‘Black Widow’ Tells Her Story, and Eases Her Pain
Judith Hill’s “Letters From a Black Widow” is a concept album that reckons forcefully with her past.
The first time Judith Hill performed her anguished requiem “Black Widow” for an audience, she wept, right onstage.
The song’s title is an epithet that has been directed at her for years by tabloids and trolls because she had been close with two of pop’s biggest stars shortly before their deaths. She was Michael Jackson’s duet partner. And for two years before Prince’s fatal overdose in April 2016, she was his protégée, collaborator and more. They shared what she has called “an intense relationship”; he told her he loved her.
Prince’s death derailed her promising career, which he had been guiding, and she spiraled into deep grief and depression as online cruelty rained down. It took years before she was able to face what happened, personally or musically.
“It was a deep wound,” she said onstage recently at Mercury Lounge in New York, after the soulful, fierce “Black Widow.” Then she brushed her tears away — “enough of that” — and started “Dame De La Lumière,” a tribute to her mother and grandmother, with a rippling, urgent chorus that has become her anthem: “Bad times make strong women.”
Both songs are on “Letters From a Black Widow,” her new record. It is a concept album that reckons forcefully with her past. The dozen tracks chart her path of self-reflection and forgiveness, with achingly personal lyrics paired with muscular funk, soul and blues, and backed by her shredding, soaring guitar. It is a new reach for an artist known mostly for her acrobatic, emotional vocals.
“I felt unmuted,” Ms. Hill said, “like I was free to say something now, because I felt like I had really put a muzzle on myself for so long, and was just afraid.”
Getting there involved therapy; a hallucinogenic trip to a hot springs with friends; and the guitar, which she first picked up in 2016, before Prince’s death. The instrument “helped me work through the trauma,” she said.
Though Ms. Hill, now 40, continued to record and perform in the years that followed
Prince’s death, she was having a crisis of conscience about her identity as an artist. “I always felt like my name only mattered because it was in relation to someone else,” she said.
In “Black Widow,” a chorus of voices call Ms. Hill “Black Widow” and accuse her of killing two musical heroes. “That’s not my name!” she spits back. But then she crumbles: “Maybe it’s true.” A jagged guitar line arrives like a rescue; soft gospel-tinged humming closes it out.
After Ms. Hill’s tearful “Black Widow” in New York, the crowd — some members crying too — was briefly quiet, taking it in, then exploded into applause.
For Ms. Hill, unleashing this music was release, and affirmation. “I realized,” she said, “I’m a lot stronger than I thought.”