Lion Babe charting its own course with indie release

Lion Babe is Jillian Hervey and Lucas Goodman.

Not quite seven years ago, fledgling neo-soul/R&B/electronic/jazz duo Lion Babe found themselves quite gobsmacked by the sudden success of their smoldering debut single/music video, “Treat Me Like Fire.”

“One morning,” said Lucas Goodman (nom de disque Astro Raw), the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based pair’s beatcrafter, “we got an email saying our video’d gotten half a million plays within two, three days on WorldStarHipHop.com.’”

“Treat Me Like Fire” was built on an offbeat call-and-response between obscure soul singer Eunice Collins — whose 1974 single “At the Hotel” had been sampled by Goodman — and sultry Lion Babe vocalist Jillian Hervey. After its video blew up big, the audio track became a SoundCloud hit, and career highs just kept multiplying. Subsequent recordings, for instance, included collaborations with multiplatinum guest artists like Pharrell Williams and Childish Gambino.

Lion Babe headlines Reggie’s Rock Club June 25, last stop on the U.S. leg of their current tour. Launched in Brooklyn, the coast-to-coast live dates support their luscious sophomore album, “Cosmic Wind,” which dropped in March as an independent release.

While major label Interscope Records had issued two introductory projects, LB’s self-titled 2014 debut EP and the duo’s inaugural full-length album, “Begin,” Lion Babe are on their own now — by choice, according to Goodman and Hervey.

Hervey regards Lion Babe’s big-league stint as “great; we don’t regret it at all.” But they did find that “in any situation with a big corporation, you’re playing with other people’s money. And everyone has a different opinion as to what you should be.”

“Fortunately,” Goodman said, “we were able to get out of [the label] situation, after ‘Begin.’”

That 2016 album had led Rolling Stone to I.D. Lion Babe’s “soul-inspired hits” as “tailored to fill the Brandy/Monica/Aaliyah–shaped niche that has gathered dust since the early 2000s.” And it so happened that ’90s superstar Brandy Norwood had, indeed, been a formative influence on a preteen Hervey, coming of age in well-heeled Chappaqua, New York.

Lion Babe headlines Reggie’s Rock Club on June 25.

“I was always listening to Brandy’s ‘Never Say Never’ in my CD player, [along with] Lauryn Hill and Spice Girls,” Hervey remarked, noting she’d been musically nourished since birth in equal measure by her grandmother’s vocal-jazz classics (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra) and her parents’ ’70s rock and soul favorites. “My dad listened to Stevie Wonder,” Hervey said, “and my mom loved Chaka Khan and Earth, Wind & Fire.”

Jillian’s mom is a celebrity: singer-actor Vanessa Williams, the first African American woman to be crowned Miss America. Being the offspring of a famous mother did have its perks, and Hervey says she didn’t take them for granted.

“I was very aware that I was cutting all the lines at Disney World as a young child — that was the coolest part,” she recalled with a self-deprecating laugh. “The fact that we got to ride on all the roller coasters as much as we wanted was definitely special.”

Hervey recounted meeting her future Lion Babe partner at an “awkward” college party in Boston, while she was still a high-school senior. Overdressed and feeling “very out of place,” she focused on “these cool, really fun beats” emanating from the speakers,

“What’s this from?” Hervey wondered aloud, and a party guest pointed to Goodman across the room, “sandwiched between all these bros on a couch. I just walked over to him and was like, ‘Hi, I’m Jill, I like your music.’”

It took several more years before the two would actually collaborate. Hervey was then a college junior majoring in dance at New York City’s progressive university, The New School; Goodman had been busy augmenting his production credits.

When Jillian was given a choreography assignment requiring original music, she asked Lucas to furnish the soundtrack: “It was kind of left-of-center for him; I knew he was making beats for rappers. But he was down – and it was perfect.”

Later, after Goodman successfully encouraged Hervey to explore her long-held desire to sing, the elements of Lion Babe were in place. “Treat Me Like Fire” was forged, and the duo was off and roaring.

In order to fashion their latest album, “Cosmic Wind,” Lion Babe “got our own studio in Brooklyn,” Goodman said. “We could do everything there; work on music, obviously, but also edit visuals, work with artwork, meet with other artists, do sessions ….”

At once deeper, richer and poppier than LB’s previous oeuvre — while retaining the duo’s subtly nonstandard song structures — “Cosmic Wind” carves a simultaneously chilled-out and stimulating groove. One particularly striking track is “Western World,” whose melody line borrows freely from ’80s synth-pop hit “West End Girls” (by another duo, Britain’s Pet Shop Boys).

The song features a savory guest-rap from Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon the Chef. “We’d imagined his voice on it,” Goodman noted, adding, “He sent his completed track back in, like, three hours. He’s absolutely a pro.”

Moira McCormick is a freelance writer.