Dionne Farris - Wild Seed, Wild Flower

Charles on one of his favorites from 1994

One of the great traditions in American popular music is the work of Black women who transgress genre, stylistic synthesizers whose work seems less wedded to category and more interested in demonstrating how significantly they overlap. These artists are often teachers too, sharing wisdom into conversations and communities both of their moment and the longer continuum. Thirty years ago, New Jersey-born Dionne Farris released one of those albums. Wild Seed, Wild Flower remains a powerful collection of calls and responses that fits perfectly into the heterogeneous nineties mix that traveled from Lilith Fair to the Dirty South. Blending acoustic textures with hip-hop beats, rootsy slide guitar with popping bass lines, jazz runs with rock screams, Farris’ only prominent solo release is a near-masterpiece that still sounds fresh even as it’s settled into its status as a legacy touchstone of that most fruitful decade. It’s a fantastic album, one that sounds better every time I listen to it.

The New Jersey-born Farris first came to wider attention thanks to her appearance on Arrested Development’s anthemic hit “Tennessee” – Farris’ appearance, calling out “Won’t you help me?” in the midst of the song’s reckoning with the past, was one of the song’s clearest links to the gospel tradition from which the roots-conversant group drew so strongly and to such great (if brief) success. Despite the breakthrough, she left Arrested Development soon after in search of greater freedom. Living in Atlanta, she recorded demos with members of Follow For Now, who emerged as part of the “Black rock” movement of the ‘80s and whose sole album (1991’s self-titled release) crackles with the same transgressive energy as contemporaries like Living Colour or Fishbone.

Atlanta was then emerging as an industry capital and creative fulcrum: Farris arrived at the same moment, for example, as similarly-minded artists like OutKast and TLC, whose own 1994 milestone CrazySexyCool is a clear musical and symbolic cousin to Farris’ solo debut. For the album that became Wild Seed, Wild Flower, Farris worked in studios on both coasts, as well as Atlanta, with a crew of additional musicians ranging from studio stalwarts like co-producer Randy Jackson to Latin-jazz legend Pete Escovedo. Placing herself within multiple traditions, Farris even referenced Octavia Butler’s novel Wild Seed in the album’s title, affirming her connection to Butler’s Afro-futurist, Afro-feminist vision.

Those overlapping legacies are on display in the opening track “I Know,” a Top Ten hit and one of the decade’s great singles. Written by Milton Davis and William DuVall, “I Know” explodes with an urgent slide-guitar riff (provided by Little Feat’s Paul Barrere) dancing atop the dusty-groove juxtaposition of analog and electronic that defined so much great ‘90s pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop. The song’s theme puts it in a longer tradition: It’s a classic fed-up song, with Farris calling out her no-good man for his duplicity as decades of blueswomen (regardless of their official genre) had done before her. The persistence at the core of Farris’ rebuke is amplified by her remarkable singing, particularly in the way they travel from the low assurance of the verses into a soaring chorus that extends into unresolved chords with Farris sailing above before Barrere’s slide kicks in again. Like so many great records, “I Know” sounds like everything at once, simultaneously unidentifiable and undeniable. I’ll always turn it up.

The rest of the album can’t possibly be as good as that dynamite single, but it’s not far off, offering an extended showcase for Farris as both singer and songwriter. At its best, like on the big-melody pop of “Now or Later,” Wild Seed, Wild Flower effectively blends affirmation and caution, with Farris employing a range of sonic signifiers to underline her words of concern, celebration, or both at the same time. “Water” is deep funk, with echoes of LaBelle or P-Funk and an ambivalent central image that reaches back to the spirituals and resonates with TLC’s “Waterfalls” from the same year. She trills and pierces here, a showing not far from the rock moves of “Passion,” where Follow For Now gets to crash and bang around Farris as she repeats the promise (or maybe prayer) that “passion is with me.” She considers domestic turmoil (and maybe abuse) in the urgent folk-rock “Don’t Ever Touch Me (Again),” with interlocking background voices and strings stabbing through her lamentation. Occasionally, she falls on top of herself, as on “Reality,” which nearly collapses under the weight of its circular hippie-dippy lyrics but is saved by a beat that can’t quit and Farris’ jazz-infused vocal. More representative (and better) is “Food for Thought,” a self-reflective slow jam with Farris’ voice buried in the mix in the manner of the neo-soul just around the corner and a hypnotic invocation of hourglasses and “ever-changing moods” as a spoken “tick-tock” background pulses away behind.

