Hotline bling

Erykah Badu has spent much of the past few months working on the music for “Legends of Chamberlain Heights,” an animated series scheduled to make its début on Comedy Central this fall. She had a personal reason to take the job: one of the consulting producers of the show is Carl Jones, a former producer of “The Boondocks,” whom Badu is currently dating. “I had to interview alongside all these other composers,” she says. “Talked all kinds of shit. ‘Deadlines? No problem!’ ” But the network had every reason to hire her. Instead of paying exorbitant fees to license old recordings, it could simply hire a Grammy-winning, chart-topping singer to make some new ones.

So it was that Badu showed up, one afternoon, at a low-slung house in Dallas belonging to her friend Richard Escobedo, a producer also known as Picnictyme. She had invited a local keyboard player to come along; together, they were scheduled to record half a dozen snippets of music, each meant to evoke a specific mood—or, in some cases, a specific record that the producers didn’t want to pay for. The session was loose and laid-back, and Badu couldn’t help getting inspired to make each snippet better than it needed to be. As a rough cut of the cartoon played on the computer monitor for reference, Badu grew more interested in the beat, an old-fashioned hip-hop boom-bap, padded with a slouchy bass line. It reminded her of “My Block,” a classic track by the Houston rapper Scarface, so she FaceTimed him. He looked delighted to hear from her. “Get yo’ soup-can ass off my phone,” he exclaimed.

“Get yo’ gator-mouth ass off my phone,” she replied.