India.Arie – The Soulbird – Exclusive Interview
I didn’t have a profound ‘Eckhart Tolle moment’, I’ve had a shift as profound and I felt just like being a whole different person by seeing clearly how I was feeling. I am now less afraid of showing my emotions, I am not afraid of hurting sometimes, I find myself crying with people more often and telling things to people I wasn’t used to, because I’m not afraid of the pain anymore. It’s hard to explain but I have a much different relationship with my emotions now.
Even when you saw me singing Break the Shell on Super Soul Sunday, I was really excited to be with Oprah and to be singing one of my new songs and excited to be back on television, but I forgot about all that when I was singing this song. Oprah was sitting there too and that made me nervous initially, but as soon as I started singing I forgot whoever was in the room. What I really cared about was how it felt and I wanted to live in that moment, fully and feel and sing.
Dirk: You have this beautiful capacity to both show the bright and angelic part in you: “My life is full in some of the most important ways…”, but also the darker and more insecure side of you at the same time: “…but empty in the core at the end of every day”. Is this your story? Where does the emptiness come from?
India.Arie: All of my songs are my story and the emptiness comes from, I guess what we just talked about. When you live a life like that for so long it takes a while for the big ship of your life to turn and so a lot of the things in my life feel much more like a real grounded real life, but there are also certain sacrifices that I made — I’ve been travelling around the world and singing and sacrificing a lot of the regular things already since I was 22, most my adult life, so the emptiness comes from the parts in my life where I haven’t caught up yet: Wanting to have children, wanting to be married, wanting to have a grounded family home life. It’s not like the biological clock thing, I always wanted to have children and to have a family. That’s also a part of my life and I feel like that with this song because I realize it’s happening a lot later than I ever expected. Not that I’ve been waiting for it all these years – I just looked up one day and it was like “Oh I could have done that a long time ago” [laughing now].
