Lalah Hathaway had a vision. Clad in a leather coat, the Los Angeles-based, Chicago-bred singer saw herself here, in her city and on the lakefront. “I don’t know where it came from,” she said. “It just came into my head like a little flash of lightning.”
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That vision of herself back home was the genesis for her latest record, “Made in Chicago,” out Oct. 1. Timed for release on what would have been her father Donny Hathaway’s birthday, the record is perhaps her most Chicago record yet.
“I think my vantage point was maybe from my childhood, or from the mid-’80s or something, because there’s nowhere you could stand and get that same vantage point now,” Hathaway said about the vision.
And that memory warped into nostalgia, which leaps through the album from song to song. The Chicago that Hathaway knew growing up here in the ’70s and ’80s no longer exists, at least physically, as she remembers it. So the record is not just about the city itself, but about the music she grew up with while living here.
Hathaway said she’s lucky to have grown up in what she deemed the golden age of terrestrial radio, going back and forth between stations. This allowed her to hear new music all day, a blend of sounds and genres and artists — from Stevie Wonder to Chaka Khan to Styx and Foreigner — that brought comfort throughout her childhood.
“I think that the radio, in a big way, as a kid in Chicago, was my community,” Hathaway said. “It was like my best friend.”
She traveled around nearly everywhere with a Walkman, including on the bus to school. Her memories are peppered with flashes of the long, daily journeys riding along Lake Shore Drive as the sun was just coming up.
“Lake Michigan to me was just this big body I could lose myself in, like on the bus with my music and all my thoughts,” she explained. “So the record is really about that person who still lives in me, and growing up with all of those different influences, all those different types of music, all kinds of singer-songwriters and bands that came from other parts of the country, and all the influences from right here in Chicago that really informed me as an artist.”
Parts of this can be heard on her first single, “47th Street,” an ode to Chicago’s Hyde Park area. Hathaway recalled spending Sundays with her grandfather and great-grandparents, who lived in a brownstone in the neighborhood.
“That part of town held so much for me, because my father would go visit his father there,” she said. “It was the one piece of tradition, in terms of my family, that I had in Chicago.”
Yet the 47th Street she remembers has changed drastically. “Just like every neighborhood in the United States, specifically where people of color live and have been thriving, a lot of those neighborhoods are changing, and 47th Street is no different,” she said. “It’s hard to recognize.”
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To capture what was once lost, Hathaway collaborated with poet and spoken word artist J. Ivy, who opens the record and sets the scene as if the listener is reading a book about the city. The tone and timbre of his voice echo what Hathaway told him about her memories of the city. Coupled with his own research, Hathaway said Ivy came back with exactly what was needed.
“It’s such a beautiful little love letter to the Great Migration, to the people of Chicago, the people of 47th Street,” she said.
The song, like the rest of the record, captures the heart of her mixed emotions: the beauty of the past, the weight of distance, the longing of knowing the city — and Hathaway herself — will never quite be the same.
“I think these songs come from a place at the intersection of melancholy and nostalgia,” Hathaway added. “A lot of those folks are gone, a lot of the places are gone, and I’d feel so happy to be there, but it would almost hurt.”
Britt Julious is a freelance critic.