Her releases are heavy on the concept and littered with literary references.
This has become Ms. Badu's mode in recent years: her releases, infrequent and increasingly insular, have felt stranded in a single mood.
From then on, her releases were ever more sporadic and when she released her eighth album Aerial in 2005, it was her first for 12 years.
Her releases were never less than interesting, occasionally they were great, and sometimes the wider world appeared to notice – her voice unexpectedly turned up, in sampled form, amid the drizzly moping of Coldplay's post-conscious uncoupling album Ghost Stories.
The newly formed Ascot Records is a United Artists subsidiary overseen by music-biz lifer Chet Woods, and his first two signings are Dede Young (a singer so utterly forgotten that her releases aren't even on YouTube) and 34-year-old Canadian jazz flautist Moe Koffman.
Badu's commercial viability decreased as each of her releases following her debut Baduizm departed further from that album's music.
