One of your hallmarks is how personal you are in your music. I want to feel someone and be with someone and be able to sing those lyrics, you know? “Here With Me,” that’s just how I want to feel - I want to be with someone. That’s where “Failing” came from: Sometimes I feel like I failed when it comes to love. I’m single, and I’m cool with it now, but the relationship thing, I don’t know what’s going on with it. Feeling, like, empty, or depleted - what does that mean? What word can define feeling that way? Getting nothing back in return - I think that would be “Rent Money.” And “Failing in Love” is what I seem to keep doing. So many songs on your new album feel really contemporary but also so genuinely Mary - “Rent Money,” “Failing in Love,” “Here with Me.” How do songs like that begin for you, from a writing perspective? A song begins from an experience, a feeling. Though her music is often informed by pain, Blige is more interested in taking stock of life’s fluctuations and grabbing whatever joy is within reach along the way. Blige has said that the character reminds her of women she grew up around: sole providers willing to do whatever it takes to survive in a ruthless, male-dominated world.īlige and I spoke on Zoom the Friday after her Super Bowl performance, in a moment of relative calm before she traveled to Cleveland to perform at N.B.A. On the Starz show “Power Book II: Ghost,” Blige currently plays Monet, the calculating, occasionally murderous wife of an incarcerated drug kingpin. Paak and songwriting assistance from H.E.R., but the substance of the songs is classic Blige: honest about her failures and unabashed about her desire to be loved. This February Blige also released her 15th studio album, “Good Morning Gorgeous," her first since her divorce from the music producer Kendu Isaacs was finalized in 2018.The production of the album feels in step with current trends, with features from Anderson. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “Still D.R.E.”) and offered broader affirmations for their people (Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”), Blige kept the show grounded in raw, introspective emotion, even while clad in Swarovski crystals and thigh-high boots. As her peers rapped about their own enduring greatness (Dr. She performed her bouncy club anthem “Family Affair,” (wherein she gifts us with the word “dancery”), and then her ballad “No More Drama” with a kind of controlled anguish, ending sprawled out on the stage in an act of triumphant depletion. In this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Blige appeared alongside some of the biggest names in hip-hop, past and present, and sang about her joy and her heartbreak. Where so much of popular music has been geared toward showing just enough vulnerability to bolster your own fierceness, Blige’s particular brand of honesty and approachability brings out something tender in listeners and collaborators alike. She has spent the ensuing years longing for love on records, finding and losing it in front of the world. She was 17 and living in public housing in Yonkers, N.Y., when she sang Anita Baker’s entire “Rapture” album to the music executive Andre Harrell, which led to her record deal.
More than a guide, she is a fellow traveler.īlige is now 51, with 9 Grammy Awards, two Academy Award nominations and three Golden Globe nominations, with a hit for seemingly every era of hip-hop and R.&B. The lyric also introduced one of Blige’s hallmarks: She doesn’t provide her listeners with answers to life’s big questions, instead complicating the inquiry itself, time and again. songs of the time to look outward (Why won’t you love me?), or to focus purely on the singer’s desires (I need romance) and turned the gaze inward, acknowledging the work to be done on the self first. Blige’s earliest lyrics, from her breakout sophomore album, “My Life,” encapsulates the theme that has become central to her 30-plus year career: “How can I love somebody else/If I can’t love myself enough to know/When it’s time/Time to let go?” It is a question that went beyond the tendency of pop and R.&B.