Singer-songwriter India.Arie was 25 years old when her 7-time Grammy-nominated debut album, Acoustic Soul, released to international acclaim. Twenty five years later, she’s entering a new era, ripe with growth and the lessons of a pandemic-forced reckoning with burnout.
A musical protégée of Stevie Wonder and a contemporary to artists like Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, D’Angelo, who brought neo-soul — a blend of ‘70s jazz, hip-hop and R&B — into the general lexicon. Arie is an award-winning industry veteran with nothing to prove. In fact, these days she’s celebrating her journey so far with a renewed confidence in herself and her music.
She sat down with KNKX ahead of her Valentine’s Day performance at Songs of Black Folk in Federal Way, Washington, to discuss her longtime love for the Pacific Northwest, her intimate 50th birthday concert, and the lessons she has learned along the way.
The place to 'get air'
Over a decade ago, Arie penned the lyrics “I love Seattle as if I were the rain,” making her relationship with the rainy city public on her 2013 album, Sonversation.
“I'm one of the people who understands the secret, the Seattle secret, like the real beauty of Seattle,” she said.
“And so it's been a place that I've been in and out of a lot. Like, just when I wanna get some air, I would go to Seattle or Bellevue or Mercer or Vashon or Bainbridge or just some place to just get some air…that's a lot of the reason why I accepted the show at Federal Way because I can go back to my favorite city.”
As a self-proclaimed introvert, she finds warmth in the infamous “Seattle Freeze.”
”Coming to Seattle, I’m just [able to] be in nature and able to walk outside and able to drive up to the beach in a regular car and watch the sunset and see things and go to the islands. It’s rest, that type of rest gives birth to songs,” she said.
In the last few months, Arie’s made the flight from Georgia to Washington state several times. Most recently at the Federal Way Performing Arts and Event Center she sang a short set of some of her signature songs including “Ready For Love” and “One.”
This was a new type of show for Arie, who has performed in venues large and small around the world. Still, Arie performed as she always does, with grace and in a gorgeous gown, adding her quintessential lyrical messages of strength and unity to a program celebrating the legacy of Black music. She closed her Songs of Black Folk performance with gratitude for what she called a “fulfilling” night.
The concert concluded with Arie and her fellow performers, including vocalists Zebulon Ellis and Josephine Howell (a Pacific Northwest local), a versatile choir, and band of Black musicians from the area. Led by director Ramón Bryant Braxton, they performed a joyful cover of Stevie Wonder’s “As.”
It was also a night of honoring local community leaders and globally influential Black artists who recently passed like D’Angelo and Richard Smallwood. As promised on the program, the concert was a celebration of Black love.
“To me, Black love is the embracing of all of the beautiful things that we are, like our inside jokes and our inside stories, and the uncles who drink Hennessy, and the aunties who smoke cool cigarettes, and the ones who have locs now — just all the ways that we look at ourselves and love ourselves,” Arie said.
A Seattle birthday
Back in October, Arie celebrated her 50th birthday with a semi-secret concert at Plymouth Church United Church of Christ in downtown Seattle.
When asked what drew her to celebrating with a birthday concert, she said, “I got delusional. I was like, ‘what do I really wanna do for my 50th birthday?’ And I said already that I'm in and out of here a lot. When I wanna feel a certain way, I just come up here. And so I decided to have my birthday here.”
Her relationship with Plymouth Church “is a bit of a longer story,” she said.
Arie was good friends with Dr. Maxine Mimms, the educator, culture keeper, and storyteller who lived in Tacoma. Dr. Mimms, who also founded the Tacoma Campus of Evergreen State College, passed away in October 2024, but her legacy continues to shape Arie's connection to Seattle.
“I came here in the summertime to get some air…something just told me to go to this restaurant that was like a good 30 minutes from where I was staying. I walked in and the pastor of Plymouth Church was in there with her daughter, and they too were very close friends with Dr. Mimms.”
In a moment that felt divinely orchestrated, Arie, Rev. Kelle Brown, and Brown’s daughter talked for several hours, and a loose invitation was extended: maybe she could come play at the church someday?
“When [it was] time for my birthday, I thought, ‘I'm gonna accept that invitation because I really feel Dr. Mimms brought us all together,’…I feel like we're all daughters of Dr. Mimms, and so it came together like that,” Arie said.
Music and mindfulness
Arie held her “Golden Birthday Jubilee Concert” in the upstairs community room at Plymouth on Oct. 5, just two days ahead of releasing the EP Write of Passage, her first record since 2019's Worthy and her only release as an independent artist. The EP also marks her first solo release in six years after a COVID-19 lockdown-induced hiatus.
“When you're in the music industry, it's like you're always running a marathon,” she explained.
For better or worse, lockdown was the first time Arie had ever just stopped. The result was perspective and growth after living life full throttle.
“The thing I learned about myself was that I wasn't even on my own list. I was not taking care of myself,” she said. “Now, I nourish myself and move slow…I ask myself ‘what do I need?’”
Arie continues to rediscover herself in her next chapter by practicing self-care via mindfulness, speaking her mind candidly on Substack, leaning into the wisdom she’s learned from women like Dr. Mimms and Maya Angelou, writing and performing new music, and saying yes to more interviews.
“I am coming off hiatus,” she said. “I haven't done a radio interview in years because I say no to everything. But I said yes to this because I'm working on being more visible this year.”
Arie's breakout record Acoustic Soul turns 25 on March 27, and the woman who wrote that album is evolving every day on her own terms.
