Jimmy Lee (album)

''Jimmy Lee'' is the fifth studio album by American R&B singer, songwriter, and producer Raphael Saadiq. It was released on August 23, 2019 by Columbia Records. Recorded at Saadiq's personal studio in North Hollywood, it follows the critical success of his 2011 album ''Stone Rollin''' and a period of years spent working on other musical projects, particularly those associated with African-American culture.

Departing from the upbeat retro stylings of Saadiq's previous albums, ''Jimmy Lee'' explores themes of stress, addiction, family dysfunction, financial burden, mortality, and mass incarceration, particularly in the context of African-American life. It uses murkier, more modern R&B sounds and a song cycle of personal narratives, inspired in part by the singer's older brother, who died from a heroin overdose when Saadiq was young, and after whom the album is titled. Saadiq, who played bass, guitar, and percussion, was joined in its recording by drummer Chris Dave, producer Brook D'Leau, engineer Gerry Brown, vocalist Taura Stinson, and rapper Kendrick Lamar, among others.

While performing modestly on record charts, ''Jimmy Lee'' received widespread acclaim and earned Saadiq some of the best reviews of his solo career. Critics applauded its ambitious sonic qualities and the singer's navigation through the complexities of its lyrical tragedies. Saadiq toured the US in early 2020 to further support the album, accompanied by singer-songwriter Jamila Woods as his opening act.

Background

''Jimmy Lee'' is Saadiq's fifth album as a solo artist and his first in eight years, following the critically acclaimed ''Stone Rollin''' (2011). In between albums, he had worked on various projects and recordings, including executive production of the Solange album ''A Seat at the Table'' (2016), score composition for the TV series '' Insecure'', and co-writing of the Mary J. Blige song " Mighty River" (2017), which received an Academy Award nomination for its inclusion in the film ''Mudbound''. According to ''Pitchfork'' writer Ann-Derrick Gaillot, these ventures left Saadiq's "fingerprints ... all over the past few years of Black American culture" and seemed to have "emboldened" him for ''Jimmy Lee''.

The album is named after and inspired in part by Saadiq's brother, who died in the 1990s of a heroin overdose after contracting HIV. He was one of four siblings in Saadiq's family to die tragically young. As Dylan Hicks chronicles for ''City Pages'', "brother Alvie was murdered in a dispute with a family member when Raphael was a boy; Jimmy Lee Baker, much older than Raphael, had a long struggle with heroin that eventually led to a fatal overdose; another brother, Desmond, a suicide, also battled chemical dependency; a sister, Sarah, was killed after backing her car into a police chase."

Writing and recording

When asked about writing the album, Saadiq told ''Entertainment Weekly'' in August 2019 that he first considered his own struggle with dieting and eating healthy before arriving at a deeper concept. "I would do it for a while but then I'd just fall off track", he explained. "Then I started thinking about people who are addicted to drugs, like my brother, and how much people wanted him to stop, and I figured I couldn't even stop doing some of the things I was doing when it came to food." After contemplating his brother's self-destruction with drugs, Saadiq elaborated on it further to write more songs, considering his own brushes with drugs, the experiences of his friends, and visits with his mother to a Kaiser Permanente facility, where he recalled seeing long lines for prescription drug pickups. "People don't realize that addiction can take over your entire life", he went on to tell the magazine. "This is a world epidemic. I stayed in that space and I didn't come back out until I was done ecording the album"

Saadiq recorded and produced ''Jimmy Lee'' at Blakeslee Recording Co., his personal studio in North Hollywood. For certain songs, he collaborated with multi-instrumentalist Ali Shaheed Muhammad, rapper Kendrick Lamar, and producer Brook D'Leau, among others. According to Jem Aswad of ''Variety'' in August 2019, "unusually for contemporary R&B, Saadiq's songs seem mostly to have been written on guitar or bass (he excels on both), giving them a rootsy core that's rare in most popular music today."

Music and lyrics

The music of ''Jimmy Lee'' is a significant departure for Saadiq artistically, abandoning the upbeat retro stylings of his previous solo albums and the psychedelic, Dylanesque