Feelings First

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.

“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.

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.

“Feelings are good,” a vocoder-soaked John Mitchell tells us at the beginning of Lonely Robot’s fourth album. The sentiment of this album’s title, and its opening title track, could not have come at a more appropriate time, as in 2020 people all around the world find themselves awash in a sea of myriad feelings, considering everything happening in the world these days. And, as much as 2020 feels like we should get a “do-over” or a mulligan on this entire year so far, as if these past six or seven months were just some cruel joke, somehow time marches ever onward; in the music world, it has suddenly been nearly a year-and-a-half since Lonely Robot‘s most recent album, “Under Stars”. In the world of John Mitchell, one of the most prolific song-crafters in all of progressive music, that might as well be an eternity…