Album in the Works: Anita Baker

Bellow is the transcript from Billboard online about Anita's plans for the forthcoming future. To access the article on their site click here.

Anita Baker is considering a live video and/or album for her next release, possibly in 2010. And she's not ruling out the possibility of some new music next year, either.

The Grammy Award-winning songstress filmed shows during the past year at the DTE Energy Music Theatre near her hometown of Detroit, Mich., in the Cayman Islands, and at the Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Prior Lake, Minn. But Baker tells Billboard.com that, if the project moves forward, the bulk of the footage will likely come from two shows at New York's Radio City Music Hall over Valentine's Day weekend this past February.

"What you'll probably end up seeing is something that's packaged live from Radio City, with elements of the Caymans and Detroit added into that," says Baker, whose last studio album, "My Everything," came out in 2004. She's also been looking over footage from this year's Essence Music Festival, which will be used for a future TV broadcast. "Luckily I wear black all the time," Baker says with a laugh, "so there's no problem with having to go back and re-cut anything, usually."

Baker released "A Night of Rapture -- Live" in 2004. ¨As for brand new music -- either instead of or alongside the live project -- Baker says there are "a couple of songs that I had in mind for a couple of artists that I think I'm going to use for myself." She adds that the new music is "not a departure. It will be an Anita Baker record, but it will have a lot of surprising elements in it. We'll take a lot of our contemporaries and bring them into my project where they may fit."

One of those could be rapper Snoop Dogg, who Baker is working with on an adaptation of Curtis Mayfield's "Give Me Your Love (Love Song)" from the "Superfly" soundtrack. "We do it in a very contemporary way, a very grown-up way," Baker says. "It's lovely -- who knew that Snoop is madly in love with his wife, you know? We've got a chance to see that in the way his music has grown, so when he comes in to do dialogue over that love theme, it becomes very grown-up and contemporary at the same time."

As for when we might hear, or see, something new, however, Baker is circumspect. "The record company (Blue Note) wants next spring, and I would love for that to happen," she says. "That would be lovely, but we all are mindful of the fact that we want it to be right. So when they say spring, they really are planning for the fall. It's like...I'm a mom. If we want to be at brunch at 1, I have to tell my kids 12 o'clock -- you know what I mean?"