Georgia Anne Muldrow and Dudley Perkins Discuss New Album “The Lighthouse”

“Raise the vibrations,” declares Dudley Perkins, one half of the husband-and-wife duo G&D. Along with his spouse, talented producer/artist Georgia Anne Muldrow, Perkins’ purpose is to bring light to what he sees as an otherwise dark music industry. “We’re a rare breed because we see a lot of our family members – our family on planet Earth – who have been lulled to sleep with the music,” he states. “They got a whole bunch of warriors waiting. Like they say the cat Kendrick Lamar is opening doors because he uses a lot of spirituality in his music. There’s a whole lot of people behind that gate right now, ready to do this, to raise the vibrations on planet Earth right now. “There’s no space for BS,” he continues. “Look at who controls TVs and radio. There’s a reason why, because there’s a potential of a higher vibration happening and they don’t want that to happen. That doesn’t fill up jails, that doesn’t get people to buy rich, materialistic things. When you have positive, spiritual music people think about he planet a lot more.”

The duo’s new album, The Lighthouse, which is out now, via their SomeOthaShip Connect record label, operates with this thinking fully in mind. Here, Life+Times talks to the husband-and-wife duo about their latest album together.

Life+Times: The artwork for The Lighthouse jumps out right away. Who did it and what does it symbolize?
Dudley Perkins: One of my friends, Tokio Aoyama – he’s actually from Tokyo, we’ve worked with him on a few projects before – did it. This last artwork, he actually just did it. He came to visit us and showed us some pictures that he drew of us, so it actually fit the new album which we’d been working on for awhile. But he usually asks to listen to our music and paints pictures of us, how he feels about us, etc. I think he thinks we’re aliens  or something. He’s a good guy.

L+T: What about the first single, “Popstopper”?
DP: It’s a song for the radio to stop all that pop crap. Giving people something good again. Something that makes it so your heart beats, almost on the borderline of when church music gets real heavy and people start getting up and dancing, and your starts beating real fast. The “Popstopper” is to turn people’s attention from that dark music and make people dance again. Music is to stimulate your system and make you move, it’s not supposed make you go to a dark world. Because then you start thinking too hard on it and your body will start reacting to that negative balance. Music is medicine. It’s a main nutrient.

L+T: Did you all already know what you wanted to talk about, and then you made the production to enhance that? Or was the production first, then the content?
Georgia Anne Muldrow: The thing that I like about the G&D records is that a lot of it is like an ongoing conversation. Almost like a daily conversation. We look up in the sky, see the BS that they’re spraying, have feelings about it, the quality of the air. You walk into the store and try to talk to your own people and they don’t say a word. You find that there’s a correlation between all those things. It comes from our natural conversation, we really are like this. It’s not like, “this time we’re gonna be extra politically-minded”. We really are that. When we do G&D it’s very natural.

L+T: Talk about the production on the album.
DP: Well the production on the album is carried by one of the coldest producers on planet Earth. And it just happens to be that this lady makes the coldest beats I’ve heard in a while. We’re trying to get people to understand it, but you know it’s a male-orientated system. So they don’t wanna hear this right now, ’cause that means they’ve gotta up their game. The beats on the album like always – unless someone is paying us to do some music and they’re giving us the beats, you gotta pay your rent so you’ve gotta do some things like that, you know – every beat that we have that’s coming from us, it’s gonna be nice. It’s gonna be big. And a lot of it is sample free.

L+T: What are the challenges and plusses of working together as G&D, as a husband-wife duo?
DP: Pertaining to music, the challenges don’t come from our home, our challenges come from out in the world, trying to get positive vibrations to the radio, to the DJs. Because we’re from two different cities, our music was slightly different before we met, we have two different fan-bases, there’s a mixed reaction. Some cats don’t want me working with Georgia, and some see it completely as the thing to do. Getting the music done, I would say we’re on a mission to raise the vibrations of sound. When we work together at it, we don’t have any problems as we work because we know what we’re doing and why we’re trying to do it. We’re on the same page with that, so it’s actually a very, very harmonious thing going on.
GAM: Sometimes I have to catch up to him creatively to see he’s doing. When we finish a song, it serves me quite well to check out his artistic vision and creative vision because there’s so much in it. Sometimes, just in life I find myself catching up to what he’s trying to hit. That’s a big gift to me, I’m always learning something from him. It’s a perk and it can be a challenge, because I can be a challenge to work with. For me, my creative process is real one-woman band, you know. When you’re married, you can’t live life as a one-woman band, so there’s a lot of things that I’ve learned to embrace. They concerned me in past moments, but in these new moments they have absolutely no grace. Sometimes, that’s the biggest challenge, knowing that there is someone here that is completely, absolutely on the same page, and on the next page. Facing that and getting hip to that and growing on an unconditional level instead of being on that one-woman band mentality because I’m [used] to doing music myself. That’s been the greatest learning experience is working with Dudley. He’s opened my mind a lot as a human being. Everyday is something. It’s a gift but it ain’t for free. You gotta work.

L+T: The album is being released on you all’s record label, and pulls from all different genres. Talk about the creative license you have when you’re making something for your own label. You’re your own boss.
DP: You can do what you want. The sky is the limit. Actually, there is no limit. You get to reconstruct stuff. This G&D album, we were recording songs for years. One day late last year, our studio got robbed, they robbed our house. So we had to salvage a lot of stuff. So we were like, ok, “This album now has to come out.” We had put it on the shelf ourselves. One of the reason I put it on the shelf was because on the last G&D album, we started getting a lot of hate from media. People weren’t comfortable with me and Georgia on a record together. After that, I had to go through a whole bunch of people talking crazy about my music. It actually helped us learn why people do that. When you bring out truth, people who ain’t about truth, they attack it. We used to always bring truth, they call us stupid, all kinds of stuff, but when you actually listen to everything we do on all these records, you can look it up on YouTube or Google, everything we’re saying is factual. There’s exercises to use in life, ways to think, high-vibrational thinking patterns, how to eat right, how not to mess your body or other people’s bodies up, and a lot of people do not like that. If you look at the radio stations, a lot of the music being pumped, that’s music for the devil. There’s demonic spirit-infused music going on. And a lot of the melanin brothers and sisters are the ones spraying this spirit, and they’re being rewarded for it so they keep going on with this stuff. People like me and Georgia, when we say this stuff, it’s like we’re speaking alien-talk to these people. Now that we have our own label, we can speak alien-talk, African-talk, whatever we wanna talk through this label and they can’t stop us or censor us.

The Lighthouse is available here.