Andra Day is rising up with her first album in nine years — and taking the stage in Central Park for a free show
In the “before” times of 2016, Andra Day was rising all the way up as a Grammy-nominated chanteuse — for her 2015 debut album, “Cheers to the Fall” — who sang like the spiritual goddaughter of Billie Holiday and Erykah Badu.
Then in 2021, the 39-year-old singer — born Cassandra Monique Batie — flipped the script to become the Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated star of “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” the Lee Daniels-directed biopic about the same Lady Day who inspired her stage name.
Now, nine years and three movies later — she also shot the indie drama “Exhibiting Forgiveness” and the upcoming supernatural thriller “The Deliverance” — Day is back to bringing her own jazzy, sultry vibes with her long-awaited second studio album, “Cassandra (cherith).”
And she will continue to get her own gardenia groove back in the most pastoral of New York City settings — Central Park — when she headlines the season kickoff of the SummerStage series with a free concert on Saturday.
Still, she hasn’t completely kicked the Holiday habit.
“There are some parts for sure that I could still shake and then some parts I’m realizing, well, I’m just growing, you know what I mean?” Day told The Post. “Like, there’s just things in life that change you. If you get married, it changes you. When you graduate college, it changes you. You get a great job, a change.
“So there are certain things that I had to just accept, like, why am I trying to go back to who I was?” she continued. “So there’s parts of her that I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, this is just a part of the new me.’ ”
But even before “The United Staes vs. Billie Holiday,” Day was nourished as an artist by the “Strange Fruit” of her ancestor.
“I think particularly [by] her ownership of her voice,” she said. “You know, that was a really difficult thing for me, just ownership of myself… It wasn’t like she had this crazy range or she was able to do all the things Ella Fitzgerald was able to.
“Her stance on her voice … helped me to say, ‘Yeah, my voice is my voice. My offering is my offering.’ ”
Day is getting back to her true self — the one named by her parents, with whom she celebrated her big Golden Globe win in a hotel room due to COVID restrictions — on “Cassandra.”
“Cassandra is more actualized. She’s accepting herself … the good and the bad,” she explained.
“I think Andra actually helped me come to accept Cassandra … I actually feel like she was a vessel.”
Given Holiday’s well-documented struggles with addiction and drug enforcement authorities, it might seem like the lines have been blurred between the singer and her greatest muse on “Cassandra” cuts such as “Narcos” and “Bottom of the Bottle.”
“Some of these [songs] were done before ‘Billie’ and some of them were done after ‘Billie,’” she said. “So it’s interesting how sometimes the songs made way for Billie, and then sometimes Billie made way for the new songs.”
Like Holiday, Day also has the courage of her convictions as an African-American artist and caretaker of her culture. It’s one reason why, although she sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — known as the Black national anthem — at this year’s Super Bowl, she would’ve passed on performing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“I stopped singing that years ago, and I’ve been asked multiple times since then to do it. But I just don’t do it,” said Day, noting that the song’s lyricist, Francis Scott Key, owned slaves and opposed abolitionists.
“The truth is, had they asked me to do ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ for that, I would have turned it down.”
But one song Day will always step up for is “Rise Up,” her inspirational anthem. When it comes to her breakout hit, there will be no “singer’s fatigue” for her.
“I’m so grateful for the places it’s taken me. I’m grateful for seeing the world embrace the song, for it becoming the anthem for Black Lives Matter,” she said. “So, you know, she’s going to be here for a while.”
