Like so many people of mixed heritages, Tierra Umi Wilson exists between worlds. The 23-year-old artist — who performs under her middle name, UMI, which means “ocean” in Japanese — was born in Seattle to a Black father and a Japanese mother, and has spent her life negotiating the cultural exchange she embodies. Her 2020 EP Introspection put that interrogation into music as she worked her way through questions of heritage and sexual identity. But while that record was explicitly inward-looking, UMI’s debut album — Forest in the City , out May 27 on RCA — seeks to turn her search outward. The themes are more universal and the sounds more expansive, bouncing from sun-soaked electro R&B on “whatever u like” to moody slow jams like “moonlit room.” It’s as if being at a fulcrum between communities has given UMI the confidence to be something completely different: herself. “Growing up, I didn’t feel Japanese enough, I didn’t feel Black enough, and I didn’t feel me enough, … [Read more...] about UMI’s Peaceful Soul: ‘I Can Be Whatever I Want to Be’
Where meditation can take you
D’Angelo F-cking Loves Playing ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’
There are few contemporary working artists who maintain a more idiosyncratic release schedule than D’Angelo . He’s famous for tinkering and revising his music, eating up years and hundreds of reels of analog tape on his way to an eventual album. It took him 14 years to follow up 2000’s smash hit Voodoo with his most recent album, Black Messiah . In that time, three U.S. presidents occupied the White House, Facebook was invented, and D’Angelo released precisely zero songs. So it was a surprise when a new D’Angelo track titled “ May I? Stand Unshaken” quietly appeared on YouTube recently. Even more startling: In many of the bootleg clips D’Angelo’s new song soundtracks footage from the wildly popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 . That’s because the only way listeners can legitimately get their hands on “May I? Stand Unshaken,” which has not been officially released yet, is by buying a copy of the game. “Even RCA [D’Angelo’s label] had no idea we were … [Read more...] about D’Angelo F-cking Loves Playing ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’