Securing Lauryn Hill for ‘Warriors’ Album

Laaaauuuurrrryyyynnnn. Come out and plaaaayyyyy.

Sol Yurick’s 1965 novelThe Warriors has lived many a life, most famously and indelibly through the 1979 cult film directed by Walter Hill. Now, Tony- and Grammy-winner Lin-Manuel Miranda and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Eisa Davis have left their own mark on Yurick’s work with a concept album. With a gender-bending twist.

Warriors, a 26-song project (out Oct. 18), follows a fictitious New York City gang from Coney Island to the Bronx and back when they are framed for the murder of a respected gang leader, Cyrus. This time around, the Warriors are a gang of women and Cyrus is played by none other than Lauryn Hill.

Miranda and Davis recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss how they landed the capricious raptress.

“It was always Lauryn Hill,” Miranda tells EW. “There was no Plan B,”

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis.

EW

Miranda had met Hill’s manager on a social occasion and found out the Fugees frontwoman was an admirer of Hamilton, the blockbuster musical that launched Miranda to superstardom and netted his nearly every award under the sun.

 “I went, okay, we have this other thing. And I wrote her sort of the letter with our intentions for the piece and what we wanted her to sing and sent her the track with a demo vocal on it,” Miranda explains.

Hill’s had a busy couple years, celebrating the 25th anniversary of her seminal The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with a world tour, that experienced its fair share of setbacks, as well as reuniting with her legendary group, the Fugees, which, again, setbacks. So locking her down for the project proved an unenviable, but ultimately worthwhile, task.

“Every week I would text [her manager] and she would go, ‘She wants to do it, and we are in Brazil. She wants to do it, and we are in Spain,'” Miranda continues. “Until we were getting close to having to turn in the album and right on time — because God’s always on time — we got a Dropbox. We got a Dropbox with vocals, and she had gotten her own background vocalists and had fully Lauryfied the tune. We had written it to her voice, and she both honored what we wrote and made it unmistakably her own. And we’ll always be grateful.”

“Yeah, I just have to say, I mean, there was a lot of prayer involved, a lot of prayer,’ Davis adds. “There were a lot of texts and a lot of prayer because really, I mean, it’s just an unbelievable thing that she did this period.”

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According to Davis, Hill, an actress in her own right, understood the song “right away” and how to play the part of the gang leader. But Davis also believes the “Ex-Factor” singer also had an admiration of both The Warriors and Miranda.

“I think the reason why she ultimately sent us that Dropbox with those files with her amazing vocals is because she really, I think, she just must love this film and understands the weight that it has in the culture. And I think it’s because she really, really respects Lin Manuel and what he has been able to do for the culture,” Davis says. “We’re so happy for her and for every single musician artist that made this happen. It’s really unbelievable.”

With reporting by Yolanda Machado

Credit: ew.com