Timbaland and Missy Elliott are being lined up for Aaliyah‘s posthumous album, her record label has confirmed.
Earlier this week, Drake unveiled a new posthumous duet with Aaliyah, titled ‘Enough Said’. The track, produced by Noah ’40’ Shebib, features a previously unreleased vocal hook from the singer, who died on August 25, 2001 in a plane crash. Scroll down to listen to it.
Speaking to Billboard, Aaliyah’s cousin Jomo Hankerson, who runs Blackground records with his father Barry Hankerson, has now confirmed that a full album is in the works, which he hopes to release before the end of the year. The album will feature 16 unreleased songs and “fragments” from Aaliyah’s archive. It will be the first release from the late singer since 2002’s ‘I Care 4 U’ compilation.
“We really felt like it was time. There’s a real new generation that doesn’t know her necessarily, and we wanted to continue her musical legacy with this new generation,” Hankerson said. “That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to do very contemporary music. We didn’t want to make it a nostalgic project; we already did that with the ‘I Care 4 U’ album. The idea was to release new music for her diehard fans, and also reintroduce her music to a new generation that doesn’t really understand how much influence she has in the music that they’re listening to today.”
Speaking about other contributors to the album, he said: “Timbaland will be involved with this project. One of the records that we had that was never released was a Missy record that we obviously are going to be refreshing,” he said. “I can tell you that Timbaland will definitely be involved, Missy will definitely be involved.”
Aaliyah Dana Haughton was born in New York in 1979 and raised in Detroit. She released her debut album, the R Kelly-produced ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number’, in 1994.
It was followed in 1996 by ‘One In A Million’ and her self-titled third album, which was released a month before her death in 2001 and has since sold over 13 million copies.
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