After she emerged to schedule a few performance dates this summer, you kind of figured that Lauryn Hill's hiatus would soon end — and it will. She is gearing up to record her second solo album and hopes to have it ready for a September release, she told MTV News last Saturday.
"My pilot is lit again, my firelight for recording is back," said Hill, who has many of her tracks already arranged and mapped out. "I spent six months in the studio banging my head against the wall because I was trying to put this fresh bread and new wine into those old wine slots."
Hill said that like her solo debut, 1998's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, her next effort will be musically inventive and feature intimate stories.
"Even with the last album I was stretching out the parameters of hip-hop as far as I could," she said. "So now it's like something has to give and it's not going to be me. That's what creativity is all about. We call ourselves creators and we just copy it really. I can honestly say that this [new album] has no external influence. It's from the inside out. This is my life."
She is expecting her third child and has been greatly impacted by a newfound level of spirituality. A new understanding of God, she said, has caused her to reinvent herself.
"I think the Lauryn Hill of then was looking to be validated, was hoping to be accepted, looking for acknowledgment from everyone except the one who made me," she said. "At this point, the things I am led to do are things that I know He wants me to do. When I say 'He,' I mean things that don't necessarily get the thumbs up, but in my soul, I have inner peace after having done them. It's a different person.
"I, like everyone else, wanted to be loved and be liked, so a lot of my behavior was patterned to be acceptable to whatever the socially acceptable thing at the moment was," she added.
She said that people will have to accept her as she is, even people who pay to see her perform.
"Yeah, it used to kill me [if my voice was a little raspy], but not anymore," she said. "It got to the point where I was like 'Oh my God, it's reality.' Reality doesn't change the words. My voice being raspy doesn't change the words. I'm sorry that I can't run up the scale and back, but that ain't about me. It's about people receiving encouragement to jump that battery and start living. What's life if you can't live it?"
Hill, who has received just as much acclaim for her singing as she has for MCing, said that as many talents as she was blessed with, she ignored another gift for a long time.
"When I was still with the Fugees I would pick up the guitar, and I always used to say, 'Wyclef, just get out there and do that thing with the guitar,' " she said. "Interestingly enough, when God shows you a thing, we always try to encourage others to do what we were meant to do. But it's like just over a period of time, He caused me to take it more serious. He said, 'This is your accompaniment. Don't think it's going to be what you thought it was.' "
The Grammy Award-winner, who is going to be playing acoustic guitar on her new LP, said plucking the strings is natural for her.
"I don't know if I taught myself — I just evolved by way of necessity, by way of grace," she explained. "It's just by way of passion. How do we learn anything?"
Hill said her biggest life's lesson is to do just what she feels.
"I am not running for social president anymore. I'm just trying to be, obey God and do my passion, and tell everybody else that life is a waste if you ain't doing that."
