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NEW YORK (AP) — Marsha Ambrosius was tired of the demands of being a successful R&B star, including the wear and tear of touring and fickle music-industry politics. She’d found peace working behind the scenes and writing songs for other artists. But Dr. Dre had the formula to reinvigorate her appetite for the stage.
“I didn’t want to do a project,” the Grammy-nominated artist said, “I’d accomplished everything on my bucket list, and Dre was like, ‘I just want to keep you inspired. Let’s just make it and see what happens.’
Their musical journey has led to her new album CASABLANCO, out now. Combining Ambrosius’s writing and singing talent with one of the greatest producers of this generation, this project has been years in the making.
“I experienced not only the opportunity to create, but also the lack of limitations and boundaries. Dre was like, ‘You can do whatever you want,'” said the British-born singer, who writes, produces and produces all of the songs. “I was creatively reinvigorated, knowing that I hadn’t done everything I could before making this record.”
The 11-track project is a sonically lush collage that expertly fuses jazz and hip-hop, a combination only Dre could put together. “CASABLANCO” is a play on the iconic film “Casablanca” and the lavish lifestyle of the Moroccan city, and marks the singer’s fourth solo studio album, following 2018’s “NYLA.” (The “A” in the title was replaced by Dre to represent the grittier nature of his hip-hop sound.)
The album was recorded over two weeks in 2021, with support from Erik “Blu2th” Griggs, Focus… and Dem Jointz, and produced and mixed entirely by The Chronic architects. At the time, much of the world was still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic and Dre was recovering from a brain aneurysm. The pair, who are signed to Dre’s Aftermath label via Interscope Records, have a long history of collaborations, having last officially teamed up on the 2015 album Compton.
CASABLANCO stands apart from today’s trap-beat, atmospheric R&B in both sound and structure. Eight of the eleven tracks are over four minutes long, and three are over five minutes long, and feature substantial instrumental breaks and creative, non-traditional verse, bridge and chorus arrangements. Many tracks are preceded by jazz-inspired instrumentals before switching over to Dre’s unmistakable hip hop sound, a combination he calls “Tuxedos and Chucks.”
But the project – backed by a 27-piece live orchestra and filled with an intricate web of samples from artists including Michael Jackson, Duke Ellington, George Benson, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas and Ambrosius himself – took more than a year to get the green light for. Singles from CASABLANCO include “The Greatest,” “Greedy” and the sultry “One Night Stand,” which samples The Mary Jane Girls’ “All Night Long.”
“I was like, what if it wasn’t ‘All Night,’ but ‘All Night Long,'” Ambrosius says, “and that’s still relevant to why we made the record. It was like, if we were to make one more album, what would it be? So it felt like a one-night moment, but ultimately it could become forever. And for me it did.”
“Best I Could Find” is reminiscent of Stevie Wonder’s “Innervisions,” while “Cloudy With A Chance Of …Real” is a dramatic song of longing for a lover, singing, “Feels like this belongs to someone else, living this pain through me/And I’m carrying the weight of this falling rain, it’s so lonely.”
Referring to the pandemic, she sings, “It’s that fog, that haze, that uncertainty, ‘What if I can’t love you the way I want to, or if you don’t want to receive my love because of the state of the world right now?'”
Despite having a steadily growing solo career with songs like “Far Away” and “Late Nights & Early Mornings,” singing with big-name artists like Kanye West, Nas and Nipsey Hussle, and writing songs for H.E.R. and Alicia Keys, many fans still associate her with the duo Floetry.
Floatry (Ambrosius and Natalie “The Floatist” Stewart) emerged during the neo-soul movement of the early 2000s, finding success with songs like “Say Yes,” “Getting Late” and the Common-featuring “SupaStar.” Ambrosius, 46, understands the nostalgia fans feel for the music.
“We were young, fearless and unconventional,” says Ambrosius, who also wrote Jackson’s “Butterflies.” “I’m happy to say we wrote a timeless classic, and 24 years later, I still feel the same way about Casablanco with Dr. Dre that I did back then.”
Follow Associated Press entertainment journalist Gary Gerard Hamilton on all his social media platforms at @GaryGHamilton.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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