André 3000: In a New Light
André 3000 stunned everyone last November. His first album in 17 years, ‘New Blue Sun’, is a jazz-inspired flute odyssey – and a reflection of his own spiritual awakening. Now, at 49, the lifelong innovator has uncovered a different kind of creative freedom
André 3000’s perfect Venice Beach day looks a little like this: rise just before the sun does and amble the five miles down to the Santa Monica pier and back; take calls in his art studio, then draw, paint and play the flute by the water; as the sun sets, return home for dinner and a Netflix marathon before bed.
He’s lived in Venice for about four years now. André calls the move to LA’s vibrant beach community a “good mistake” – while looking for a six-month rental, he’d struck out at eight prospective homes in Los Angeles before his real estate agent offered a Venice listing as a last-ditch effort. The town’s walkability stole his heart. A planned six-month stay turned into a multi-year residence, despite pleas from his LA friends who knew that setting up shop on the westside would signal his inevitable absence from future hangouts. (Spoiler: they were right.)
But today is not one of those idyllic beachfront days. After his morning stroll, André packed up his cherry-red Chinese flute, a Mayan ‘death whistle’ and a handheld harp, and made the 60-minute drive from Venice to Chinatown to meet us. At Sage Blossom, a Vietnamese restaurant, he slides into a booth seat and asks for shrimp and vegetable stir-fry – hold the noodles, though.
These days, André 3000 enjoys interviews. “You’ll see as you get older – you just want to remember,” he says. He’s just as excited for his photoshoot, pulling his collection of instruments from his bag like Santa Claus – if Santa had time-travelled to the Mayan Empire to exact unfinished revenge on the Spanish conquistadors, that is. “Imagine hundreds of thousands of people making this sound at the same time, all coming to fight you,” he says, before blowing into the Mayan ‘death whistle’ – a palm-sized, wooden jaguar with ears pinned back, jaws agape – and creating an ear-splitting growl that knocks the photographer back a few feet. “You’d be like, ‘Woah, we fucked up.’”
Later, as a piano cover of OutKast’s sentimental She’s Alive plays over the speakers, a warm smile rolls across his face. Much has changed for André since the OutKast era. Famously, at the 1995 Source Awards, he and Big Boi stood defiantly on stage and proclaimed that the South, too, had something to say.
Over the next decade, the duo’s words drove that point home, emphatically working new pockets, textures and sounds to create some of the most innovative music hip-hop has ever heard. Hearts around the globe still skip a beat when André utters a rhyme, but those moments when he’s moved to write a verse are becoming increasingly rare. The last rap he wrote – a runaway pick for 2021’s verse of the year – was for Kanye West’s Life of the Party, where he sent a poetic dove up to the heavens in memory of both his and West’s mothers. (He also featured on Killer Mike’s 2023 track Scientists & Engineers – which won a Grammy for Best Rap Song – but tells us the verse had been resting in the vaults for about seven years.)
“I’ve heard some rappers reply to what I’ve said about age, and I have to ask, ‘What are you rapping about?’” he says, referring to rappers of a certain vintage who took issue with his previous statements about having nothing new to rap about. “Some are the best braggadocious rappers in the world, and we love them for that – but it’s so much easier to do that for the rest of your life. I don’t necessarily rap like that. Our formulas are different.”
“He,” André says, tactfully referring to his archetypal critic but mentioning no names, “doesn’t know what it takes for me to do what I do. I don’t know what it takes for him to say the same thing over and over again and still keep it creative. But I love him for doing it. ”
Instead, he’s found new life through the flute. It’s another byproduct of his move to Venice. One day, he wandered into a breath-work class and found himself spellbound; an award-winning surfer called Kassia was playing the flute during a post-class sound bath. Kassia introduced him to Guillermo Martinez – a craftsman specialising in Native American and Mesoamerican woodwind instruments – who manufactured André’s first flute. He immediately fell in love with playing. Now, an entire room in his home is adorned with around 40 flutes – all in different keys, from different countries, resting on blankets as they await their turn to sing his melodies. “I haven’t found the greatest way to store them yet,” he admits.
He may not yet know how to store them, but it’s rare that he leaves home without one. He’ll frequently play while sitting in the backseat of an Uber, making drivers shed tears with his emotive riffs as they whisk him through the city. TSA agents have stopped him at airport security, demanding he remove that weapon-like object from his bag, only to leave the encounter with a newfound appreciation for woodwind instruments. Now, artists ask him to play the flute on their albums as often as he’s asked to rap on someone’s song – “but I do get flute requests from rappers,” he laughs. “I just have to find the right ones to put out.”
