Andra Day strives to be fearless.
“I feel like fear is a very real thing, a very ubiquitous thing, and it can be very subtle,” Day says. “The album Cheers to the Fall is really kind of me breaking out and being like listen, I don’t care about criticism, and I don’t care about possibility of failure. I’m going to do it. And if I do fail, well then here’s to it.”
Day is far from failing. She may not be a household name yet, but you’ve heard her voice. Her song “Rise Up” soundtracks a day in the life of tennis superstar Serena Williams in the widely viewed Beats commercial released this summer and she sings with Stevie Wonder in a Christmas spot for Apple. She recently received two Grammy nominations, one for Best R&B Album and one for Best R&B Performance. Spike Lee directed her “Forever Mine” video after seeing her perform at Sundance Film Festival. She’s set to tour with Leon Bridges this spring. And she still gets attention for her 2012 YouTube series of covers and mashups, where she paired Notorious B.I.G. with Marvin Gaye and put her twist on songs by Eminem, Muse and more.
“It was just kind of like how can you make these songs that are different than what I do but make them what I do,” Day says of the YouTube videos, which helped land her a deal with Warner Bros. Records. Of course, for Day, figuring out “what I do” took some time and reflection.
Day was raised on church music and soul, and attended the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. She studied jazz vocal performance, classical music and musical theater as well as dancing. “When I graduated everyone was like you got to do pop and R&B to make it, like very contemporary pop and R&B,” says the 31-year-old artist. “I tried for a little while but I just realized my voice wasn’t quite fitting some of the records that I was doing. So that’s when I started to incorporate more jazz back into what I do and the soul music that my father had me listen to when I was young. And that’s when it really clicked for me. That’s exactly where I wanted to be.”
Which gets us to what Day does do—she brings her contemporary R&B and pop sensibilities to a palette of jazz, blues, and, at the core of everything, soul.
“Soul music is true to its name,” she says. “It’s music that connects to your soul, your spirit. When music resonates with people’s spirit like that, when people can emotionally connect with something or it helps to heal them, transform them, that never goes out of style. People will always need something to relate to. They will always need encouragement. They will always need truth.”
Day hopes her music also inspires, encourages and heals. But she knew she needed to take some time off to work on her relationship with God before she could make the album she really wanted to make.
Day’s career started looking up five or six years ago when Kai Millard Morris, who was married to Stevie Wonder at the time, saw a performance and shared it with Wonder. The couple reached out to Day and discussed working together. It didn’t work out at the time because Day was working with someone who, in her words, “sabotaged everything.” About a year later, when Wonder introduced her to producer Adrian Gurvitz, Day says she was where she needed to be, professionally and spiritually.
“I needed time to grow and develop as a person in that year before I actually started working with him,” Day says. “I had not been making great decisions and was concerned about the trajectory of things. For me everything is a spiritual thing so I just took that time to work on my relationship with God and just me as a person.”
After meeting Gurvitz, Day prayed for a sign that she should jump back into music.