Knowles Locked Herself Away To Record New Album

Singer SOLANGE KNOWLES literally lived and breathed for her work while making her new album - she was holed up in a house on the California coast with her musician pals for an entire month until her project was complete.

Knowles has been working on a follow-up to 2008’s Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams in recent months and she decided to get the creative juices flowing by locking herself away with a group of fellow artists.

But the sister of clean-living pop superstar Beyonce admits she also found inspiration after smoking a little marijuana.

She says, “I went up to Santa Barbara, found this house on five acres in the mountains and invited a bunch of amazing musicians to come live there with me for a month and just experiment.

“We woke up around 10 am and made music until midnight, all of course while drinking good wine, picking avocados from the trees outside to make guacamole, and maybe enjoying a joint or two. I left the process a little crazy, but I really feel like I came into my own.”

Knowles went for a more organic and stripped down sound for the as-yet-untitled project and she hopes fans will be pleasantly surprised by the results: “We went extremely natural and raw when it came down to the production. Blowing into beer bottles, playing flower vases, tapping on chairs with pencils, and even recording a house party we had for Memorial Day as a sample.

“My previous record was extremely inspired by ’60s Motown, and was very conceptual and polished. With this record, it was completely opposite. We kind of partied our way through an album. It was all about letting loose, and the boogie was very important.”