Features : SABi returns with beauty and grace in pop/R&B track “Take It Back Kindly”

In “Take It Back Kindly,” the song and the video, SABi is the beautiful, sexy master of her music and performance.

The track is her second this year and the latest ahead of her upcoming EP Chakra Blu.

After a decade away, she has, as she says, clearly “fallen in love with music all over again.”

“I think this is just the beginning,” she said, “this new chapter of music from me as an artist.”

Stars aligning perfect timing

Under the moonlight diamonds shining

If your heart is searching you gone find me

I might just put up a fight

Hope you came to dance tonight

“Take It Back Kindly” is pop and R&B, fun and a perfect tease for the EP, which drops October 19.

SABi wants to make two points about Chakra Blu.

“One is that I’m getting to say things in a way that people who have heard my music before have never gotten to hear. I feel like this is the first time I get to express other sides of my artistry,” she said.

“And the second thing is that I got to make bilingual songs. I’m half El Salvadorian, and this is the first time I’ve ever used Spanish in any of my music.”

“Playa Del Rey,” the first track she released this year, is one of the songs that includes lyrics in Spanish.

SABi started at age 18 in a girl duo called The Bangz. SABi was the singer, her partner Ella Ann was the rapper, and they made a video that went viral and led to a contract with a major music company. SABi went on to record a multi-platinum record, “You Make Me Feel,” with Cobra Starship, then made a song with Britney Spears and traveled the world with her on the Femme Fatale tour.

“I went into music as naive as you possibly can be,” said SABi. “I love music and I love to sing. So when I got into the business, I just assumed everything was just about feeling and magic.”

But it turned out that music was business. “I was starting to feel like a product. Everything was managed — what hairstyle, what songs to sing, who I’m being marketed to, and so I just had to step away and rediscover myself as a human being.”

In the decade she spent getting in touch with her humanity, she got into yoga, was in a movie, Isa, which aired on Telemundo and SyFy, and went to work at Apple Music Radio hosting a show called “Easy Hits,” featuring pop music from all over the world. Apple Music “is where I fell back in love with music.”

“I listened to so much new music,” she said. “There was so much change happening — artists who were making records that were hitting the billboards, and they made the songs in their bedrooms, stuff from around the world, Korea and Africa. At some point, I felt like I had to make more music.”

Chakra Blu is the first project over which she has had full creative control. The chakras are the seven energy points on the body, and the fifth, the blue or throat chakra, “governs your ability to express your truth, own your truth and own your creativity.”

“Within the label system I learned a lot. I had a good time. I traveled the world. I got to experience amazing things, but I felt that my creative voice was stifled. I was not allowed to say what I wanted to say as an artist. I was treated like, ‘You’re young, you don’t know what you’re doing, and this is also not your money.’”

Well. It’s her money now. This project is entirely self-funded, and she is singing what she wants to sing, the way she wants to sing it, and as anyone who listens to “Take It Back Kindly” can hear, and as anyone who watches the video can see, she revels in the moment.

She also wants to share the credit with her co-director on the video, Mike Mihail, and with the executive producer of Chakra Blu, Kam Kalloway.

“I absolutely could not have done this project without Kam,” she said.

“When I was in the girl group, we had a street attitude. You know, just talking big,” she said. “On the Britney Spears stuff, the Cobra Starship stuff, that was straight fun and pop. And something I never got to do, really, except on a mixtape I released called ‘0-60: Love Sounds,’ was play with some of the R&B and soul influences that I grew up listening to. This EP is a combination of all that.”

She calls this phase of her career her “Spiritual Gangsta Era” and promises boldness, sassiness, flirtation and social commentary — “light social commentary, but it’s in there.”

“I want this music to go wherever it’s meant to go,” she said. “This is about legacy for me as an artist. People who have been rocking with me since I was making music at 18 years old, when they pull up my name on Spotify, or Apple Music or YouTube, I want catalogs of stuff I can stand behind and feel proud of, stuff that shows the true evolution of me as a person and an artist. But in this moment, I’m just so happy to get it out.”

Go with SABi as she builds her catalogs on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.

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