Ultra Naté

The glamorous and talented dance/pop musician, singer-songwriter, record producer and DJ Ultra Naté is best known for mega hits “Free,” “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Automatic.” 

Just about all of her singles have reached the top 10 of the U.S. Hot Dance Club Play chart. On September 5, Naté will be appearing at Fairgrounds: Out at Night at Six Flags, where she will be featured as a DJ as well as a performer.

I was extremely honored to have had a conversation with Naté and found her to be brilliant, fun, revealing and very passionate.

Tell us about your appearance at Six Flags on September 5.
I’m there as a DJ, but I’m also going to work on a song or two.

That’s great. So what have you been up to?
Well, I’ve been traveling around the globe. I’m not doing my residency in Ibiza as I did the last few summers, so I got to do a lot more domestic events like Pride and things like that. I’ve been going back and forth to Europe. I went to San Francisco for a Pride event a week before that. I was in Italy a week before that. I’ve just been kind of here and there, all over the place, as well as running my party, which is an underground event in a really huge warehouse. Also, I’m finishing up the next two albums. They are two very different kinds of records actually.

Tell us about them.
One is a straight up more summery dance album called “Sold Out.” That is kind of a collection of various collaborations that I’ve done all within the dance music world. Then I have an album called “Black Stereo Faith” that I’ve been working on for the last four or five years with producer/DJ Quentin Harris from New York. That album is a different kind of affair. It’s a bit of a departure from the straight-up dance world record. It’s more of funk and rock. There’s more influences like doo-wop, funk and rock.

That sounds fun.
It is very fun. I feel like it’s been a long time coming, because it’s the first time since my first album in 1989 that I’ve worked with a sole producer. That hasn’t happened since “Blue Notes in the Basement” that was solely produced by my original production team, The Basement Boys. By the time we had our second album from Warner Bros, The Basement Boys were the primary producers, but there were a few outside producers as well.

You are a lot of things: a performer, singer-songwriter, producer, DJ, etc. Is there anything that you haven’t done, that you still wish to achieve?

In regards to music?

In regards to anything in life.
Well yeah, I want to do everything. I think I’d have a lot of fun in television. I’ve always been interested in doing something for TV if the opportunity comes by and it’s the right situation. Unfortunately with reality series, a lot of times there can be a lot of negative energy. I don’t really subscribe to that. It would have to be something more interesting, more positive. I’ve always been interested in doing something on TV, maybe my own show. I’m very much a people person. My interests are more sports related. I’m always advising someone on what they should be eating, supplements, herbs they should be trying or alternative medicines and therapy. Originally I wanted to go into medicine. I was planning on being a doctor. I stumbled into the music business by accident. I had absolutely no aspirations or idea to be a musician. So yeah, my original plan for my life as a career was to go into the medical profession. I always want to help people. I’m always investigating and trying to learn about different things. My friends call me a street apothecary. I’m always investigating herbs and things. It’s just my natural inclination.

I would have never known or thought that about you. You have so many fans in the U.S., but I understand you are even more popular in the U.K. and Europe.
Definitely! Europe is a different marketplace than the U.S. Also, my first album was through Warner Bros in the U.K. So everything was coming out of the U.K. and then coming back to the U.S. The U.S. would get it after the U.K.

I think we’re way behind Europe musically sometimes.
You know, that happens a lot. The U.S. musically is regimented, very strict about the demographics they are marketing the music to. It’s much more exciting to be in a European market. Their sound, their ear, is much more meaningful to different styles, different vibes. It has the same amount of credibility, which is the biggest thing for the dance industry. Here in the U.S., when the dance music first bubbled out from under the disco backlash, it was a bastard child in a large way. That backlash never happened in Europe. So it became just a natural evolution of disco without any bumps in the road. You could get radio play. You could get senior placements in record stores, in big department stores.

That’s actually very interesting.
Definitely. The U.S. is so big, so vast. In Europe, it’s country by country as opposed to state by state. You can be huge in Germany and no one knows you in Italy potentially.

