Meshell Ndegeocello Turns Motown Standards Into Duets on Synonym

Meshell Ndegeocello has spent more than three decades declining to settle into one version of herself. Her biggest chart success, according to Billboard, remains a 1994 duet with John Mellencamp, a cover of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” that reached No. 3. For an artist whose albums rarely chase the single, that remains an odd piece of trivia.

Synonym extends the same instinct. The record takes a set of Hitsville standards and rebuilds them as duets, with Ndegeocello working as arranger rather than accompanist. Cynthia Erivo takes on the Aretha Franklin and George Michael hit “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me),” trading its arena scale for something more intimate. “Don’t Stop The Music” pairs Nick Hakim and Robert Glasper with a deconstructed funk arrangement, and Cat Power joins for “Don’t You Want Me,” where the Human League original gives way to a dub-weighted bassline.

The approach fits a career shaped less by genre than by context. Ndegeocello took her surname from Digable Planets’ Doodlebug during her years at Howard University, where she spent time among Five Percenters; the name translates from Swahili as “free as a bird.” In New York she found the Black Rock Coalition, the collective founded by Vernon Reid and the late critic and musician Greg Tate. That environment’s resistance to dogma is audible on Synonym: Motown treated as material to be rewritten, not preserved.