Usher says his latest album, 'Coming Home,' is about his journey from 'being a married man to a single man': 'I wanted to once again be fearless and go into a space that felt new.'
"I just wanted to explore. I wanted to once again be fearless and go into a space that felt new, at least for me."preparation for his looming Super Bowl halftime show "I think I completed it about 10 times," Usher tells EW days before its release and his performance for the NFL's big game.
He would start and stop, get preoccupied with other things — the residency became his priority — but he would work in the studio "here and there" while trying to figure out "how to collect more life" to shape its 20 songs. "I wasn't consistently just working on an album for five years, man. I would've went crazy," Usher says. "But I did work on numerous amounts of songs and went through a great deal of transformation in the process." Like everyone, Usher found the pandemic to be a time for "a great deal of reflection." It gave him a different perspective on "what matters," he says, "what feelings and emotions that I still deal with, and why I'm dealing with those traumatic things, why I'm still living in certain suffering, and how I get out of that." Then, while he was in Ghana, inspiration struck. He had visited and vacationed there before, but this time, he says, "something hit me different." "It had an effect on me to the point where I wanted to make music based off what I was feeling in Ghana, specifically, and amapiano," he explains, referring to the South African subgenre of house music, which has been gaining steam on the U.S. charts the past few years. "It was the rhythm. Afrobeats is something that has been very popular here in America. So I just wanted toUsher's 'Coming Home'.to reflect his journey while making it, starting five years ago and leading up to the place he's in now. "I went through an entire world of experience from being a married man to a single man, to having and finding true love myself, and then finding a partner, and then the journey of what that is and what that has become, and is still becoming," he says. "The idea of that journey felt like me finally coming back home to this place that I'm very comfortable to just share and know I'm being vulnerable in. I'm ready.", Usher recruited a cadre of buzzy collaborators, including Summer Walker and 21 Savage , The-Dream , Latto , Nigerian artists Burna Boy and Pheelz , and H.E.R. , alone — who's gonna deny the King of R&B a certified bop?Usher says his Super Bowl halftime show will be longer than past shows: 'That was a huge strategic thing' Tiësto drops out as Super Bowl's first in-game DJ due to 'family emergency', Kaskade steps in as replacementMojo Nixon, 'Elvis Is Everywhere' singer and radio DJ, dies on country music cruise at 66reunion in all-star Super Bowl adUsher says his Super Bowl halftime show will be longer than past shows: 'That was a huge strategic thing'Madonna laughs at fan's 'reductive' Lady Gaga shade on tour: 'You look it up, bitch'
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