She was adamant about composing and arranging nearly every song, and she wanted it known that she had done just that.
She always exercised some measure of control over what she recorded, but this was different. The album recreated songs by Randy Newman, Judy Collins, and Hall & Oates, and while it is often hailed as a late-career highlight, Simone said that she felt forced into making it.Īfter the experience with CTI, Simone sought greater authority in recording Fodder on My Wings. Simone was not fond of the album’s reggae-tinged sounds and rhythms (“What is this corny stuff,” she asked CTI arranger Dave Matthews). It was all done before I could make any decisions,” she later claimed.
“The material was not my personal choice, and I had no say whatsoever in the selection of songs. She butted heads with CTI producer Creed Taylor, recording all that record’s vocals in a single hour-long session on the final day of taping. Her 1978 album Baltimore had soured her on the recording process. It is a record as unsteady, daring, damaged, and sensational as she was.įor a while, it didn’t seem like Simone would be back in a studio again. The album contains some of the most poignant ballads of her entire catalog, some songs that could double as rallying cries, and others that feel like fun sketches made for her own amusement. Some songs she sang in English, some in French, and on others she alternated between the two languages. But it is a strange, captivating document that helped capture what a complicated person she was, the tumultuous life she’d led, and the nature of her travels. Although it does not achieve the unrivaled brilliance of the performances on her albums for Philips, it marks her creative apex as an artist, somehow both her most worldly and her most introspective work.Įven in Simone biographies, Fodder on My Wings is usually represented as an outlier in her career. At times manic, at times depressive, she shares many different sides of herself in vignettes that make up a portrait both intimate and immense. It was Simone’s means of working through fear-of death, manipulation, discrimination-in search of joy and self-discovery.Ī marvel of self-expression, Fodder on My Wings is a culmination of Simone’s frustrations molded into a jarring personal statement. A class act.“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me,” Nina Simone once said: “No fear.” If many of the most important records of the soul icon’s career were about political freedom, her 1982 album Fodder on My Wings, newly reissued, was about personal freedom-about liberating herself from her past and finding the liberty to create as she pleased.
It's as excellent and compelling as you would expect from this sublime mix series. Inside, you get shreds of house and techno from Four Tet and Nils Frahm himself, among others, but the mix explores much wider terrains Miles Davis makes an appearance with the masterful "Concerto De Aranjuez", electronic dub maestros Rhythm & Sound join the party the timeless "Mango Drive", and even Nina Simone's "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" gets selected. This September is Germany's Nils Frahm who takes care of the selection, and the DJ/producer serves up a gorgeously vast selection of sounds from around the globe and from all corners of time.
Moreover, these guys have invited some of the biggest names in the game over the last fifteen years, a highly impressive catalogue which includes the likes of Fatboy Slim, Jamiroquai, AIR, Arctic Monkeys, Sly & Robbie, and many more of the same calibre.
Review: Apart from Ministry Of Sound and Fabric, the Late Night Tales crew is perhaps the best and most respected compilation series these days.