Miguel’s ascent into the position of freaky-deaky, celestial sex mystic has been inevitable. Prince Rogers Nelson paved this path so guys like Miguel could thrive, and in Prince’s absence the parallels between the two are even starker and more urgent: a rich voice and richer songwriting extolling eroticism as a balm to heal the vicissitudes of our time and get through this thing called life. Flange and echo pedals are their shared sensual vessels. There’s always going to be a place in contemporary American music for musicians like Miguel, a stony guitarist with an innate sense of the desire behind R&B psychedelia. It’s escapism as a stand-in for freedom both spiritual and actual, a way to shake loose within ever-lusher soundscapes. As Miguel sings on War & Leisure’s homage to his Purpleness, “Pineapple Skies”: “Can we look up, look up, baby/There’s pineapple purple skies/Promise everything’s goin’ be all right.”
Like his musical predecessors—Prince, Hendrix, collaborator Lenny Kravitz—all deepened their erotic pull with a sense of justice and moral fortitude, War & Leisure would imply Miguel’s got more than your body on his mind. He’s said as much, at least; in early November, he told Billboard that War & Leisure “is intentionally about the ethos right now, that we are right in the middle of all this.” This would imply a more overtly political album than, say, 2015’s sublime Wildheart, which made Congressional lobbying and the 42nd President into a slinky simile for a come-on, and parsed the feeling of being misplaced in a rigid society; or more political than “Candles in the Sun,” his 2012 call for peace and harmony.
But Miguel is a savvy songwriter, and so he swerves on those expectations. His allusions to “the ethos right now” are so far mostly visual, with the video for “I Told You So” featuring clips of Trump protests and earthly ills like nuclear missile launches and glacial melt, as he croons to “baby” about the freedom and pleasure in his love. (In October, Miguel also debuted “Now,” War & Leisure’s most overt social-conscious joint, at a benefit for Schools Not Prisons, a California public education campaign). Instead of offering the more woke/political album he’s been suggesting, this fraught moment has infused Miguel with a kinetic energy that is still mostly centered in his sacral chakra, a pelvic mind concern. It’s juiced-up sex Miguel but with a fire in it, less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, a virile, wavy palette and a clear step forward in his maturation as a writer. He’s weaved an album that’s taut and economical, like a featherweight champion landing smoothly choreographed jabs in the form of powerfully raspy harmonies and tight, lusty blues runs.
He’s also, like most of us, a bit more on edge this year. Miguel has employed guns-as-sex-metaphors before, in 2010’s “My Piece” and 2015’s too-smoking-to-deal “Coffee,” which characterized cis hetero sex as “gunplay” a flip on the guitar-as-cock trope. On “Banana Clip,” a sneaky grin of a mid-tempo romance serenade, he asserts that he’d do just about anything for his love, up to and including homicide: “M-16 on my lap/Missiles in the sky/No matter where I go on the map/You got my protection/Banana clip on my love for you/Let it ring like braapp.” And on “Criminal,” an evocative Rick Ross-featuring track for when the stroke game’s just too good, it seems like despite the copious pleasure he’s spouting, everything might just be getting to him. Over a chunky guitar riff and the requisite sex-reverb with a Tame Impala-style psych-harmony propping it all up, Miguel declares, “I got a mind like Columbine/Vigilante, I’m volatile/...I just want someone that I can trust,” before the chorus: “It’s so good it feels criminal/This shit’s gotta be criminal.”
Yet behind Miguel’s addled thoughts and swaggering cocksmanship, he’s still a consummate dreamer, mitigating his darker impulses with a perpetually sunny sound. Even his more post-apocalyptic songs take an optimistic bent, like “City of Angels,” a pared-down blues croon about doing a woman wrong that also celebrates a deeper outcome. On the upbeat “Caramelo Duro,” assisted by Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, Miguel sings in Spanish about a sweet and freaky sucia he’s trying to flow down, and while the español is fine, his hefty vocal depth places him in another distinct musical lineage, that of romantic Mexican crooners like Juan Gabriel and Vicente Fernández. Let’s all will a Miguel/Romeo Santos full-length collaboration into existence, too, if only because bachata's falsetto king could use his West Coast, low-end counterpoint.
While Miguel, who is black and Mexican American, has sung in Spanish before, the inclusion feels like a statement in and of itself when his very existence is politicized, and perhaps a resolution to the questions he posed on Wildheart’s “What’s Normal Anyway”—the answer to people rejecting your multiplicities is to be yourself even harder. It’s something that Miguel has always done, as an iconoclast in a musical landscape where genres are ever flattening and merging into each other. On War & Leisure, he sounds unconflicted and ready to rumble. The freedom he promises his lovers in his music extends to himself, and he’s better than ever at just letting go.
