Even if you don’t recognize the name Cree Summer at face value, there’s a good chance you’ve heard or seen her before – she’s lent her voice to numerous animated favorites such as Rugrats, Tiny Toon Adventures, Inspector Gadget, Clifford the Big Red Dog (one of my personal favorites growing up), and even popular video games such as Fallout, Diablo III, and Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (another childhood favorite). She hasn’t done as much live-action work, but she had a major role in the legendary sitcom A Different World and has been making more guest appearances in recent years on series such as Atlanta, What We Do in the Shadows, and Abbott Elementary.
As you can tell, she is a very versatile and accomplished talent in those fields – in addition to all of that she is quite an exceptional musician. Unfortunately, that aspect of her talent has never quite yielded the same amount of success, although it certainly cannot be blamed for a lack of talent or effort. She was the lead singer of a rock band called Subject to Change that had a contract with Capitol Records, but their debut album was shelved before it ever officially released – there were some promotional copies that ended up coming out, however, and the album is available to listen on YouTube. It definitely was a great showcase of Cree Summer’s ability as both a vocalist and songwriter but following the album’s shelving, she put music on the backburner and focused primarily on voice acting.
She decided to return to music in 1999 with an album called Street Faerie, and she decided to release it on a Sony imprint called Work, which boasted releases from artists like her who were very experimental and difficult to categorize by genre, such as Jamiroquai, Fiona Apple, and Esthero. And while the former two became platinum-selling artists and the latter’s Breath From Another has received retrospective acclaim as an essential album of the 1990s, these outcomes unfortunately never materialized for Street Fairie.
There are plenty of reasons to theorize why this album never quite found an audience either at the time of release or since, but one that’s very plausible is that it’s been very difficult for black women who aren’t easily pigeonholed into a singular genre or format to find success, especially in the United States. Artists like Betty Davis, Nona Hendryx, and Rotary Connection before her failed to gain significant chart success despite critical acclaim, and peers of Cree’s era such as Joi and Res faced similar struggles. Even Grace Jones, someone who’s often referenced as one of the best and most influential artists of all time, only had three Billboard Hot 100 hits in her solo career, none of which cracked the Top 40. A common thread for a few of these artists were that executives and audiences found their music too provocative – in Cree’s case songs like “Miss Moon” being about sex during ovulation and “Curious White Boy” on the topic of white men fetishizing black women may have scared some of these folks.
Still, though, it's especially perplexing that this album never found its proper audience because it was produced in its entirety by one of the biggest artists at the time – Lenny Kravitz. His star was meteorically rising after his album 5 came out in late 1998 and lead single “Fly Away” peaked at number 12 on the Hot 100 in May 1999, just one month after Street Fairie came out. He even appeared as Cree’s duet partner on album highlight “Mean Sleep,” an anthemic blues-rocker that seemed primed for success.
But enough about why it struggled to find a proper audience – let’s focus more on the music itself. Cree Summer and Lenny Kravitz make a perfect musical match on Street Faerie because they both draw from similar influences – this album seamlessly weaves between funk, hard rock, and slower-tempo R&B, all of which Kravitz is excellent at doing in his own music. However, I personally believe that Kravitz’s production on this album is the best singular work of his entire career, as he branches out a bit more than the majority of his solo material to include more electronic and trip hop influences on top of those other genres, as well as the jazz/samba-influenced standout “Fall.” It makes one wish that Kravitz did more production work like this for other artists - between this album, Madonna’s “Justify My Love,” and Brandy’s “Where Are You Now,” he has a stellar track record in outside production but unfortunately this type of work was far too infrequent.
Street Faerie starts off with one of the LP’s most accessible tracks, “Revelation Sunshine,” an absolutely wonderful pop-rock song with influences of trip hop and psychedelic rock. The run from “Still Heart” to “Mean Sleep” adds a layer of funk to the proceedings, and two of the tracks are co-written by Van Hunt, who would later be acclaimed (not to mention fucked over by his record label) as an innovative artist in his own right. The album’s centerpiece, though, is the absolutely marvelous “Naheo,” a deeply personal song that is an ode to her childhood being raised on the Red Pheasant reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Cree Summer, through her prolific voice work, was a major soundtrack to my childhood, and ever since I found out about Street Faerie she’s been a constant soundtrack in adulthood as well. A truly magical and phenomenal album, and I hope that one day it gets its proper recognition as a lost classic of the 90s.