Lionel Richie Coming Home (deluxe Edition) (2021)

Lionel Richie's eighth studio album as a solo artist is led by "I Call It Love," a lightly buoyant and bittersweet single produced by Swedish hitmakers Stargate, the same team that helped boost Ne-Yo's In My Own Words. It's an ideal match, one that should've been made more than once. Too much of Coming Home is merely pleasant – particularly the adult contemporary fare, with the exception of "I Love You" – or too conscious of remaining with the times. While the likes of "Why" and "Up All Night" involved Richie's songwriting in some capacity, just about any twentysomething vocalist could be fronting them; the same goes for the Jermaine Dupri-produced "What You Are." The stab at emotionally cleansing reggae of the Bob Marley variety, "Stand Down," comes up short as well. That said, at least half the album should satisfy Richie's longtime followers.

2006's Coming Home was Lionel Richie's most commercially successful release since 1986's Dancing on the Ceiling. It was the first time since then that one of the singer's albums peaked within the Top Ten of the Billboard 200 and Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts. Much of its success could be attributed to "I Call It Love," a collaboration with StarGate. So, on Just Go, Richie's fourth studio set of the 2000s, he continues to work with StarGate and adds some of their hitmaking contemporaries, namely Akon and the duo of Terius "The-Dream" Nash and Christopher "Tricky" Stewart (Rihanna's "Umbrella," Beyoncé's "Single Ladies," the-Dream's own hits).