Erykah Badu on gathering data, doula work and her first album in 11 years

After eleven years of gathering what she calls 'the data' — the deaths, the births, the heartbreaks, the dopamine — Erykah Badu has returned with a full-length album born in collaboration with underground producer the Alchemist. The Dallas-born artist, who has spent the intervening years not in silence but in service — attending births and accompanying the dying as a certified doula — arrives not as someone who has been away, but as someone who has been elsewhere, watching. Her comeback is less a re-emergence than a confirmation that some voices deepen precisely because they refuse to be rushe