“Cinematography does it all for me,” Grammy-winning musician Raphael Saadiq told IndieWire over Zoom.
The R&B icon, who has seen decades of success as a solo artist, as a member of the groups Tony! Toni! Toné! and Lucy Pearl, and as a writer/producer for everyone from Erykah Badu and Earth, Wind & Fire, to Alicia Keys, John Legend, and a few key names he’ll get into later, has been explaining the way films have inspired a few of his biggest hits.
There are the more obvious examples from his working relationship with the late director John Singleton, like “Me & You” from “Boyz n the Hood,” or “Ask of You” from “Higher Learning,” but the one he likes to talk about is a song called “Keep Marching” from his 2008 album “The Way I See It.” The filmmakers behind “The Express,” about the first Black college football player to win the Heisman Trophy, reached out to him because they wanted a Black artist to write a song to replace the Elvis Presley temp track they were using for a montage. Saadiq studied the scene and completed the task, but “they never called me back for the song,” he said. “So, I took the song away from the movie and put it on my album, and it’s my biggest licensed song ever.”
And now, here he is again, on the precipice of a second Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, for co-writing “I Lied to You,” which soundtracks the centerpiece scene of “Sinners.” Another success story from his cinematic sidequests. “I should just ask directors for film when I do my next album,” Saadiq joked. “Just write to the film and take all the music and put it on my album.”
He compares the five solo albums he has released so far to “small movies in my head” as a way to make a point about why he is best suited for high-concept work. “I love great stories, and I love challenges,” said Saadiq. “But more than that, I love working with people that really love what they do. It really helps me out to see somebody else have the passion for what they do. It means I have to really respect the art and the craft that somebody took time in their life to work on. And if they invite me into it for whatever amount of whatever piece it is, I want to deliver.”
Sometimes finding those like-minded individuals comes as a surprise, like how “Bodyguard,” a fan favorite cut from Album of the Year winner “Cowboy Carter,” came to be. “Things I would do for myself, I don’t really believe everybody would take that chance or that risk,” said the songwriter and record producer, explaining how he originally did not intend for Beyoncé to hear the song he was writing for himself. “I played a second of it, and Bey kind of stopped me and was like, ‘Yo, what’s that?’ And I was like, ‘Oh.’ And I played it, and she liked it, but she had a vision for it too once she heard it.” Reflecting on the collaboration that earned him his latest Grammy, he said, “Trust me, she took it way further than I took it, my demo. But that’s what visionaries are, right?”
That led him to working with “Sinners” helmer Ryan Coogler. Keeping in mind the way in which he makes his own music, Saadiq doesn’t see much difference between collaborating with music artists and with film directors. “I work from concept, and that’s what keeps me going,” he said. “Even starting with D’Angelo, really, working with somebody who you could play something and you could sing it, and then they could just sing it and take it. You could throw somebody a pass, and they could just run through everybody and get to the end zone. That’s what Ryan gave to me.”
While the pair had never met in person, the director still contacted his fellow Oakland native to share the broader idea of what “Sinners” would be, and how his Blues-musician uncle inspired it. Saadiq was particularly taken by the bit about how secular musicians were looked down upon at the time by Christian leaders “because they didn’t want to go to church, but their church was the blues. It was always similar,” he said. Though Coogler left the door open for what part of the film Saadiq would be writing a song for, the songwriter said, “The way he told the story, he led me to write for the blues, for the preacher’s son,” the character who would end up performing the song.
Saadiq’s love of the Blues is generational, with his father being from Texas, and his mother from Louisiana. Though he grew up on the West Coast, he had gone plenty of times to the local Blues bar Eli’s Mile High Club with his late brother D’Wayne Wiggins, one of the members of Tony! Toni! Toné! So listening to Coogler conceive of this juke joint as the centerpiece of “Sinners,” Saadiq said, “I know what that looks like. More than that, I know what it feels like . . . I’ve seen that movie in my head.”
Pretty quickly, he was in a room with the film’s composer, two-time Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson. “Me and Ludwig just sat there and just played guitars for an hour or so, just jamming and just laughing, stuff like that. And then he was like, ‘OK, you want to sing it? You’re going to go ahead and write it now?’ So then after, we came up with the guitar riff, and then I just went and jumped in my bag and wrote the lyrics,” said Saadiq.
When he finally saw the film, and how “I Lied to You” would become this expansive journey through the history of Black music, with international elements, it was unlike anything Saadiq had imagined. “You put Run DMC under it, you put disco under it, you put Hendrix under it. Ludwig is such a scientist/professional at basically doing anything, whether it’s music, R&B, whether it’s Childish Gambino, whether it’s scoring. He’s a very focused dude,” said the musician of his co-writer. “When he said he’s going to make this thing into 17 things, I was like, ‘Man, have at it.’ And when I heard it, I was just like, ‘Wow.’ Every time I watch that scene, that big scene, I’m just sitting there like, ‘Wow.’ Because it hits home.”
