Haley Smalls brings her sultry, transportive R&B to The Intro
The singer-songwriter performs songs from her latest album, The Cure III
Haley Smalls's musical independence has been hard-won. The classically-trained singer and self-trained recording engineer learned at a young age that the most important thing she could have was autonomy — over her image and her sound.
She told host Damhnait Doyle in this episode of The Intro that, "The best gift I could have given myself was to learn how to [produce] because you don't have to rely upon anybody else."
Her latest album, The Cure III is full of spacey production, hazy synths and muted drums — and Smalls's transcendent voice really takes you on a journey. She performed three songs from the album, "Divine Energy," "What Would U Do," and "Soulcatcher." She sees music as "a mode of healing" and tackles subjects such as infidelity in her lyricism.
When she was a teenager, she was invited to Los Angeles to showcase for superproducer LA Reid and it was a formative experience. She became aware that the ideas she had of how things would go were in contention with the "the realities and the politics" of the industry. "I started to realize if I didn't know who I was, people were going to put that on me," she says.
She doesn't blame the record label executives for it, as it's their job to find talented but marketable artists who they can mould. "These people are there and they're responsible for making you into something that can sell," she says.
That experience led her to want more control over her music, and her father built her a home studio when she was 18 so she could start learning how to produce. Learning the ropes of production afforded her freedom, which has been fruitful, but she still believes in the power of collaboration, and teamed up with Grammy-nominated producer Megaman in 2013.
Smalls says her music has grown so much by feeling comfortable in "knowing that [the person] I'm working with understands and respects who I am."
Watch her serene performances and her frank conversation with Doyle about the music industry and "the slimy stuff that goes on" in the video above.