page_title: Electric Lady Studios
section_title: Turn of the century: Soulquarians era
hierarchical_section_title: Electric Lady Studios / Turn of the century: Soulquarians era
caption_attribution_description: English: Studio A of Electric Lady Studios
context_page_description: Electric Lady Studios is a recording studio in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was commissioned by rock musician Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and designed by architect John Storyk and audio engineer Eddie Kramer by 1970. Hendrix spent only ten weeks recording in Electric Lady before his death that year, but it quickly became a famed studio used by many top-selling recording artists from the 1970s onwards, including Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, and David Bowie. After serving as a homebase to the innovative Soulquarians collective at the turn of the century, the studio fell into financial hardship and disarray during the 2000s. With the renovation and new leadership of investor Keith Stoltz and studio manager Lee Foster, Electric Lady returned to form as a popular location for mainstream artists of the 2010s, such as U2, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga.
context_section_description: Members of the Soulquarians, an experimental black music collective active from the late 1990s to early 2000s, held many innovative jam sessions while recording their respective albums at Electric Lady, often drawing on the influence of Hendrix and Wonder's recordings there. This period at the turn of the 21st century is known in the studio's history as the Soulquarians era. The collective's activity there began in 1997 when the singer D'Angelo and drummer-producer Questlove (of The Roots) prepared to record the former's Voodoo (2000) album. Their sessions at the studio over the next five years resulted in the Roots' albums Things Fall Apart (1999) and Phrenology (2002), singer Erykah Badu's second album Mama's Gun (2000), rapper Common's Like Water for Chocolate (2000) and Electric Circus (2002), and singer Bilal's debut album 1st Born Second (2001).
  Questlove often acted as the director behind the sessions. "I tried to do all in my power that I could to bring people together – to bring Common to Electric Lady, have him record here whenever so that he could record with some of these other artists", Questlove explained in 2002. "You'd just come into [the studio's] A Room, you don't even know who has a session, but you call me: 'Who's down there?' 'Common's in there today.' So you come down, you order some food, sit down and bullshit, watch a movie, and then it's, 'Let's play something.' And I say, 'Who wants this [track]?' And it would be, 'I want it!' 'No, I want it!'"
  The Soulquarians' period at the studio ended due in part to the experimental nature of some of their recordings becoming commercial liabilities. Bilal held improvisatory jam sessions at the studio for his second album, Love for Sale, but its experimental direction alienated his label from releasing it, and a subsequent leak led to its indefinite shelving. Common's similarly experimental Electric Circus sold disappointingly, which discouraged his and the Roots' shared label, MCA Records, from letting the artistically-free environment at the studio continue.
  Having visited Electric Lady often during the "Soulquarian" period, producer Mark Ronson observed that the studio's "glory-days era had sort of ended". As Schillinger writes, "after the Soulquarians had departed, the place had gone further downhill."
caption: Studio A in 2014
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