Aloe Blacc Life Your Spirit album cover - S 2014
Aloe Blacc is putting a bit more weight into his third album Lift Your Spirit later this year. The singer, riding high on the success of singles “The Man” and “Wake Me Up,” tells Billboard that he and Interscope “are going to repackage the album” this summer for a uniform collection comprised of all the songs he released globally during the campaign.
“I recorded about 40 songs, and you can only release 10 or 12 of them at a time,” Blacc explains. “The European version of the album had a different set of songs than the [American] version, a couple of songs that were different, so we’re going to get them all together and release all of the songs from across the world so that everybody gets every song and no territory is complaining about not having any particular song.”
Blacc adds that, “It was never my intention to release so many songs. I wanted to just have 10, but we had way more material than we expected that we considered worthy. But I think that’s okay. I think it’s okay to give people more than they expected.”
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Blacc expects to have the set ready “by the end of the summer or, probably, the beginning of the fall.” Meanwhile, he says he’d like to release a follow-up to Lift Your Spirit “hopefully early next year,” but acknowledges “maybe that’s too soon. It depends on what the label says. I’m definitely ready to release more music, because I’ve just got so much stuff recorded and so many other songs that I’m eager to record.”
Blacc has had no trouble staying busy outside of the study, with heavy touring — including dates opening for Bruno Mars — and a spot as a guest coach on Adam Levine‘s team during the latest season of The Voice. Blacc is featured on the track “The World is Ours” from One Love, One Rhythm, the official FIFA World Cup album and he’s getting ready for his film debut in Get On Up, the James Brown biopic in which he plays Famous Flames guitarist Nafloyd Scott.
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“That was a different challenge, it really was,” Blacc says. “Acting is something that requires a lot of patience, a lot of skill, a lot of internal reflection. It’s a whole new muscle I’m going to continue to develop, either writing screenplays and my own scripts or finding the best roles out there to challenge this new skill.” A dearth of information about his character, meanwhile, actually proved to be a blessing for Blacc.
“I had to learn it all,” he explains. “There isn’t much information about that time in [Brown’s] career available, no photos I could find of Nafloyd Scott on Wikipedia or anything. He wasn’t really part of the meteoric rise of James Brown — he quit the band because of personality conflicts, before it really took off. So it was all about having to learn from the script and some of the archival footage that was available. But it did make it a little bit easier to create my own character, which was nice for the first time doing this.”
This story originally appeared on Billboard.com.
