Stacy Epps and Everett James keep their 'AURA' positive

• Chad Hess
• Everett James and Stacy Epps

Tonight (Sunday, Feb. 24), Stacy Epps celebrates the release of her latest offering, AURA. A collaboration with producer Everett James, the eight songs that make up the album were crafted to serve as singular and positively charged fusions of brilliant soul and hip-hop atmospheres. Epps and James took a few minutes to break it all down.

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Your new album, AURA, draws from a palette of both soul and hip-hop sounds, but the album's rich atmosphere kind of transcends both.
Stacy Epps: For this album, me and Everett James had been working on songs for a few years and decided it was time to finally do a project. Everett came up with the name AURA - there was a distinctly positive and healing energy that we wanted to express in the music. This is something that I experimented with for my previous album, The Awakening, but Everett could actually translate that to sound, and use the healing frequencies within the music. So it was a coming together for everything: an embodiment of the energy that surrounds us, and we hope that through the music, your aura can be lifted, cleansed, and shine brighter.

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Impressionism on such a deliberately fundamental level of the music's production doesn't often come across with such evocative results.
Everett James: A lot of records have it, but it's a negative thing. I got my start more on a punk end - punk and gangster hip-hop. It wasn't till I met Stacy that I understood ... When I was younger my mom and people like that would say to me, "You have to be careful about what you say on these records, because it becomes a reality." That's true! A lot of music speaks of very negative subject matter: a lot of stuff about money, death, drugs, and haters. When you hear these things, you absorb them, and you don't even know it. It's a subconscious thing - you go into the club feeling happy, but they play all this music, and you leave feeling angry and like you're ready to fight. You can change peoples' energy with music; I've seen it happen, and have experimented with it on stage and with recorded music. You can literally take someone's frame of mind and flip it with music.