Fans have been waiting for André 3000‘s debut solo album for what seems like an eternity.
Now, ahead of its Friday release, the Atlanta rapper is opening up about how his experience of getting high off a plant-based psychedelic inspired one of the tunes on his highly anticipated project, “New Blue Sun.”
In an interview with NPR, the Outkast musician said his experience taking an ayahuasca trip in Hawaii, which involved being high for three days, was so life-changing that he “turned into a panther.”
“I was actually in Hawaii, and it was my second night of the first time I’d ever taken ayahuasca,” André said. “We did it like a three-night kind of phase. The first night was inviting and beautiful and the most powerful love and connection with all things I’ve ever felt in my life.”
Ayahuasca is an Amazonian psychoactive that’s used as a form of traditional medicine and ritual consumption among the Indigenous people of the Amazon, according to the National Library of Medicine.
The musician, also known as 3 Stacks, went on to explain that the second night wound up being so out of this world that it led him to create the instrumental “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control ... Sh¥t Was Wild.”
“The second night was different and everybody knows that aya will do you that way. The second night my stomach was hurting, my mouth contorted like a panther and I actually turned into a panther. And I was doing like, ‘GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR’ — like, that kind of thing. I actually turned into a panther.”
He explained that what he was experiencing is called “toning,” which is “another way of purging.”
“Toning is where you make these vibrational noises that you can’t control. It started playing me like an instrument. I started as a panther and then it would make me do these long kind of tones and started changing the notes,” André added.
The Southern hip-hop artist, whose legal name is André Lauren Benjamin, shared that he channeled the purring sound he was making at the time to piece together the song’s melody.
“So, on the album I’m mimicking [it], but the funny thing in the aya session, I was like, ‘Damn, I wish I had my phone so I can record this ’cause, like, it’d be so dope,’” he said.
André added, “I’m witnessing it and I’m watching it, and it holds you for so long. I’m like, ‘Where’s this breath coming from?’ And then you end off and you go and do it again. And I’m like, ‘Whoa, what is happening right now?’ So that’s what I’m talking about in that title.”
He added: “It was kind of intriguing at the time because the sound listener in me, I’m digging the sound. But at the same time, the shaman is coming over and he’s fanning me. And he’s saying, ‘Oh, that’s like 20 years of therapy happening right now.’”
André explained that the moment was so intense that his “mouth actually shaped like a panther.”
He called the experience “so natural” and admitted he was a “changed person” after having been in a “very low” place mentally.
“I have to say, man, it is legit, you know? I won’t say it’s, like, a fix-all kind of thing, but at the time, when I went to do it, I was in a very, very low place,” the rapper said.
André also spoke about the fact that his solo album is 100% instrumental, with its first track titled, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.”
“I love rap music because it was a part of my youth. So I would love to be out here with everybody rapping, because it’s almost like fun and being on the playground,” the “Idlewild” actor shared.