It’s hard to believe, but Missy Elliott has never gone on a headlining solo tour. The last time she regularly hit the road, it was alongside Beyoncé, who was promoting her debut solo album “Dangerously in Love,” as well as Alicia Keys and Tamia on the Verizon Ladies First Tour in 2004.
“I felt like it was time,” Elliott tells Variety of her upcoming Out of This World — The Missy Elliott Experience, kicking off on July 4 in Vancouver. “It’s just a good time. Especially for my era of fans out there to just see me do my own headline tour, they never got a chance to see that. And a new generation, too.”
The iconic multihyphenate hasn’t put out a solo album since 2005’s “The Cookbook,” but Elliott’s influence has loomed large over pop music in the decades since. Everywhere you look, there are hints of Elliott’s singular, reality-bending strain of art and music permeating through contemporary culture. Nevermind that her output has been somewhat sporadic — a guest feature here, a showstopping performance at the MTV Video Music Awards there — Elliott has continued to warp the minds of fans who have been locked in since 1997’s “Supa Dupa Fly,” plus the throngs of young fans discovering her music for the first time on social media.
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For Elliott, going on a headline tour at this point is a natural peak in her run of milestones. She’s riding high off inductions into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. That, plus she had a street named after her in her native Portsmouth, VA. For Out of This World, it felt right to spread her magic across the country alongside frequent career collaborators Busta Rhymes, Ciara and longtime partner-in-crime Timbaland. Though Elliott is years removed from a full body of work, it feels only right to corral the players in the world she built to bring it to life, one arena show at a time.
Elliott, 52, is currently in the throes of paring down the dozens of hits she’s released as a solo artist, or written and produced for others, for her upcoming tour. There will probably be crossover with Rhymes, who opened and closed “Supa Dupa Fly,” and Ciara, a perennial fixture in Elliott’s orbit (and vice versa). But for now, she’s meditating on the work that brought her to this point, and what it will take to translate that to a regular live show.
This is your first headlining tour thus far. So the question is, why now?
Well, I’ve had opportunities before and I was so engulfed in producing and writing for other artists. And I just woke up one day like, I want to go out on the road. And for my team of course, they thought I was playing, like yeah, alright. My manager, she called me the next day like, are you sure? Were you playing about what you said? No, I want to go out, I’m for real this time.
How does being the headliner differ for you from being part of these bigger vision tours that are co-billed?
Yeah, this is most definitely a different vibe, because now, it’s more so what am I going to do because I’m the headliner. But it’s fun, though. I feel like a kid in a candy store, for real. So you know, I’m going to try to put everything on the stage. But also I have Busta and Ciara and I’m excited about that because I made sure that I didn’t just pick people who were hot out there. They’re hot anyway because they have so many timeless hits. But I wanted that energy to match the energy that I have so I believe that all of us have the same energy. It’s you and me dancing the whole time.
You mention Ciara and Busta and Timbaland, obviously. You’ve collaborated with these artists a lot throughout your career. Do you plan on having cross-pollination between sets?
Great possibility, you never know. You know, I want to make sure everybody come out and see it. Trust me, I am fighting to not tell you how amazing it’s going to be. But possibly. Yes. [Laughs]
You’ve done these show-stopping performances at award shows over the past few years. But it’s a different beast to take on a headlining tour. How has it been boiling down your discography into a tight set?
It’s been hard. That’s the part that’s probably the most difficult because you have people all day underneath your posts or tweeting, “I hope you do this record.” Y’all have me on stage for five hours! So I’m trying, I’m trying to blend the stuff together so I can try to please everyone, but I know I won’t be able to. But I’m getting close to it.
Are any plans to include music from before “Supa Dupa Fly,” like from Fayze or Sista?
Oh… No, if I go back that far, I most definitely… Y’all would be coming back a week straight if I go back that far. Y’all would be coming back every day for a week. So nah, I’m going to start at “The Rain,” for sure. I can give you that information. I’m going to start there.
It’s about to be the 25th anniversary of “Da Real World” on June 22. What do you remember about that period of time working with Timbaland? That album sounded like the future then, and it sounds like the future now. So how do you feel about it looking back?
That album was stressful. [Laughs] That was my most stressful album. And I appreciated that album later. It was the most stressful because if you know anything about the periods of albums and the second album, we call it the sophomore jinx, and so especially if you have a successful first album, you are stressed out because you’re chasing trying to be that first album. So that album was successful for me, that first album, so I was trying to find something that was going to be bigger than “The Rain,” visually and sonically. Years later, I look back on that and that was probably one of the most creative [periods] because it was theatrics mixed in with hip-hop. If you listen to a lot of the songs, it’s a lot of strings. I don’t want to say dark strings, but very theatrical, very dramatic strings happening. If you think about “All N My Grill,” the record with Redman…
“Dangerous Mouths.”
You see! You know better than me! So all of that had… Even in “She’s a Bitch,” the breakdown… Everything was very dramatic. And so I can appreciate that album as one of my tops because at that time, it was stressful but when I look back, I’m like, damn, we were in a pocket, a different kind of pocket that was amazing to blend the two because it was hip-hop but it still had the theatrics to it.
Over the years, you’ve teased “Block Party.” We got the “Iconology” EP in 2019. Last year, Tim said you guys were locked in and he was hoping the album would come out in summer. So the question you always get asked: What’s up?
Well, you never know with me. It’s almost like the way this [tour] just surfaced out of nowhere, all of these years, we’re talking about “The Rain,” it’s like 27 years, and here I go like, oh I’m going out on the road. It’s one of those things I think about with the music. You never know when I decide, OK, this is the time to put out a whole album.
How much music would you say you’ve amassed, solo records, since “The Cookbook?”
Oh my goodness. [Laughs] Can you imagine someone like Prince answering that? Only because when you are a writer and a producer, I’m quite sure I can probably speak for a lot of those types of people, that they’re recording all the time. So I probably have at least six albums worth of music at this point.
Missy… Come on!
Yeah. And Tim is always saying that to me, “What you waiting for? So what you waiting for then?” I be like, I don’t know. But yeah, I believe that it’ll be a day that everybody’s going on about their way, and then you just look online and see an album date from me. So yeah, I think that’ll happen sooner than later.
You’ve had decades in the industry and have put out so many great albums and done great things. Have you had time to stop and reflect on your legacy, and take a step back and look at what you’ve accomplished and put it into perspective? Or are you still wowed by it?
Oof. I’ve been telling people this. I’m just now starting to see those things, which sometimes I be like, wow, I’ve spent so much time in the industry, and just to now feel like, OK, maybe I have a legacy going on here. Maybe I have a lot of things, and I think most definitely the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was the icing on the cake. All of them, there are so many things I’ve sat and looked back on, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriter Hall of Fame, having a boulevard named after you. All of these different things. But I think just now it’s starting to click, because I’ve spent so much of my career, if I wasn’t doing records for myself, I was doing records for other artists so I was just constantly going, going, going, without stopping to even think about any of those things. And now I can. I’ll have my cousin just hit me the other day and was like, “I’m in L.A., I’m about to go see your star! We proud of you!” That makes me feel good, because it’s one of my cousin’s house that I used to clean up. I used to clean up his house and now he’s like, “You can still come clean my house whenever you feel like!”
