Raphael Saadiq’s solo career has been haunted by the ghosts of tormented men and women. One such figure hides beneath the catchy pop melody of “You’re the One That I Like,” a song from his 2002 debut Instant Vintage about losing a love interest to addiction. Another lurks in “Grown Folks,” a concerned-but-scolding soul track off his sophomore album Ray Ray, about parents who can’t seem to prioritize their children. And even “Good Man,” from his 2011 retro-R&B album Stone Rollin’, is filled with contempt for the would-be patriarchs that just can’t get it together.
He’s walked a fine line between approaching these self-destructive figures—stand-ins for the ruptures and trauma in African-American communities—with empathy and pity. Which is perhaps why his latest album Jimmy Lee feels like a long-held exhalation. Named after his late brother who died of an overdose around the time Saadiq left legendary R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné!, Jimmy Lee is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown that pushes Saadiq to his most humanizing work yet.
Jimmy Lee is Saadiq’s first solo album since 2011’s Stone Rollin’, but his fingerprints are all over the past few years of Black American culture. “Mighty River,” which he co-wrote with Mary J. Blige for the 2017 film Mudbound, earned the duo an Academy Award Best Original Song nomination. On the small screen, Saadiq has served as composer for HBO’s Insecure since 2016. But his greatest artistic feat since Stone Rollin’ has by far been serving as executive producer of Solange’s 2016 album A Seat at the Table.
Working with artists like Solange (and Kendrick Lamar, who also features on Jimmy) seems to have emboldened Saadiq. Both the charging blues song “Kings Fall” and neo-soul groove “I’m Feeling Love” offer sympathetic, heart-rending perspectives on addiction from within the storm, while the Motown-steeped protest song “Rikers Island” brims with an urgency and mourning the artist has usually reserved for love songs. Mid-album cut “My Walk” slides gritty, beating synths beneath his easy blues and soul cadence; it’s his biggest musical departure, and also the album’s most frankly autobiographical track.
The R&B legend still stays close to the sounds that raised him, as on the straight-up gospel song “Belongs to God.” But even that inclusion belies an artist more willing to embrace loose ends, disorienting interruptions, and the unknown. On Jimmy Lee, Saadiq shout-sings, whispers, and croons with new abandon. It feels like a refutation of his old reserve, and it also represents a welcome stretch from Saadiq before he takes his sound all the way back to his beginnings: He recently announced that a Tony! Toni! Toné! reunion is in the works.
Buy: Rough Trade
