Yaya Bey had grown weary of reading about her own grief. After a few album cycles defined by it—familial, ancestral, societal—the R&B singer and songwriter began to suspect her “grief” had become a cartoon thought bubble above her head: Everyone could see it, but it lived outside of her. Bey writes about these feelings eloquently in a lovely essay that she penned to accompany Fidelity, her latest album. “Grief became the ethos of my work and I couldn’t escape that perception of me,” she writes. “My grief went from human to specifically Black and tasty on the lips of outsiders.”
And yet, I confess I have never once in my life listened to Yaya Bey’s vital, warm, familiar, and fondly lustful music and meditated on grief. I put on Bey’s music, I suspect, for the reason many do: to feel the comforting presence of Bey herself, who feels like a friend at this point, one whose murmured personal jokes I am lucky enough to catch if I stay within earshot. Over the course of six albums and two EPs, Bey has carved out a private, personal little kingdom. At this point, her records simply sound like her thoughts, and if grief makes frequent appearances, it does so along with everything else—sex, food, longing, loneliness, resentment, affection, pain, and heartache.
Her records sometimes make facile distinctions difficult, but Fidelity is more wistful and weightless than either Ten Fold or do it afraid. She raps less; she sings more. She leans into the breathier end of her fantastically versatile voice, pairing it with sun-soaked keyboard sounds reminiscent of mid-’90s R&B groups like SWV or Kut Klose. “The Great Migration,” which mingles those sparkling keys with muted trumpet and a quick-footed drum pattern, might be the lightest and most multilayered thing she’s ever made. The lyrics offer benediction and affirmation to Black people worldwide with her trademark simplicity and clarity: “Love’s the thing that got us here and it’s love that’ll take us home.” Behind her, the music makes the same point, wordlessly.
The credits on a Yaya Bey album are remarkably succinct: Nearly everything is by Bey. She excels at rendering small sounds with pristine, loving clarity, which means her records shrink down into small spaces as effortlessly as they perfume larger ones. Fidelity bustles with wonderful little noises, strewn about the mix like passed notes. In the background of “Simp Daddy Line Dance,” maddening water-droplet sounds dance around dead center in the mix, like something sprung from Timbaland’s Ensoniq ASR-10 at the height of his berserk-experimental phase. Glitching keyboards squiggling in the background of “As the Ocean” mimic the motion of light on the ocean itself.
As usual, Bey’s lyrics touch on heavy themes without pressing on them. She’s a great line reader, and everything she sings feels like it came to her in the moment and is being hurtled out while it’s still fresh. When she sings, “You can’t even function in the room without your ass kissed,” on “The Breakdown,” it has the hurtful tang of something accidentally overheard, maybe even a devastating judgment muttered at a mirror. On “Cup of Water,” she observes, “Heartache do happen sometimes/Just like miracles,” and her eyebrow-arch is nearly audible.
What shines through her writing, above all, is wry humor, which is Bey’s signature: “You never wanna believe me when I say/My back hurt, my heart ache, my bra too tight,” she complains on “As the Ocean.” On “Simp Daddy Line Dance,” she jokes about giving someone “a lil nookie anyways” to keep him “in the game,” before asking: “Would you do the same for me?” Sex, like so many other gifts, comes with unspoken questions about reciprocity, about what is being given and what is being received, but Bey is too subtle of a singer to merely sound indignant. She does, of course, sound a little indignant, but she also sounds a little bit playful, a little flirtatious, more than a little mad. Her voice, and her calm poise, holds all of this possibility in its palm.
