion, because people like good music and Donnie’s good music.”

For Donnie, it’s less a matter of marketability than destiny. Before leaving the table, he quotes scripture, saying, “Many are called, but the chosen are few. Some people are really chosen to do this. I knew all my life that I’d be doing this.”

roni.sarig@creativeloafing.com??