Saadiq knew that between Coogler and Göransson, and even “Sinners” star Miles Caton, who sings “I Lied to You” in the film, and also co-wrote “Last Time (I Seen the Sun),” the other “Sinners” track on the Best Original Song Oscar shortlist, he was once again working among visionaries setting each other up for success. “Ryan just puts all the bells and whistles behind it. Same with Beyoncé, same with Michael Archer (D’Angelo), people that I’ve had these similar experiences with a few times. I know when I feel that,” he said. “I felt it with D’Angelo, I felt it with Beyoncé, I felt it with Solange, I felt it with a few artists that I work with. They can take things, and if you throw that alley-oop, they gon’ slam it, they gon’ dunk it.”
That sentiment has carried throughout how he, Göransson, and Caton perform “I Lied to You” live. “The Blues don’t need to be rehearsed too much,” said Saadiq. “When we made the arrangement backstage, I already had it in my head, but I came with the playbook. Being in front of people, this is what I do day in and day out — perform. That’s what I do.” Speaking to Caton, he said, “‘Let me start it. It’s your song now, but you’ve got to take it home.’ And that voice, he could take it home. He’s ready to go. He’s game-ready. That’s the alley-oop kid. You throw it to him, he’s going for it.”
Saadiq considers Caton to be perfect casting — all credit to the Best Casting Oscar-shortlisted Francine Maisler for discovering the 20-year-old. “It couldn’t have been a better person to do it than Miles. He sounds young, but he sounds old. He sounds spiritual, and he sounds very evenly keeled. He knows what to do, when to do it. He’s always thinking,” he said of his fellow performer. “That kid is always thinking about how to do better, and that’s what it takes.”
When performing “I Lied to You,” Saadiq says that the most important thing to make clear to the audience is “It’s not a track inside a movie. It is what the movie is.” Invoking another Oscar-winning music film to solidify his point about how interconnected their song is to “Sinners” as a whole, he adds, “It’s like ‘Purple Rain’ in ‘Purple Rain.’”
Prior to all the awards season promotion and performances that have led his “Sinners” song receiving a Hollywood Music in Media Award, and being nominated at both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards so far, Saadiq had been touring his one-man show “No Bandwidth,” which digs deeper into his musical history. “After 30 years, I told all the stories in one night, and so many people got to hear the stories,” he said. Seeing the scene in “Sinners” that features “I Lied to You” felt like an even more condensed version of what he had been trying to convey. “When Ludwig did score that part when he added all that, it was like telling all the stories in one scene, one night. That’s how I feel when I watch it.”
“No Bandwidth” had already been an emotional journey through the music and memories that shaped Saadiq, addressing both the loss of his oldest sister Sarah Levinston, a fellow Blues singer, in 1992 (“I felt like her energy came into me, which made me a better vocalist, a better writer, everything,” he said,) and began on the heels of losing his brother in March. “That was a lot of therapy for me, the one-man show,” said Saadiq.
“The last week of the tour, I lost D’Angelo, and I knew I was losing him,” he said. “I had just seen him a week before and was with him talking about music, and he was giving me pointers on things about piano, and we sang together, singing some gospel music. I was playing guitar. He got off the bed, he was singing to me, he was singing.” Less than a month after that, “I was in the ‘Sinners’ business,” said Saadiq.
It was in that mindset that he watched the film at a special friends-and-family screening at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, his first time back in his hometown since his brother’s death. Through the lens of that introspective period, going to see a film he played a role in, that brought to life what the Blues have meant to him and those closest to him, Saadiq said, “‘Sinners’ really helped me. It really brought everything back home. It brought everything back home. And then, it just kept giving.”
The film transported him back to the days of him and his brother at Eli’s Mile High Club. It made him think of the time he was obsessed with Howlin’ Wolf, and would send D’Angelo (who he personally referred to as Michael Archer) the song “Smokestack Lightning,” which inspired the name of Michael B. Jordan’s twin characters in the film. “We were all that. We were this,” said Saadiq. “It’s my backyard. It’s this music that I’ve been sending to people.”
“It’s just weird, man, how the ancestors work. It just all came back to me. And that’s really the reward for me. I’ve seen it work. It’s like this energy just flying around me, and I’m in the middle, and it just keeps grabbing me,” he said. Saadiq again mentions his admiration for Coogler from afar, prior to them working together. He grew up close to where the director’s debut film “Fruitvale Station” is set, and knew that story of Oscar Grant, who was wrongfully slain by police in 2009, all too well.
To work with said artist who’d been making their hometown so proud, and “to watch him take that, and create, and do this, and then give back and give back and keep growing, it’s that thing again. It’s that energy,” said Saadiq, with a sense of pride. “To see it work and to be able to identify with it, with ‘Sinners,’ and like I say, losing D and my brother and my dad some years ago, all Blues guys — all Black, strong, Blues guys. I know they’re somewhere looking and going like, ‘Bro, that’s what the fuck we do.’”