Koffee To Open For Ms. Lauryn Hill On Australian Leg Of ‘Miseducation’ Anniversary Tour
Reggae sensation Koffee will be joining five-time Grammy-winning artist Ms. Lauryn Hill on her ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ 25th Anniversary Tour.
The tour, which commemorates the anniversary of her debut solo album, will see the Toast singer joining Hill at two locations in Australia, namely the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on October 3, 2023 and the Qudos Bank Arena on October 5, 2023.
Overall, the tour will see Hill performing at 17 concerts across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Hip Hop group The Fugees will be joining Hill at the North American stops. She is expected to kick things off on September 8 at Mystic Lake in Minneapolis and end on November 9 in Seattle at the Climate Pledge Arena.
According to Hill in a statement, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is and was “a love song to my parents, my family, my people, my musical and cultural forebears, my teachers, my loves, my Creator. I wrote love songs and protest songs — (still love songs) about the subjects and interests that inspired and moved me. I was confident that what inspired me would resonate with an audience that had been led to believe that songs of that kind could only live in the past.”
The statement further said: “I loved music, I loved people, I truly felt grateful to God for my life, and genuinely blessed to have a platform where I could share wisdom and perspective through music. I felt a charge to challenge the idea that certain kinds of expression and/or certain kinds of people didn’t belong in certain places. I loved showing what could work or happen provided there was imagination, creativity and LOVE leading the way.”
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was released on August 25, 1998 via Ruffhouse and Colombia Records. Recording sessions for the album took place from late 1997 to June 1998 mainly at Tuff Gong Studio as Hill collaborated with a group of musicians known as New Ark in writing and producing the songs.
The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, selling over 422,000 copies in its first week, which broke a record for first-week sales by a female artist.
At the 41st Grammy Awards, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill earned ten nominations, winning five awards, making Hill the first woman to receive that many nominations and awards in one night.
In the meantime, Koffee has always been vocal about her admiration for Hill’s influence and talent. Back in 2021, during an interview on BBC 1Xtra’s Influence With… she sung Bob Marley’s praises, noting that she hoped to remix one of his tracks someday. At the time, she specifically referred to the dub-heavy re-up of Turn Your Lights Down Low featuring Hill—which was nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals at the Grammy Awards in 2000–as a benchmark.
“It’s a song that’s special to me because I think it shows the generations that Bob’s music stretches across. It shows the longevity of the music, of Reggae music the genre but also of Bob’s work,” Koffee said at the time.
“I would love to even remix something of Bob’s in a similar way so that’s inspirational to me.”
She did, in fact, go on to sample Marley’s Redemption Song on her sophomore project, Gifted.