OutKast Pack "Idlewild"

Tweet

OutKast's long-awaited Idlewild -- the follow-up to the Grammy-winning blockbuster Speakerboxxx/The Love Below -- is shaping up to be an embarrassment of riches.

"We're having a hard time picking the single," says Big Boi of the album being bumped from December to February. "There are four songs that we really love, and we just want to make sure we pick the right one to come out with first." The single hopefuls are "The Train," "Idlewild Blues," "Foot on the Gas" and "Cock-A-Doodle Do."

Idlewild is the companion to the hip-hop duo's musical feature film -- which Big Boi calls "out of this world" -- of the same name. Set in the Depression-era South, the film follows the story of a struggling musician (played by Andre 3000) and a lovable Lothario (Big Boi). "It's not your typical soundtrack, where you have a lot of different artists," Big Boi says. "It's me and Dre, and Organized Noize doing production. Sleepy Brown is on the album, a new artist, Janelle Monae, and then me and Dre. It's crazy."

Meanwhile, Big Boi's Got Purp? Vol. 2 collection, a gathering of several up-and-coming artists, hit stores Tuesday. The set features fourteen new songs by such artists as Goodie Mob, Bubba Sparxxx, Bun B and Cool Breeze. "It's a compilation of all my new artists," Big Boi says. "It's action-packed."

With all this new music on the way, Big Boi promises to be a road warrior in the coming months. "We got a lot of college dates coming up in December with the Purple Ribbon All-Stars, and then, when the OutKast album drops, I'll be back out there."

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES The 10 Best Zombie Movie Scenes
• 
  TV The Most WTF? Moments of 'Mad Men'
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter