Wyclef Records Charity Single with Bono

| No Comments

7.13.99 - Rolling Stone.com

Wyclef Jean discusses collaboration with Bono, a Woodstock surprise, and his next album

Wyclef Jean didn't spend the day after the Fourth of July chilling like the rest of the country. He spent it hard at work in his New Jersey basement recording a new song, "War Child," with none other than U2's Bono.

"Bono came to down from Dublin to check me out on the Fourth of July, and then we cut it the next day," the sometime Fugee recounted on a cell phone while en-route to a Yankees game last Friday. The two-day session marked the first time the pair had ever worked together; all of the proceeds from the resulting single will be earmarked for charity.

The song began life as a song called "New Day" that the rapper wrote "for kids in the ghetto and people in poverty." Jean felt it was ripe for retooling. "Remember when Men at Work did 'Down Under' and they had a lot of different versions for it?" he asks. "I wanted to do a revision of it." The end result, he said, sounds just like "Fugees meets U2."

"[Bono]'s somebody that I look up to," Wyclef enthused. "He's like -- I don't want to say a legend because he's not dead -- but he's an incredible everything, you know? For me it was just an honor going into his zone and his vibe, and I learned a lot from him being in the studio."

Half of the proceeds from "War Child" will go to Net Aid, the organization set up by Cisco Systems and the United Nations to help the poorest nations in the world; the other half will go to the refugee-aiding Wyclef Jean Foundation. A label has yet to be decided on, but Jean says he hopes to see the single (and video) out by mid-August (though he promises it will "leak" on the Web prior to its official release).

In other Clef news, the singer announced that he will be joined at Woodstock '99 by his siblings' outfit, Melky Sedeck. Jean also said that he's completed his second solo album, but he's holding it back in deference to his first love, the Fugees.

"Basically a lot of people are talking if there's going to be a Fugees record and all that," he said. "I would like there to be a Fugees record, and if there is, it's going to happen next summer. But if it's not going to happen, I'm dropping my album July 4. It's called The Preacher's Son: Two Sides to a Book: Sodom and Gomorrah.

"This thing's in my head and I already recorded it, but I love my group, you know what I mean? So much so that I'm going to hold back." RICHARD SKANSE

Copyright © 1999 Rollingstone.com, Inc. All rights reserved.

Leave a comment

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Jonathan published on July 13, 1999 6:12 AM.

Boyzone Seeks Bono For Feature Film was the previous entry in this blog.

Bono, Wyclef Collaborate for NetAid is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Monthly Archives

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID