Usher continues to reign as the “king of R&B” with the help of his new album, which he calls his “magnum opus.”
Days before hitting the field of Las Vegas’s Allegiant Stadium for the Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show, Usher, 45, released Coming Home, on Friday, February 9. His ninth studio album is his first full-length project since 2016’s Hard II Love, and comes when he’s enjoying a career resurgence.
He told Entertainment Weekly that inspiration for the new album struck during a trip to Ghana, citing the South African subgenre of house music called am a piano. He wanted to explore the sound as Afrobeat grew in popularity in America. Thus, Burna Boy appears on the title track, with Nigerian producer and singer-songwriter Pheelz guest on the song “Ruin.”
The album also boasts appearances from Summer Walker and 21 Savage (“Good Girl”), The-Dream (“Cold Blooded”), H.E.R. (“Risk It All”), Latto (“A-Town Girl”) and BTS’s Jungkook (“Standing next to U”).
Coming Home is “a love letter to my fans,” Usher told HuffPost, “especially those ones who have stood with me through what has been perceived as tumultuous times and prayed for me or either had well wishes for me. I want you to know that I’m covered, that love is the reason why I’m able to continue to keep going.”
He also said he wanted to give this new album to his supporters because he wanted to explain “what I was going through” because he’s not someone who “necessarily talk(s) to the world.” Coming Home was a way for him to express his emotions and experiences in his preferred medium. “I talk to the world through my music,” he said.
Though Usher said he completed Coming Home “about 10 times” before releasing the album, according to an interview with EW, the timing couldn’t be better. Usher’s been working on the album for the last few years, but other obligations – like his incredibly successful Las Vegas residency – drew his attention away from the project. “I wasn’t consistently just working on an album for five years, man,” he explained. “I would’ve went crazy,”
“But I did work on numerous amounts of songs and went through a great deal of transformation in the process,” he added. Usher also explained that the COVID-19 pandemic allowed him to reflect on “what matters” in life.
“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 explained.
In March 2018, Usher and his then-wife, Grace Harry (née Miguel), told Us Weekly exclusively that they had separated. Nine months later, he filed for divorce. In October 2021, he and Jenn Goicoechea welcomed their second child. It was Usher’s fourth; he shares two sons with ex-wife Tameka Foster.
