Meshell Ndegeocello’s new album of soulful, inventive duets, Synonym, is among her most intriguing and pleasing. The bassist, singer, and songwriter covers 15 songs here, but she works considerable magic on them all. Her taste is famously wide, even though her own sonic signature is clear: she loves great songs from many genres, but she remakes them with a sophisticated layering of soul, folk, hip-hop, funk, and (yeah, just a bit of) jazz that has been her sonic signature since her brilliant 1993 debut, Plantation Lullabies. She has always had a knack for textures and harmony.
Synonym layers funk bass and acoustic guitar, gospel vocals and spooky organ, Duke Ellington-ish harmonized saxophones and slippery synths. Mostly, the result is a set of compelling groove tunes that only Ndegeocello could have made. Though, in this case, each one is performed as a duet with a notable artist or two; everyone who’s anyone wants to record with Meshell Ndegeocello!
The songs themselves, ranging from early 1960s Bob Dylan classics to early 2000s hip-hop, were often conceived as duets, but what range: Sonny and Cher, Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. Whether they are duets or started as duets seems less important than the larger idea: Ndegeocello collects diverse sounds, so the duet partners are mainly great tonal ingredients she puts into her recipe. The results are, generally, more consistent than the identity of the inputs would suggest.
Let’s consider three wildly different songs sung with truly different vocalists. “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” was originally a hit (and the last number-one hit) for Aretha Franklin, in duet with George Michael in 1987. Ndegeocello sings it with Cynthia Erivo a couple of clicks slower than the original. It comes off here as a slippery slow jam—lush in its harmonies and layers of bass, reverberating guitars, and organ. Erivo, a soprano, and Ndegeocello’s contralto blend like sea salt and caramel.
Contrast that with Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, sung with Madison Cunningham. Ndegeocello’s arrangement complicates Dylan’s simple folk harmonies with an ambiguous tonal center and a jumbled set of sonic inputs, including Béla Fleck‘s banjo. It’s not a slow jam, but it is a soul groove. Compare both of those to “Hunger Strike”, the grunge song by Temple of the Dog, a duet for Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder, wrapped here in vocal harmonies from Ndegeocello and Willow (Smith, yes, the daughter of Will and Jada), South Asian percussion, and sumptuous synth, acoustic piano, and guitar textures.
Each performance sounds like Meshell Ndegeocello at her best.
Synonym is sometimes close to 2018’s excellent Ndegeocello album Ventriloquism, an ingenious set of covers of 1980s and 1990s soul records—music the artist clearly knows very well. On the new record, she not only remakes the Franklin/Michael hit but also re-earths 1981’s “Don’t Stop the Music” by Yarbrough and Peoples (decidedly not the Rihanna song) with help from keyboardist Robert Glasper and singer/producer Nick Hakim, using a rubber-band bass line and all manner of hip orchestration: acoustic guitar interludes, slithering saxophones, hand percussion, slices of MC commentary, distorted samples.
If you thought you liked the Human League‘s 1981 breakthrough hit, “Don’t You Want Me”, then here it is slower and more soulful, with harmonized saxophones that are ten more “human” than those British 1980s synths. The vocals by Ndegeocello and guest Cat Power bring the tune more authenticity and edge than the original. “Don’t Look Any Further” is a cover of the 1984 hit for Seidah Garret, sung with Lianne La Havas.
Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers may have made the 1985 hit “Islands in the Stream” famous, but the Bee Gees’ Gibb brothers wrote it originally for Diana Ross (and “in the Tamla style of Marvin Gaye”). Ndegeocello drags it back to its origins with duet partner Chaka Khan. After a somewhat introspective opening using sequenced synths, acoustic piano, and harmonized vocals through the first verse/chorus, the groove takes over as Khan joins.
The Barry Gibb/Barbra Streisand hit “Guilty” from 1980 is reinvented as a fresh, Latin-tinged pop song here, with Ndegeocello singing with Ink, also known as Atia Chade Boggs, the woman who wrote “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” from Beyoncé‘s last album. The one taste of a hip-hop song here is Ja Rule’s “Always on Time”, a relaxed jam that uses the cool vocal sound of Laura Lee from Khruangbin.
Synonym easily widens its lens to look further back, however. The 1970s are represented by two classic Roberta Flack/Donny Hathaway duets: “The Closer I Get to You”, featuring Destin Conrad and Moses Sumney atop an almost grooveless accompaniment that reharmonizes the well-known track with tasty electric piano chords, and “Be Real Black For Me”, sung gorgeously by Emily King and Lizz Wright over acoustic guitar and humming Hammond organ.
Ndegeocello also includes a 1976 country hit for George Jones and Tammy Wynette, “Golden Ring”. The leader sings it along with Brandi Carlile, giving it a treatment that adds some swung piano, gospel organ, and a call-and-response chorus. 1977’s “Here We Come” is from Brian Eno’s Before and After Science album, sung here with Evann McIntosh.
Synonym gets even quirkier as it reaches further back in time. Meshell Ndegeocello covering Sonny and Cher is so odd it’s almost inevitable, especially when you realize Etta James covered “I Got You Babe” just a few years after it first hit in 1965. The version here becomes a chilling art song of a kind: a chorale of saxophones hums beneath Ndegeocello and the singer ANOHNI, who sounds unnervingly like a resurrected Nina Simone on this track.
The other Dylan cover, “With God on Our Side”, features Chris Thile on mandolin and vocals and singer Bill Callahan, closing the album with a dirge (and the album’s longest track) that sounds the least like it comes from Ndegeocello. The folky quality holds for a minute or so before thwapping and insistent drums enter for two overwhelming minutes.
Synonym appears on Blue Note Records, normally the home to jazz artists. Though Ndegeocello has never really presented herself as a jazz musician, the album includes playing from musicians from that world: keyboardist Larry Goldings; saxophonists Josh Johnson and Levon Henry; and flautist Elena Pinderhughes. Yet, the album was co-produced by David Gamson, who produced the first two Ndegeocello LPs, each just a brilliant soul recording. Since 2024, Ndegeocello has won two consecutive Grammys in the new “Alternative Jazz” category, which seemed to have been invented for her.
I hope Synonym doesn’t get recognized as an “alternative jazz” record because, at its core, Synonym is a superb modern soul album full of sensual grooves, compelling singing, and ingenious arrangements. One reasonable comparison is to the mature Stevie Wonder albums of the 1970s. It is a hip act of historical reinterpretation that suggests how this extraordinary artist hears the long history of soulful, popular music, whether it was connected to country, hip-hop, folk, or any other style. Here, in the hands of Meshell Ndegeocello, it grooves, stays smart, and is Ellingtonian in its brilliant arrangement, and, believe it or not, every song is a cover yet utterly original.