Legendary singer Anita Baker will have an unexpected collaborator in Hip-Hop icon Snoop Dogg for her proposed 2010 album.
The new project will be a combination of recent live performances, and new music the songstress had originally written for other artists.
Aware that some of her older followers may be aghast at the idea of a Hip-Hop collaboration, Baker assured her long-time fans the project is in the tradition of her previous classics like Rapture (1986) and Giving You the Best That I Got (1988).
“[The album] is not a departure. It will be an Anita Baker record, but it will have a lot of surprising elements in it,” Baker explained to Billboard. “We’ll take a lot of our contemporaries and bring them into my project where they may fit.”
Baker and Snoop are working on a cover of Curtis Mayfield’’s “Give Me Your Love (Love Song),” first heard on the seminal Superfly soundtrack.
Baker disclosed that many will be impressed with the emotional maturity Snoop displays, as it is a side rarely emphasized in his rap persona.
“We do it in a very contemporary way, a very grown-up way,” Baker stated. “It’s lovely, who knew that Snoop is madly in love with his wife, you know? We’ve got a chance to see that in the way his music has grown, so when he comes in to do dialogue over that love theme, it becomes very grown-up and contemporary at the same time.”
Anita Baker’s forthcoming LP will be distributed through the historic Blue Note label, and is tentatively scheduled for a release next spring.