Khan’s last album of new material was in 2007, but she is in the studio now working on new songs. But if they don’t make you want to dance, you’ll be very interested in what the lyrics are saying and trying to get the message out of that.” “I’m gonna make empowering songs that will make you wanna dance. “The base word for this whole movement would be ’empowerment,'” she says. A little love goes a really, really long way.”įor Khan, who will celebrate her 40th anniversary in music in 2013, she’s taking that motto to her future recordings. Then they will take an oath to assist and foster and mentor a new crop of women. “The women will share some of their plans and talk about their future. One girl started an all-girl band, and I’m gonna be singing with her when I go down there for their graduation,” she says. “A hundred and fifty women were totally on the upward spiral to a better life, to a super life. Khan went down recently to visit with the women and found amazing results. The year-long work of the Superlife Transformation Program, which targeted career, education and health goals, will culminate with a graduation ceremony at this year’s Essence Festival next month. So she teamed with a group called IWES (Institute of Women & Ethnic Studies) and the Essence Music Festival to take on a transformation for 150 women. the stories they were telling really changed me.” Some women were living in their car or living with friends. “Some of the women had lost, in one day, their mother, their aunts, their granddaughters. ‘What’s it like for you and did you lose anybody?’ I heard horrific stories,” she says. “I met some women and I asked them questions.
Khan took time to interact with some of the locals, which had a profound effect on her. It’s really sad, because it didn’t feel like the same New Orleans I’d been going to for most of my life.”
“The infrastructure in that city was hit really hard, and they’re still reeling. “When I landed I sensed something was really, really wrong there,” she tells Rolling Stone. When Chaka Khan headed down to New Orleans in 2011 for the Essence Music Festival, it wasn’t the city she remembered.