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"   Photo: Marc Baptiste/Atlantic Records  When Janelle Mon\u00E1e burst onto the scene with her first EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, she introduced her fans to a fantastical, futuristic world. The songs followed android heroine Cindi Mayweather&amp;#039;s love story of falling for a human. Sci-fi and Mon\u00E1e enthusiasts are in luck: On September 10, her second full-legnth album The Electric Lady will be released and it continues to tell the Metropolis saga. Expect a sound that is new and evolved, yet still identifiable as her own. Mon\u00E1e caught up with us recently to share exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from the album shoot and tell us more about The Electric Lady. As an artist, most of your musical career has been shaped by &amp;#039;Metropolis.&amp;#039; How did it develop?  I was always influenced and inspired by science fiction. I remember watching The Twilight Zone and Star Wars with my grandmother growing up. Then I started to write. I was in honors English, and I did the Coterie Theatre in Kansas City&amp;#039;s Young Playwrights Roundtable, where I would write short stories and have actors perform them. It wasn&amp;#039;t until I watched Metropolis, a German expressionist film, that I felt compelled to write a conscious album around science fiction. I heard the line in that movie, &amp;quot;The mediator between the mind and the hand is the heart,&amp;quot; and I was like, &amp;quot;Wow, that&amp;#039;s my music. That&amp;#039;s what I want to represent in my music.&amp;quot; How so? I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and grew up in the language of the oppressed and the oppressor. I just felt that it was time to talk about that. It made me want to continue to unite people with music and bring awareness to the working class, the have-nots, and those who are discriminated against. The android is just another way of speaking about the new other, and I consider myself to be part of the other just by being a woman and being black. There&amp;#039;s still certain stereotypes that I have to fight off, and there&amp;#039;s still a certain struggle that we all individually have to go through.  One of the musical interludes, &amp;quot;Our Favorite Fugitive,&amp;quot; features a radio caller phoning in and declaring &amp;quot;Robot love is queer!&amp;quot; Insofar as queerness is about defying labels and breaking down boundaries; is that a theme in the saga?  Yes. When you think about the android you think about the other, and sometimes the other is discriminated against. In this particular instance you have an android, Cindi Mayweather , who has fallen in love with a human, and the love that they have between each other is considered to be queer. There are so many parallels that can be drawn from that, like Muslim families who don&amp;#039;t want their loved ones marrying Christians and Christian families who don&amp;#039;t want their loved ones marrying Muslims because of their religious beliefs. I&amp;#039;m an advocate for love, because I think love has no religious beliefs. It has no sexual orientation. It should be celebrated no matter who you are. You should be able to embrace who you are, whoever you are.  That same transgressiveness and erasure of boundaries is something you do in your musical style, as well. You go effortlessly from Judy Garland, for example, to Parliament. How do you take such disparate musical elements and synthesize them into one coherent sound?  What I like to find is soul in all of it: You can find it in rock and roll, classical music, and jazz. I want something that I&amp;#039;m drawn to, something that makes me say, &amp;quot;Wow, I want people to know about this. I&amp;#039;m moved by this. I could listen to this all night.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t want to through any process of limiting myself; my iPod goes from Jimi Hendrix to Judy Garland and the Talking Heads followed by a new indie artist. With this album, I wanted to stick deeply to R&amp;amp;amp;B music, but I wanted to make sure I was diversifying it. I wanted to pay homage to people like Bo Diddley, who inspired The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. It just comes out of making sure I&amp;#039;m not bored and the community is not bored with the regurgitation of certain sounds.  How do you see this album as a step forward for you?  For Cindi it&amp;#039;s about realizing that you have all these feelings, and you have the power to change the community by voicing your truest thoughts. Your voice is so important, and once you realize that your voice can shape a community and move a community forward, that&amp;#039;s when you realize that it&amp;#039;s time to put that into action and go after it. I also feel like it&amp;#039;s a step forward for me as a narrator and an artist. Where did the album name come from? The title of this album was really inspired by my painting. I got the opportunity to tour around the world for a while, and I would paint every single night. I would paint this image of a female silhouette, and I didn&amp;#039;t quite understand why I was painting the same image of a female silhouette. I went home and talked to my therapist about a number of things, and she encouraged me to name this character, so I did. When I looked at the paintings I said, &amp;quot;This is the Electric Lady. She is beyond.&amp;quot; So I started to think about a world where there are a million girls and women who are electric ladies and I wondered, &amp;quot;Well, who is this woman in the 21st century and what does she think about?&amp;quot; That helped me write the album.  What comes after the release of this album?  I&amp;#039;ll be touring for The Electric Lady. Unfortunately I can&amp;#039;t tell you where we are right now regarding the rest of the saga, but I&amp;#039;ll tell you I&amp;#039;m about two steps ahead in terms of the story.  Get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look of Janelle Monae&amp;#039;s album cover photoshoot, below.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/news/a23604/janelle-monae-interview-electric-lady/>