Eddie Rockerz VibeZ

Every great production partnership has a quieter half. Twenty-five tracks arguing that Daryl Simmons was as responsible for the sound of 1990s R&B as anyone with a bigger name. The third man at LaFace Daryl Simmons is an Indianapolis-born songwriter and producer who came up alongside Babyface and L.A. Reid and became the essential third element in the operation that produced a decade of R&B. He co-wrote and co-produced across the LaFace roster and beyond, and his fingerprints are on a startling number of records people assume were purely Babyface's work. His specialty was the mid-tempo relationship song — not the enormous ballad and not the club record, but the one in between, with a groove you could move to and a lyric that actually described something. That is the hardest kind of R&B record to write and the one that ages best. What to listen for TLC's "Baby-Baby-Baby" is the biggest thing here — a number two hit that spent weeks nea...

A queer Nigerian-American folk singer from Arizona, writing about faith, race and doubt over acoustic guitar. Joy Oladokun does not fit any available box, which is precisely the point. The songwriter working in the gaps Joy Oladokun grew up in Casa Grande, Arizona, the child of Nigerian immigrants, and has described picking up the guitar after seeing footage of Tracy Chapman — a specific and revealing origin story, since Chapman is the obvious precedent for a Black woman writing serious folk songs and being told there was no audience for it. She spent years as a worship leader in evangelical churches before leaving, and that history sits underneath everything she writes. Her songs deal with faith without either defending or attacking it, and with queerness, race and depression in the same unadorned register. She is now based in Nashville, which puts her inside a genre establishment that has historically had very little room for anyone like her. What to listen for ...