In 2003, the Gospel Music Association applauded a young hip-hop/pop trio by the name of Souljahz. Granted with five Dove nominations and awarded two statuettes (Urban Album of the Year, Rap/Hip-Hop/Dance Song of the Year) for their debut album, The Fault Is History, the group seemed poised to take the industry by storm. However, their sophomore album was inexplicably shelved and the group was subjected to five years of uncertainty. Now, Rachael and Je'kob Washington, two-thirds of the original lineup, have returned to the music industry as The Washington Projects. I was able to catch Rachael early in the morning before a busy day of promoting and such and we chatted about the past five years and the next few months. Below is that interview. brenten gilbert: How's it going? Rachael Washington: Good.
Are you actually on the west coast now? Yeah.
Wow. So it actually is 7:30 for you there. Yeah, it's early. (laughs)
I wouldn't want to do an interview that early, so props to you for this. (laughs) I actually have a jam-packed day, so this was like the only time that I had. I'm totally fine with it.
I guess you probably do a lot of early morning radio spots and such. We have been. It's kind of been picking back up since we have another record now so I'm getting back into it. I had gotten a little lazy.
(laughs) So the album's been out a couple weeks now, how has it been going? It's been good. I think it's been great. It's picking up slowly. It's quite the transition from what we were used to beforehand, just having the label support and doing a lot and now we're kind of doing everything ourselves. It's very different. So we're just getting used to it. We're on the grind, doing everything we can. It's a lot of hard work and we're just putting in as much effort as we can. It's interesting, but we're definitely doing good. This record is something I've been really wanting to put out for a long time, so we're very excited to have it out and available for people to hear.
Yeah, it's been about five years since you've had a project to peddle. I imagine there's a bit of relief? A lot. A LOT.
(laughs) It's funny because, even to this day, the only thing that people have of ours is not even our independent releases, it's The Fault Is History from 1999 which I'm really proud of, but at the same time, I was 17 on it. The writing was, on my part at least - I was 17, my brother was 20. . . So it's different than where we're at right now. So I was really excited to put out something that kind of reflects who we are right now. To this day, I've still been talking about who I was when I was 17. I want to talk about something that's relevant to my life right now and we've been through a lot and we've changed a lot in the last five years and grown. I wanted to be able to share that with people. I'm very relieved, definitely.