Maya Rudolph has admitted it used to be “painful” to be reminded of her late mother Minnie Riperton’s song Lovin’ You.
During Monday’s episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, host Dax Shepard recalled a moment on the 2004 set of their film Idiocracy when Maya asked him to stop singing the 1974 song.
“I’m sure I was honest with you about why it’s too painful,” she replied. “That was at a different stage in my life where that would be painful to me whereas now I’m just like, oh my God, OK, yeah, go ahead, go for it, sing it. But it’s not painful.”
Minnie, who wrote the song with Maya’s father Richard Rudolph, died of breast cancer at the age of 31 in 1979, when Maya was almost seven years old.
Maya explained that the pain felt different after she had children with her filmmaker husband Paul Thomas Anderson.
“It wasn’t like a magic bullet of, oh, I have kids now, I’m healed,” she continued. “But after I started having my kids, I think I looked back and went like, oh, I don’t feel the pain in the same way. It’s never going to be gone, it’s just that I hadn’t processed any of it at that time of my life.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the comedian admitted she refuses to sing “real music” in public because of the “expectation” placed on her as the daughter of Minnie, who had a five-octave range.
“I’ve seen it in my children sometimes where they’ll start something and I can see the gears turning of like, if this isn’t great, I’m not going to do it. So that’s me with real music. Real music meaning pouring my heart and soul and bearing my voice,” she confessed.
Maya is in a Prince cover band called Princess.
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