So what’s the funniest or most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you live?
I haven’t had any tragedy live. I hope I’m not jinxing it. Hello! There’s still time. One moment that’s been tough for me always was falling on stage at “Ministry of Sound.” The beauty of it was it was pitch black in the club and really no one realized that I had fallen, because they didn’t really see it. It just kind of looked like I was dancing. I got right back up even though my mic was flying. So people in the front row got the mic back to me, so I never missed a beat. I was in so much pain. There was water on the stage, and it was so blacked out I couldn’t see the water, so I went flying. Only the front row knew what happened. Then there was one time I had on a pair of Vivienne Westwood shoes. There was a part in my song that was choreographed. I had one dancer, and he helped me down on my knees while I was singing the songs, but I couldn’t get back up.  The shoes were too big. You know, Vivienne Westwood shoes are really hot. The shoes were so big, the heels were so high, I couldn’t get my foot up from under me. I was literally stuck on stage kneeling. It wasn’t until the song was almost over that the dancer figured out, “Maybe she can’t get up?” He kind of played it off with this whole dramatic thing, enveloping me in his arms, and bent over and kind of lifted me “gently” before the song ended.

That’s pretty funny actually.
A lot of people didn’t know there was tragedy going on.

Where do you see yourself going in the next 10 years?
I love to perform. I really can’t imagine my life not being on stage in some capacity. I think I always want to perform. It’s really a beautiful art. It’s a full expression of self. I want to be able to still do records, obviously in my own comfort level. You want to make sure that you’re handling your business and that you’re in a place where you can pick and choose whatever you might want to do. But I do want to explore further into other things, other options, but I don’t ever want to stop being on stage. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I still feel like I’m 12 years old and there is so much more music to be had. I feel like I still have so much time to make so much more music.

Definitely. Look at Billy Idol: He is going to be 60, and he’s hotter than ever.
When I run into people around the world, the newer generation, the older generation says, “You know, I grew up on your music.” It bugs me out.

Well, you have a lot of fans, all ages.
I was very happy when Mark Nelson called me to do Six Flags. He’s been a long-time supporter. He always has great ideas. He is so genuine about artists, the talent he believes in, whether you’re a DJ or artist. He supports that talent. When he called me to see if I was free that day, I was like, “Yes!” I didn’t even ask what was going on. He’s been a really staunch supporter for many, many years. I really appreciate the opportunity to play, to DJ, because it’s really a different situation for a lot of my fans, to hear me that way. They have heard me singing, but they haven’t heard me play. I think a lot of people will be pleasantly surprised. Obviously if you’re an artist and you start playing, people are a little suspect about it, and when you’re a woman, the expectations are either very high or really low. I grew up listening to amazing DJs, and I represent that culture. Anything less is unacceptable.

I was a bit surprised when I heard you were going to DJ. I know you as a singer, a performer.
In the place in San Francisco where I just played, I had really great energy from track to track.

What inspired you to start DJing?
I started playing because, really, here in Baltimore where I’ve lived much of my life since I was eight or nine years old—I love this city, because it really helps the kind of person that I am. It has its good points and bad points, like all urban cities. But I felt like when we got into the late ‘90s the scene here was very driving. A lot of the underground scene was getting signed to major label deals, myself being one of them. It started me on a whole different path that I never saw coming. I’m sure it was like that for a lot of the other artists coming out of the underground scene in New Jersey, New York and Chicago. Starting to DJ was when music has shifted so much here in the states. That dancing culture had started up in the clubs. When I stated touring around the world and I would come home, I would feel a sense of loss. I wanted to hear that music. One thing led to another, and my DJ partner, Lisa Mooney, started having friends coming over, and we’d play for them. We didn’t even know how to mix. The more we played, the more I wanted to play to get good at it. For me, being who I am, when people got wind of the fact that I was playing, the expectations as I mentioned would either be way high or low. I definitely didn’t want to suck. I didn’t want to get by, because I was Ultra Naté. That wasn’t acceptable. I wanted to play at the level of my peers. That was always my goal. Then later I started my party Sugar. Sugar is going on its 12th year next month. You know, things happen because they’re supposed to happen.

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