Blood Tracklist
Blood is the genre-blending sophomore album from singer-songwriter and guitarist Lianne La Havas. The album is inspired in large part by a trip to Jamaica that Lianne took with her mother, who is Jamaican. While there, Lianne felt a new connection to her heritage, which lead to the title of the album and inspired the song “Green and Gold”.
Compared to her first album, 2012’s Is Your Love Big Enough, Blood is a fuller, more diverse album from a musical standpoint thanks to the number of producer Lianne met and worked with. The more acoustic sounds of Is Your Love Big Enough have been swapped for the funky bass line’s of “Tokyo” and the electric riffs of “Never Get Enough”
La Havas also received her first Grammy Award nomination for the album, nominated for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 2016 Grammy Awards.
“Blood” Q&A
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What has the artist said about the album?
I think the album Blood represents my evolution as a songwriter because I’m just a bit more mature now. It was like the most fulfilling experience to just write the music – I’ve always loved that feeling – but I learned to recognise and harness that feeling of like, when it’s going really well and you like the song and how to steer it in the direction that it wants to go in.
– La Havas via Wax Poetic (September, 2015)
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Where did the title "Blood" come from?
When I started the process of thinking about the next album, I was pretty happy in my relationship, so I thought, “Maybe I don’t want to talk about that this time around.” The title, Blood – also, I just really liked that word and I wanted to get it into a song title or a lyric of some kind and I started, like, a while ago, started writing a song about my grandma, kinda loosely, about my grandma, and the first word was “blood,” and I thought, “I kinda like that word,” so it kinda stuck. So it was all, kinda, swimming around in my head.
– La Havas via Wax Poetics (September, 2015)
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How did this record perform on the charts?
Blood peaked at #2 on the UK Official Charts during the week of August 13, 2015.
The album later peaked #52 on the US Billboard 200 during the chart week of August 22, 2015.
Blood also peaked at #2 on the Billboard US Top R&B Albums during the chart week of August 22, 2015.
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How did La Havas react to the album's GRAMMY nomination?
Blood was nominated for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in 2015. The category of “Urban” and “Urban Contemporary” has been brought under fire due to its lazy assignment to primarily Black artists, despite the genre that the artist is most known for. When asked by Coup de Main Magazine April, 2017 about her reaction to the nomination, La Havas responded:
[The category] was called Best Urban Contemporary Album and I was like, “Hmm.” I mean, obviously, to me, getting nominated for a Grammy regardless of what the category is unbelievable and I was so honoured to have been recognised as a UK artist as well, I felt very proud. I did find it interesting that it just sorta sounded like they didn’t know what exactly… I personally wouldn’t call myself “urban contemporary,” I would call myself maybe “contemporary soul” or “contemporary singer-songwriter.” Why is it that soul has to have the connotation of, “You are probably brown?” Urban, I don’t think is at all a good adjective because it does kind of just mean they’re probably black which is maybe a little lazy, because urban means “of the city,” which we all learnt in geography class back in the day. It’s very interesting. I’ve just heard about this through you that [Aaradhna] didn’t accept the [NZ Music Award for Best Urban Artist]. I probably would have accepted the [Grammy] and just said what I just said, “Thank you so much…But…,” but then still had it on my mantelpiece.
