During a recent phone interview, Chance — whose anticipated album “The Big Day” is due July 26 — discussed the original movie’s impact on his life, what it was like to introduce it to his young daughter and his involvement in the remake. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Can you recall the first time you saw “The Lion King” and what that experience was like?

“The Lion King” is so embedded in my childhood that I can’t even remember any time before it. What I do remember very well is my grandmother took me to see the Broadway adaptation when I was 9 in Orlando, Fla., and it changed my life and it made me love musical theater. That was the first soundtrack that somebody bought for me from a play or a movie. Seeing it [onstage] deconstructed and a little bit more — I don’t want to say authentic, but more realized — it made me just fall in love with it all over again.

I saw it on Broadway when I was a kid, too, and it was really cool to see black people onstage playing those roles. I have this theory that a lot of black kids who grew up on the movie have fond memories of it in part because it made Africa seem cool instead of “othered” in a way that a lot of other pop culture does. Is that something you picked up on, too?

Yeah, totally. I grew up really heavy on Michael Jackson, and there was this movie, “The Jacksons: An American Dream,” that we used to watch all the time when I was a kid. So, this dude Jason Weaver was the main kid that played Mike in the movie and he was the singing voice of Simba in the original “Lion King” and I just always was a Jason Weaver fan. I don’t know why, I was a weird kid; I just knew all about actors and stuff.

I also used to watch [“Home Improvement”] so I knew that Jonathan Taylor Thomas was the main [voice of young] Simba but I always felt like it was a black story and a story that made me feel like Africa was this kingdom, you know? It was probably my first real representation of that.