Feelings First

“Honesty, heartbreak, love, lust, elation: Those concepts are in a lot of music that I love, but it's just never been something I've attempted on my own records,” DJ-turned-superproducer Mark Ronson tells Apple Music about the genesis of his fifth album. “When I dip into other people's worlds—whether it's Queens of the Stone Age or Gaga, whoever—that's when I get to work on deep s**t, but my own records should just be either record collector-y or for the dance floor.” But on the heels of a breakup, Ronson rallied a typically star-studded cast of collaborators, including Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li, and Alicia Keys, for sessions in New York and Los Angeles that plumbed personal topics previous albums would have danced right past. “It was the first time I couldn't really hide behind a concept,” he says. “It was like, 'No, no, you have to put yourself into the music this time.'” Here Ronson puts himself into telling the stories behind each track on Late Night Feelings.

Robert Glasper is a jazz pianist with a knack for mellow, harmonically complex compositions that also reveal a subtle hip-hop influence. Since debuting as a leader during the mid-2000s, the Houston native has been crucial to the enduring relevance of Blue Note Records, blurring genre distinctions and regularly topping Billboard's Jazz Albums chart with highly collaborative recordings such as the Grammy-winning Black Radio (2011) and Black Radio 2 (2013), as well as ArtScience (2016), all credited to the Robert Glasper Experiment. In addition to guiding projects such as the soundtrack for Miles Ahead (another Grammy winner) and R+R=Now's Collagically Speaking, Glasper has contributed to dozens of other albums, most notably Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. The mixtape Fuck Yo Feelings (2019) best exemplifies Glasper's obstinate resistance to expectations and devotion to spontaneous interplay.

Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release "Born To Touch Your Feelings - Best Of Rock Ballads", an essential anthology of new and classic recordings from the seminal German hard rock band SCORPIONS, on Friday, November 24.