To him, the flute isn’t an evolution. It’s a carte blanche that makes him feel like a new artist again. There’s now a fair amount of grey in his beard, especially when compared to his clean-shaven appearance during the OutKast years. But spiritually, he’s turned back the clock. “[Turning 50] feels weird because of that number, but I don’t feel 49,” he says. “I feel about 38, maybe 36 years old. I knew my vitality at 36 and I still kind of feel that way. But then I look in the mirror and be like ‘Nah, n*gga you 50.’”
As he experienced his spiritual reawakening, fans on the outside world were patiently waiting for a new André 3000 album – 17 years had elapsed since OutKast’s 2006 album Idlewild. But for André, suffocating anxiety that intensified in the public spotlight had rendered him unable to effectively release music – until he took a soul-cleansing ayahuasca trip. André tells us that as recently as six years ago, he suffered blinding anxiety attacks. “I couldn’t look people in the eyes”, he remembers, explaining how he’d go on dates and feel his entire body overheat. “I’ve never wanted to kill myself, but as humans, you wonder – what if I wasn’t here?” he says. “You get so low, where it’s worse than killing yourself. You’re just walking around dead.”
A friend who knew of his battles recommended the psychoactive drink as a potential remedy. After some scepticism, a chain of synchronistic events landed him on a Hawaiian island, where he bathed in a newfound love and acceptance of himself that lasted long after he’d returned from the astral plane.
“On 'New Blue Sun', I hear discovery. It’s not perfect at all. But to me, that’s the power in it. You can hear something forming, something new happening”
He returned from that journey with a renewed desire to connect, and be “out in the world again.” Once again, Venice came to the rescue: browsing the shelves of high-end grocery store Erewhon, he had a chance encounter with Carlos Niño, the percussionist, bandleader, composer and co-founder of LA radio station dublab. Niño had heard from friends that André was new to town and had been hoping to meet him.
Niño invited André to an event he was hosting that night in honour of Alice Coltrane, and a friendship blossomed from there. Over time, continued improvisational sessions led to one song, then two, and eventually eight – which would come to be called New Blue Sun, André’s first album as a solo artist.
Sprawling yet incredibly specific titles (That Night in Hawaii When I Turned into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild, for example) bely the celestial gravity of the album. Throughout, playful wanderings are offset by wondrous musical climaxes; on the fourth song, chirp-like notes give way to a waterfall of synthesisers. “On New Blue Sun, I hear discovery,” he says. “It’s not perfect at all. But to me, that’s the power in it. You can hear something forming, something new happening. That’s what I love about it the most.”
André may wield an imposing flute on the album cover, but it’s not just an album made up of woodwinds. Bird chirps, breaths, gongs and guitars – along with at least a dozen other instruments, courtesy of established musicians and frequent Niño collaborators Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina – all contribute to the album’s soundscape. Liner notes reveal Niño even drew sound from plants on nearly every song – because for André and his band, music can come from almost anything. “Nothing is off limits,” he says, banging a metal cup against the table at Sage Blossom to prove his point. “As long as it sounds good.”
Now, for the first time in 10 years, André 3000 is living on the road. He’s spent much of 2024 touring the album, which he brings to the UK this month for performances at the All Points East and We Out Here festivals. “I haven’t played in London in a long time,” he says. “So the European tour is going to be fun. One thing I do know – for some reason, Europe and Asia treat music more deeply. So I’m excited to play in those spaces.”
“Right before we go on stage, we have this huddle, and we’ll say, ‘We’re going into deep oceans right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we trust each other’”
André’s A Myriad of Pyramids tour opened at the Crown Hill Theatre in Brooklyn on 29 January. Despite decades of performing experience, André admits he was “so nervous” about returning to the stage. But soldiering through that mental block has recharged his battery. Unlike a rap show, where André will recite lyrics in a sacred yet repetitive ritual, the current tour is built on improvisation. On any given night, André and his band – made up of guitarist Mercereau, keyboardist Botofasina and drummer Deantoni Parks, along with Niño – may spend the first 30 minutes wordlessly blowing into woodwinds, briefly alerting the crowd to the fact they’re making it up on the fly while inviting onlookers to soar alongside them.
