Syd on ‘Beard,’ marriage and the return of the Internet
In the Mid-City neighborhood where Syd grew up, lots of people now refer to this 34-year-old musician as the mayor.
“During COVID, I’d spend all day on the grass waving at everybody,” she says with a laugh. More recently, a bunch of “unruly teenagers,” as Syd describes them, have been doing doughnuts in the street near her parents’ house.
“I’m out there talking about, ‘Hey! Stop!’ I had one of my trucks parked in front, so I was like, ‘Y’all ain’t finna mess my s— up.’ But also they were hanging out the window — it was really dangerous.” She laughs again.
“I’m an old head when it comes to safety.”
Syd’s new album happily embraces a sense of maturity — of “feeling more sure of myself than I ever have,” she says. Released last week, “Beard” — the title was inspired by Syd’s wife’s request that she maintain the peach fuzz on her upper lip — sets thoughts of romantic commitment and professional achievement against gleaming R&B grooves that occasionally nod toward Afrobeats or bossa nova. It’s Syd’s third solo LP since she emerged nearly two decades ago as a member of the Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future; it also comes eight years after her most recent album with the Internet, the Grammy-nominated soul-music combo she shares with Matt Martians and Steve Lacy (the latter of whom dropped his new “Oh Yeah?” on the same day Syd dropped “Beard”).
Yet for all the growing up she’s done, “ironically, I feel younger than I’ve ever felt,” Syd says. “Beard’s” blurry cover photo, which shows her shaved head and slightly doleful eyes, “captures exactly what I was trying to portray with the music,” she adds. “It’s kind of this nonbinary image, where if you’re looking at it and you don’t know who I am, you might wonder: Is that a 12-year-old boy?”
Syd and I are talking over coffee at a crowded spot on Jefferson Boulevard that she says she visits every day. (So many people say hi to her that I’m inclined to believe it.) The restaurant isn’t far from her house, which itself is just an eight-minute drive from her folks’ place; eventually, she says, her parents plan to swap homes with Syd and her wife, the model Simone Clay, so that the couple can fulfill their dream of becoming foster moms in the larger house.
“With all my privilege and with all the peace I’ve been able to create for myself, I would love to spread that,” says Syd, whose full name is Sydney Bennett and whose younger brother Travis (known as Taco) also came up through Odd Future before finding success as an actor.
Syd recorded “Beard” between a studio she built at her parents’ place and a studio in North Hollywood owned by Raphael Saadiq, the veteran R&B star whom Syd counts as something of a mentor. The singer says she can relate to the way Saadiq moves between making solo records, working in a band (in his case Tony! Toni! Toné!) and writing and producing for other artists, as Syd did on Beyoncé’s 2022 “Renaissance” album.
“Syd is just looking for things in music that are breathing,” says Saadiq, who plays bass and co-produced several cuts on “Beard.” “She keeps developing, and she’s not developing to be relevant — she’s developed because she loves doing it. People like Syd and myself, we’ve been at this since we were kids. We were the ones in the neighborhood who’d walk outside and say, ‘Anybody want to get on this track? Anybody want to play?’”
Songs on “Beard” like “Closet” and “My Love” reflect recent changes in Syd’s life, not least her decision to get hitched last year, which she attributes in part to an uncertainty about how long same-sex marriage will remain legal in the United States.
“You know the Supreme Court,” she says with a shrug.
She also quit drinking after realizing that she was waking up more often than not with a hangover. “People around me weren’t like, ‘She be drinking,’” Syd says. “But it was every day, and it was just at the crib. Everybody has a different relationship to it, and I found that mine was tied to boredom, which I think is probably better than it being tied to sadness. But that’s also what made it a little bit harder to call it a problem, you know what I mean? I had to realize: OK, this might not be a problem for someone else, but it’s not serving me.”
So two and a half years ago, she stopped — and on a holiday some can’t imagine without booze.
Says Syd: “I raw-dogged New Year’s Eve, bro.”
“Ironically, I feel younger than I’ve ever felt,” Syd says.
(Nabil)
“Beard” encompasses shifts in Syd’s business too. After fulfilling her contract with the Columbia label, the singer signed last year to Warner Records, where an old high school pal, Tim Hinshaw, oversees a boutique label called Free Lunch. The new deal inspired her to mix up her creative process and hold a songwriting camp with an assortment of writers and producers, among them the duo Nova Wav, who’ve also worked with Beyoncé; on “Beard,” the duo co-wrote and co-produced the hooky “Callin” and “Jasmin 17,” a lusty boudoir jam titled after the unisex fragrance. (Additional collaborators on the album include James Fauntleroy, Van Hunt, Rodney Jerkins, Big Sean and Jordan Ward.)
Given her high-profile gig writing and producing Beyoncé’s “Plastic Off the Sofa” — a sensual retro-soul number that went on to win a Grammy — I tell Syd that I assume the offers came rolling in immediately afterward to join other A-list acts in the studio.
“To be honest, that opportunity didn’t give me any more producing opportunities,” she answers, to my surprise. “Nobody was reaching out — like, ‘Hey, can I get beats?’” She’s not bothered, though, since what the experience did do was “give me the confidence to produce this album for myself.”
And anyway, she’s got a solo tour coming up, not to mention a long-awaited Internet LP to finish. The band has been recording intermittently at her place, and last month she spent a week working at Martians’ studio in rural Georgia.
“We’re closer than we’ve probably ever been,” Syd says of the band, whose drummer, Christoper Smith, put out yet another solo record on the same day as “Beard” and Lacy. Syd doesn’t want to reveal too much about the Internet’s new music. But she will say that so far the group has avoided using Auto-Tune, the vocal-processing software that she feels has become sadly ubiquitous.
“I want nuance, I want texture, I want the lack of perfection,” she says. “I’d rather mess up naturally than not mess up unnaturally.”
