Lady Blackbird: 2025

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Lady Blackbird's powerful second album, 2024's Slang Spirituals, follows three years after her much-praised 2021 debut, Black Acid Soul. Although born in New Mexico as Marley Munroe, the Los Angeles-based singer first took flight as Lady Blackbird in Britain, where she initially broke through as an in-demand session singer, before segueing to her own solo path. In 2020, she released her first single, a take on the classic Nina Simone standard "Blackbird." By a serendipitous turn, the single came out just two days after the murder of George Floyd, paralleling the intensity of that summer's grief.

Munroe has been called "the Grace Jones of jazz" by BBC presenter and Brownswood label head Gilles Peterson, and like Jones, as Lady Blackbird she transcends easy labels, exemplified in the eclectic, mutable tides of Slang Spirituals, which slip from mind-bending psychedelic jams to gospel-splashed piano house and straight-up folk balladry.

Handpicked by Chaka Kahn for last year's Meltdown Festival at London's Southbank Centre, Lady Blackbird is an inimitable presence, truly impossible to neatly box in a genre — and a delightful person in conversation and spirit.

She's surprisingly shy — and sang her set of three songs joined not only by her guitarist, pianist and producer Chris Seefried, but with her 17-year-old beloved Maltipoo, her "son" Reginald, patiently sitting on her lap.

Lady Blackbird and Seefried needed just one take for each of the songs in Studio A — "Man in a Boat" and "Like a Woman" from Slang Spirituals and from the deluxe edition of Black Acid Soul, a cover of Jerry Herman's "I Am What I Am" from the musical La Cage Aux Folles. The two collaborators also chatted in Studio A about the their creative partnership and the intersecting themes of acceptance for yourself, freedom and redemption throughout the album. "Love for all and no judgment," says Munroe.

[Recorded: 4/29/25; Engineered by Jim O'Hara with James Higgins; produced by Megan Suma. Videographers: Anna Fahy, Lyla Toomey, Nikki Phillips and Louisa Schramm.]