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'What Do You Need A Song For?': Esperanza Spalding's Search For The Answer

Esperanza Spalding, performing at the Newport Jazz Festival on Aug. 5, 2017 in Newport, R.I.
Douglas Mason
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Getty Images
Esperanza Spalding, performing at the Newport Jazz Festival on Aug. 5, 2017 in Newport, R.I.

At the heart of Esperanza Spalding's new album, Songwrights Apothecary Lab (S.A.L.), is a question: "What do you need a song for?" In pursuit of answers, Spalding, a Grammy-winning jazz singer and bassist, assembled a team of more than just other musicians; she created a laboratory of sorts, gathering neuroscientists, psychologists, ethnomusicologists and more. "We are like shipwrights," Spalding says in an interview with NPR's Ailsa Chang. "We build things. We build things that we want to be vessels to ferry people from one point to another point. One shore to another shore. Or even through a vast, uncharted terrain."

Together, the group created a 12-track LP of sonic prescriptions: Each song, or Formwela, has, in Spaldings words, "an intended use and effect." Formwela 3, for example, is "for releasing the heaviness of a seemingly endless blue state." And Formwela 4 is "for tuning oneself to expect and receive attunement when speaking intimately to the heart's unarticulated needs," according to S.A.L. 's website.

"Really one of the primary invitations of this lab is for us to remember the resource that we have in music," Spalding says. "I use these songs in my life. You know, it helps me. They help me. Other people's songs help me too, but maybe I'm responding to the question, 'What do I need a song for?' [by] trying to write the songs that maybe we don't have yet for these very specific functions."

Listen to Ailsa Chang's interview with Esperanza Spalding in the audio player above, and stream Spalding's latest album below.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Ailsa Chang is an award-winning journalist who hosts All Things Considered along with Ari Shapiro, Audie Cornish, and Mary Louise Kelly. She landed in public radio after practicing law for a few years.

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SOMOS CONNECTICUT es una iniciativa de Connecticut Public, la emisora local de NPR y PBS del estado, que busca elevar nuestras historias latinas y expandir programación que alza y informa nuestras comunidades latinas locales. Visita CTPublic.org/latino para más reportajes y recursos. Para noticias, suscríbase a nuestro boletín informativo en ctpublic.org/newsletters.

The independent journalism and non-commercial programming you rely on every day is in danger.

If you’re reading this, you believe in trusted journalism and in learning without paywalls. You value access to educational content kids love and enriching cultural programming.

Now all of that is at risk.

Federal funding for public media is under threat and if it goes, the impact to our communities will be devastating.

Together, we can defend it. It’s time to protect what matters.

Your voice has protected public media before. Now, it’s needed again. Learn how you can protect the news and programming you depend on.