Even beyond these syntheses, Wild Seed, Wild Flower is filled with direct invocations of the musical past. It gets personal: on “The 11^th Hour,” Farris says goodbye over a stone-skipping beat and “la la” chorus that set a listener adrift on memory bliss before briefly invoking her famous “Tennessee” line at the end, suggesting that the song’s farewell is partly directed at her previous career. But she casts a wider net too: “Stop To Think” (co-written with Lenny Kravitz) opens with a sampled welcome to “adventures in Negro history,” a line that returns later over the song’s crunching rap-rock beat and Farris’ declamatory performance. “Human” is vibrant a capella that recalls Sweet Honey in the Rock, with Farris (in multitracked harmony) pulling a clever trick: First she suggests her identities (including being Black, woman, and short) are all secondary to her humanity, but the second verse reminds that it’s because of all these identities that she’s human, a simple but significant shift. And Farris covers “Blackbird” three decades before Beyoncé, infusing the song with jazz and blues textures before it fades into the brief spoken “Old Ladies” interlude, where elders (one voiced by David Alan Grier) add commentary. Grief returns on “The Audition,” another spoken piece at the album’s end that finds Grier’s Mr. Tubbs character from In Living Color trying to get on the album by comically (but accurately) invoking the connections between blues, R&B, and hip-hop.

Just before “The Audition,” the album’s final new song “Find Your Way” builds from lonesome blues harmonica and a restless bass riff into another poignant admonition. With voices swirling around her, Farris urges her listeners (and herself, of course) to “find your way before it’s too late” and “time slips ever fast, instantly becoming the past.” With calls to “live your life” and “love yourself,” Farris’ words take flight in her soaring, partly scatted vocal, as the warm dynamics that characterized the era’s R&B and pop surround her. It’s a benediction, as well as a thematic inverse of “I Know.” And – even though it’s followed on the album by “The Audition” and a serviceable “I Know” remix – it’s a fitting summation for an album defined by the musical and lyrical insistence on knowing oneself in an expansive, loving fashion.

Farris’ way didn’t lead to more mainstream success. After some fine contributions to a few soundtracks, she mostly receded from view. She recorded a follow-up album, For Truth, If Not Love, but it wasn’t released until 2007. It’s a very good record, with all of Farris’ gifts on display and covers of Stealer’s Wheel and Joe Tex as unexpected highlights, but her moment in the spotlight had passed. This hasn’t stopped her: She released several albums in the 2010s that included an album-length tribute to Dionne Warwick (whom she was named after) recorded with jazzman Charlie Hunter. She raised a daughter, rapper Baby Tate, and has been teasing a thirtieth-anniversary Wild Seed, Wild Flower tour. If this happens, I hope I can be there. Both because Farris’ recent performances reveal that her voice remains as strong and flexible as ever, and because Wild Seed, Wild Flower remains one of my favorite albums from 1994 or the decade overall. It contains so much of what made that moment remarkable, mixed with particular care by an artist who found her way into the center of some of the decade’s most vibrant musical overlaps. I hear Farris today in so many artists, including in new releases from Joy Clark, Joy Oladokun, Talibah Safiya, and Shirlette Ammons that are all among my favorites of this year. Wild Seed, Wild Flower is a great album, one that now symbolizes a treasured past and yet continues to speak forward into the future. May it continue to find its way. - CH

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