Brandy returns with new music on Friday with B7, her first album in eight years. On Tuesday, the R&B superstar sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during his “At Home With” radio series to discuss the 15-song project, its collaborations and some of her career’s biggest hits.
For Brandy, the music never stops; however, she acknowledges the large gap between her last project, 2012’s Two Eleven, and her latest one. She notes that she wanted B7 to be “as honest as possible,” and wanted to find the time to “set [herself] free.”
“I wanted to approach this project like if this was my last chance, if this was my last shot at creating music, what would this project be about? What would it sound like? Would I just bare it all?” she reveals. “Would I tell my story as deep as I could tell it? And I wanted to, of course, stay true to R&B but at the same time go outside of the box.”
The album features her daughter Sy’rai, the “great” Chance the Rapper, and the “anointed” Daniel Caesar. Their beautiful duet “Love Again,” which was first featured on his 2019 album CASE STUDY 01, will be on B7.
“It’s like the chemistry was just not forced,” Brandy says of Caesar. “We just came together and his team, they just got me and we just were able to put together a great song and I absolutely loved what he wrote.”
The musician and mother also got real about the perils of fame, something she reveals is a “scary” thing that she “[doesn’t] like at all.” Nevertheless, she is thankful to have a strong support system to guide her through tough times, such as a high-profile automobile collision in 2006 that left one person dead.
“You have to want to be better,” she says. “You have to want to be the best version of yourself. I don’t have a choice either. I have a daughter. She’s everything to me. It’s either get it right or mess up her life. I don’t choose to mess up her life so I choose to be, what I have to be, the example that I need to be.”
Check out the tracklist for the album below.
1. “Saving All My Love”
2. “Unconditional Oceans”
3. “Rather Be”
4. “All My Life, Pt. 1”
5. “Lucid Dreams”
6. “Borderline”
7. “No Tomorrow”
8. “Say Something”
9. “All My Life, Pt. 2”
10. “I am More”
11. “High Heels” (Brandy & Sy’rai)
12. “Baby Mama” feat. Chance the Rapper
13. “All My Life”
14. “Love Again” (Brandy & Daniel Caesar)
15. “Bye Bipolar”