Lion Babe talk new music exclusively to Fault

They’re a duo. And they’re not Neo Soul, stop calling them that. Jillian Hervey and Lucas Goodman are Lion Babe. Their popular, eclectic, feel good, organic sound has recently been compressed into a summer mixtape ‘Sun Joint’. We caught up with them before their Glastonbury performance to talk all about it.

[both laugh]

Jill: We’ve definitely heard it’s muddy, but this one seems to be a whole other world type of mud, but we’re excited. I think Glastonbury is always going to be an adventure. We actually just got some wellies, so we feel a little calmer than going in with just some proper shoes, because that was the scary part for me.

L: We love the music scene out here.

J: Yeah, we definitely admire the music scene. Just the fact that it seems like culturally everyone is involved. There are ways for just regular people to become big artists, they don’t have to go through any label or that kind of thing, they can just really be heard, which is so cool.

J: With radio as well, I feel like there’s a lot more opportunity to hear good music, stuff that you would only ever really hear online, but here, if someone finds it, they’ll just play it. That’s dope.

L: Just the area I grew up in, the East Village, so much good music came out of there. The punk music and rock ‘N’ roll music that happened around there… Growing up my dad would tell me all about that stuff. The area has huge artistic influence.

J: It’s also nice to be able to place a lot of places. I remember reading, Patti Smith ‘Just Kids’ – one of my favourite books – and reading about all these venues, with all these famous artists and they were literally down the block. You could see what coffee shop she was talking about, or at least where it was. You feel a kind of energy within that, which is awesome. You also have instances where you run into people, you’ll see them on such a casual basis. This dancer, Bill T. Jones – he’s super famous – but you can just run into him at dinner. I met him at dinner and I couldn’t even say my name! [laughs] but it’s just nice to have those moments that catch you off guard. You feel really connected, because it’s like, ‘oh, everyone is doing the same thing’.

When I was little, it was just going to Times Square. My mum would take us to all the Broadway shows. As a young girl I thought that was the city… All the bright lights, it wasn’t until I got much older and saw down town that I realised you could live there [laughs].

L: It’s kind of all of those things. There’s a lot of music on this mixtape. Some old stuff, some new stuff, some covers… We’ve just been working on stuff and wanted to put it out. It’s still fresh to us now, we’re going on tour and wanted to do some new music and it’s just for us and the fans and for summertime.

J: ‘Begin’ was the beginning of everything for us for a couple of years. It’s 14 songs, but we were already expanding and growing. I think it’s just something that we share, whenever we want to put something out we just do it.

J: Raury, we basically met at a gig we both played at in LA, maybe a year or two ago and we’ve been fans of each other since the beginning. We connected there briefly and have always been in talks. We were thinking of someone to be on ‘Jungle Lady’ and he [Raury] was really into the original and wanted to try something and obviously, we weren’t going to say no.

L: There’s definitely a bunch…

J: I really want to work with Missy Elliott. I just feel like it would just be awesome. She’s one of my greatest influences. She’s so cool, so creative… We had a brief conversation on the phone after one of our shows. It turned out Pharrell talked to her about us, which is even cooler. She was a super fan and was just like, ‘keep carving your lane out’. When you get that kind of love from someone like that, then to imagine working with them… It would just be amazing.

J: I haven’t! I feel like she has her own language. She’s so cool. She’s her own species. The meaning is probably buried in a cave somewhere, or in Pandora’s box or something. It was definitely a complement. I loved it. It was so amazing to have an interaction with her. She was beyond our expectations of cool. To have these people who are such amazing influences support us and be proud of us is just the best.