*Usher is speaking out about creating his ninth album, “Coming Home,” released on Friday amid the celebration of his 30-year career.
The 20-track album features collaborations with Latto, Burna Boy, The-Dream, Pheelz, BTS’ Jungkook, 21 Savage, Summer Walker, and H.E.R. The R&B crooner also reimagined Billy Joel‘s “Uptown Girl” for a new track called “A-Town Girl”.
The 8-time Grammy award-winner has extended his massive 2024 North America tour to support his new album. The USHER: Past Present Future tour added more cities and additional shows in Atlanta. Produced by Live Nation, the 51-date tour will kick it all off in Atlanta, making stops in Seattle, Las Vegas, Vancouver, and more before wrapping up at Toyota Center in Houston on November 27, per the news release.
Tickets are on sale at LiveNation.com
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Usher unpacked his creative process for the new album. He also revealed the advice that Michael Jackson gave him. Below are excerpts from the interview.
What was it like flipping Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” for “A-Town Girl”?
It was super cool. I didn’t think he was going to clear it at first, to be honest. But when I finally got the clear, I was like, “This is fire.” There’s these songs and algorithms that work with the world; you might not even know the damn song, but you have heard it before. You’ve heard that feeling. There’s these forever-type records. So “Uptown Girl” is something that worked with “A-Town Girl.” It was the perfect sample that could flip this mentality of this girl who’s just unwavering and she don’t really care about what the fuck else is going on in the world. She cares about where she is and what she feels and what she knows is real. And the places that she goes and the experiences that she has is something like, “Yo, you can try to change an A-Town girl, but you’ll never change an A-Town girl.” Wherever she goes, she’s just going to make it A-Town.
I’m trying to get her to come to Las Vegas, try to get her to come to L.A, [but] they just move a little bit different. They motivate. ATL girls motivate the rest of the girls in the world. You look at even how the models are dressing. I mean, if you’re from Atlanta and you really do know it, you’ll know the difference. But otherwise people will be like, “Oh nah. Those nice curves, everybody has those.” Nah, that’s some A shit. That’s ATL.
On “Bop” you reference a bunch of icons who have passed, including Aaliyah and Michael Jackson. Do you remember having conversations with Michael or getting advice from him?
Yeah. It was an admiration of what I do as an entertainer that he offered me. He didn’t really say a lot. Whenever we had conversations, they were fairly brief, but what he did tell me is he appreciated the fact that I’m a song-and-dance man and the fact that that’s not an easy thing to do. It is celebrated by people who did it and didn’t have a choice when they were back in the earlier days. It was almost as though he was telling me to keep it authentic. And I battle with it, because sometimes I absolutely want to have more support, so I add extra backgrounds and stuff like that, but it actually detaches me from the experience that I want to have with my fans and what I want to offer them. So that’s why I always try to give my all when I’m singing, try to stay away from the technical side of it and keep it as raw and authentic and analog as I possibly can. I do use it to assist me. I don’t use it to assess me.
What’s the message you want to deliver with the album?
That it’s never too late to be passionate. It’s never a bad thing to choose love, because love may not always be cookie-cutter and perfect. Sometimes it comes with complications and sometimes it’s literally just life making it cycle and the process that we go through. So the songs, they depict a few different positions that I’ve been in, in my life in relationships, but all dealing with love, man. A bit of it has something to do with coming home and an acceptance that this is intended and that whether I was working with L.A. Reid or I was working with creatives that I worked with in the past musically, maybe I had to go through all of these different experiences to then get to a place where I was confident enough to just release and share.
One of the hardest things the album demands is to be vulnerable, especially as a man, a Black man specifically. So it comes with a great deal of, I don’t know, just anxiety and just overthinking at times because you want things to be perfect, especially if people’s expectation is for you to make the big hit record or have the most successful records. You know what I’m saying? You can get caught in that. But the inspiration was just an offering. I’m working with somebody that I love working with and I’m creating things that I really do love and I’m creating from a place of love in a time when I think that there’s a lot of pain in this world. There’s a lot of pain that ain’t got nothing to do with relationships, it’s just pain period.
Read Usher’s full THR interview here.
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