For an artist in a lifelong pursuit of freshness, there’s nothing more he could ask for. “Every night – the same way the album was made – we’re exploring space,” André recalls. “Right before we go on stage, we have this huddle, and we’ll say, ‘We’re going into deep oceans right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we trust each other.’ It feels great to do that every night.”
André’s seen attendees weeping in the audience; he’s had musicians tell him backstage they’re jealous of the freedom he has each and every night; he’s heard a woman tell him the show made her want to crawl on the ground in an eruption of primal wildness. But the return to the stage has come with a trade-off. Before releasing the album, spotting André 3000 roaming the streets with his flute became rap’s very own game of Where’s Waldo? Now, everyone wants a piece of the pie. “Before, somebody might sneak-film you and post it on Instagram,” he says. “But now, it’s more valuable, like they caught you playing. It’s like you’re performing. So I don’t play in public as much as I used to, which is sad. I have to find more private places now.”
Of course, André also drew the attention of Kendrick Lamar, who rapped hip-hop’s most hyped flute-man into a bar on Like That (“If he walk around with that stick, it ain’t André 3k”) – the precursor to his all-out dismantling of Drake in the biggest rap beef of the internet era. “As a 49-year-old rapper, you’re just happy to get a shoutout,” André laughs when asked about the line. “But as a rapper, I’ve noticed myself walking around with this stick. So it was a line for me, too, and I was trying to find a way to use it. But Kendrick used it, so I had to say ‘Yeah, he got it.’”
André has admitted to writing more than a few diss tracks in his career, even calling it good exercise. “You have feelings… if n*ggas say some slick shit, lines will come to your head immediately,” he says. But he’s resolved to never release a record talking crazy about another artist, even if someone calls him out of his name – the things that can happen once verbal disrespect has gone too far simply don’t interest him. Despite initially enjoying a front-row seat for Kendrick vs Drake – he’s a fan of both – this realisation gave him pause. “I got a little sad, at a certain point,” he says. “In early rap battles, you had kids in the park rapping against each other. But it’s not just people rapping now. You got people with 100 employees. You have livelihoods, empires, companies, deals – all of it can be jeopardised. If you don’t have anything to lose, sure, go for it. But if I already made it, I’m not sure it’s even worth it any more.”
He is, however, increasingly excited about artificial intelligence. He considers tools like ChatGPT “the ultimate analyser,” and is trying to find creative ways to tie it into his work. “I think some of the AI art is interesting,” he says. “But, as humans, sometimes we just want to know what’s real. We want the humanness of things.” Having said that, he doesn’t think artists are wrong to fear the potential fallout as the technology improves. His advice would be to adapt, rather than to resist.
“Before cameras came into play, a king would hire the best artists to paint a portrait of you and your family,” he says. “The best artists were the ones who could make it look as real as possible. But then cameras came along. So you had all these artists saying, ‘What are we going to do now?’ I think we’re at a similar place now. But what happened was – we got Van Gogh, and we got Impressionists,” he continues. “Doing shit the camera couldn’t do. You gotta find your place to be. That’s the humanness.”
We ask André if the younger version of himself, the one that pushed rap’s boundaries as one half of OutKast, would ever have pictured himself morphing into the flute-toting man he is today. He shakes his head before I can even finish the question. But today, he has a much clearer image of where he’ll be in ten years.
It begins with him leaving Venice. With his metamorphosis complete, he’s ready for a new chapter. The Pacific Northwest and Japan are the first spots that come to mind. He envisions himself in a workshop, about an hour outside of a large city. There, he can fully dive into his earliest artistic dream, the one he had before diving headfirst into rap – visual artistry.
As a child, he always found himself sketching. Now, he’s drawing in three-dimensional air, through freeform ceramics and wood sculpting. He’s about to apprentice with a stonemason to try his hand at a new material. “I’ll always have something to say,” he says. “I see myself transforming a lot of thoughts into visual works. Like, take stone sculptures – I’ll want to say something, so I’ll have to find a way to say it through that. Will it be as powerful as my raps? Hell nah – or maybe it could be. But you just have to keep expressing yourself.”
“I’m obsessed with passing things on,” he continues. “I know we’ll leave this planet at some point. But imagine, someone finding one of my stone sculptures 2,000 years from now? I’m obsessed with that.”
André 3000 plays We Out Here on Sunday, 18 August
ADVERTISEMENTS