Source: Tamron Hall Show / Tamron Hall Show
Jill Scott has made some adjustments just like many of us have had during the pandemic. And during her recent appearance on the “Tamron Hall Show,” she spoke about some of those changes and how she and her son have been living in Nashville, Tennessee.
See what Scott had to say about why she never called herself a single mother, why she moved to Nashville, her Verzuz with Erykah Badu, taking on the role of Mahalia Jackson in a new project and her new podcast, J.ill the Podcast.
You can read the highlights from the interview below.
Jill on her new podcast
“I’ve been having these conversations with my girlfriends for years. And I always thought, man, what if everybody else could hear these conversations too, you know, in the process of trying to learn and grow, which never ends. We’re always trying to get to the other side of the road. I thought maybe this is a good time to share because we’ve had so much contained existence recently, so much contained existence, that maybe we could spark conversation.”
“Verzuz” with Erykah Badu:
“It was so good. I mean, it still is, ‘Verzus’ is so good. When the opportunity came about, Erykah, we talked about it, and we just wanted to celebrate each other. We were not going to go back and forth battling each other. That is not for us to do. It was for us to celebrate the culture of music and that’s what we did.”
Her decision to move to
“Well, one, I wanted lower taxes. Two, I believed everyone here was friendly. I got good vibes from Nashville and I love the manners. We have Southern manners, ‘yes, ma’am, no ma’am, thank you, no, thank you,” I wanted my child to be raised around those kinds of manners…It’s very much like Philadelphia. Philly, has great musicians, great singers. And there are places where, when I was growing up, there were a lot of places to play. In Nashville, you’ve got singers and musicians on every corner, depending on the day, well before COVID, but you know, we had a lot of musicians everywhere. I like that energy is a constant thing of inspiration…A friend asked me to come to Nashville to work to record and I thought, okay, I’ll do that. I was living in LA and there’s massive taxes and I wanted to get rid of that, so I came here. I like the vibe so much. I started looking at real estate and initially I bought 13 acres, because in my head coming from Philadelphia, grass equates wealth, but I didn’t realize how much work there was in 13 acres. So, I cut down to seven and I moved to another place.
Purposefully not referring to herself as a single mom:
“I never really considered myself a single parent because I was blessed to have a village of family and friends who love us and assist in every way to help him become a really kind person and a genuine person…Uncle Scott and Uncle Lance are my brothers from another mother. They teach him how to fight. They remind him of what manners are supposed to be. They remind him to take out the trash and celebrate him for doing these things. What I don’t want is to end up with somebody 40 years old living in my basement, you understand?”
Portraying Mahalia Jackson in an upcoming project:
“There is one. I’ve been working on that for quite some time, for maybe about a good ten years. And the other, I have the privilege of playing Mahalia Jackson…It’s scary and exciting. It’s thrilling. This is what as an artist, I think maybe as a person. This is what you want. That kind of excitement and fear, not fear in a way that stops, but fear in a way that motivates you. My goal is to be amazing at this, and I’m going to work for it. I know that I have to. I’m surrounded by amazing artists and producers, Jamie Foxx and Queen Latifah. So I know that I’ll have insight on playing someone of this magnitude. Mahalia Jackson is the queen.”
You can watch a portion of Jill Scott’s interview in the video below.
