Into The Music
Aja Monet announced a new album this week, and it arrives co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello, which should tell you this is not going to be a small thing. The Color of Rain comes out May 22 via Drink Sum Wtr, and it is the follow-up to Monet’s 2023 debut When the Poems Do What They Do, an album that felt like a poet discovering what happens when you hand the microphone to a full band and trust the room.
This time the room is bigger. Ndegeocello conducts a live ensemble that includes Ambrose Akinmusire, Nico Segal, Josh Johnson, and Burniss Travis, among others. Guest vocals come from Mick Jenkins, Vic Mensa, Brandee Younger, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Novena Carmel. It is the kind of roster that suggests Monet is making a record for keeps.
The first single, Elsewhere, was written in the wake of Sly Stone’s death. Monet has said Ndegeocello sent her home to write something in homage, not in memoriam, and the distinction matters. What she came back with is clearly a love song to a lineage, something that sits in the same blues-soaked, jazz-adjacent space that Sly himself always occupied before the world caught up to him. Georgia Anne Muldrow and Novena Carmel both answered the call the same day Monet reached out, and the song reportedly came together fast, which you can hear in it.
The tracklist for The Color of Rain runs fifteen songs deep, which for a poet is not unusual. Monet does not write in small gestures. Titles like For the Congo, Working Class Musicians, and Skinfolk suggest an album with something to say, which is also not unusual for someone who has been making politically engaged spoken word and music for over a decade now. The presence of a song called Hollyweird, though, is an interesting swerve.
Monet has a performance lined up at Carnegie Hall on May 20, two days before the album drops, which is a smart and slightly old-fashioned way to announce yourself. Not a streaming premiere. Not a content rollout. A room, a stage, and a live band.
The Color of Rain is shaping up to be one of the more ambitious jazz-adjacent records of the year, and it is arriving at a moment when that whole territory, the space between poetry and jazz and R&B and politics, feels genuinely alive. Whether the record delivers on all of that is something we will find out in May. What is already clear is that Monet is not hedging.
meshell ndegeocello producing is genuinely exciting. she makes albums that feel like they have architecture. this one could be something.