Usher says his new album, Coming Home, is about his journey from 'being a married man to a single man'

Over his 30-year career, Usher has released a new album about every two to four years, but his latest, Coming Home, arrives almost eight years after his last solo effort, 2016's Hard II Love (he released the collaborative A with producer Zaytoven in 2018).

During that time, Usher got divorced, had two kids, and launched a massively successful Las Vegas residency — on the heels of a world-stopping pandemic, no less. And that's not even including preparation for his looming Super Bowl halftime show. In the midst of it all, he was crafting his ninth LP.

"I think I completed it about 10 times," Usher tells EW days before its release and his performance for the NFL's big game.

He would start and stop, get preoccupied with other things — the residency became his priority — but he would work in the studio "here and there" while trying to figure out "how to collect more life" to shape its 20 songs.

"I wasn't consistently just working on an album for five years, man. I would've went crazy," Usher says. "But I did work on numerous amounts of songs and went through a great deal of transformation in the process."

Like everyone, Usher found the pandemic to be a time for "a great deal of reflection." It gave him a different perspective on "what matters," he says, "what feelings and emotions that I still deal with, and why I'm dealing with those traumatic things, why I'm still living in certain suffering, and how I get out of that."

Then, while he was in Ghana, inspiration struck. He had visited and vacationed there before, but this time, he says, "something hit me different."

"It had an effect on me to the point where I wanted to make music based off what I was feeling in Ghana, specifically, and amapiano," he explains, referring to the South African subgenre of house music, which has been gaining steam on the U.S. charts the past few years. "It was the rhythm. Afrobeats is something that has been very popular here in America. So I just wanted to explore. I wanted to once again be fearless and go into a space that felt new, at least for me."

The singer decided to name the album Coming Home to reflect his journey while making it, starting five years ago and leading up to the place he's in now.

"I went through an entire world of experience from being a married man to a single man, to having and finding true love myself, and then finding a partner, and then the journey of what that is and what that has become, and is still becoming," he says. "The idea of that journey felt like me finally coming back home to this place that I'm very comfortable to just share and know I'm being vulnerable in. I'm ready."

For Coming Home, Usher recruited a cadre of buzzy collaborators, including Summer Walker and 21 Savage ("Good Good"), The-Dream ("Cold Blooded"), Latto ("A-Town Girl"), Nigerian artists Burna Boy ("Coming Home") and Pheelz ("Ruin"), and H.E.R. ("Risk It All," which is also featured in The Color Purple).

He also teamed with BTS member Jungkook before he went into the military with several of his bandmates. The album's closer, "Standing Next to You," had originally been Jungkook's, but Usher asked the K-Pop star if he could put it on his record. "I just felt like people were having such an exciting reaction to it," Usher recalls. "And he was on his way to the service. I was like, 'I really would love to have this song be a part of my album,' and thank God he gave it to me."

Sure, but after all he's given us — the great early-aughts "U" trilogy ("U Remind Me," "U Got It Bad," and "U Don't Have to Call"), alone — who's gonna deny the King of R&B a certified bop?

Coming Home is out now. Super Bowl LVIII, featuring Usher's halftime show, gets underway Sunday at 6:30 p.m. ET on CBS and will stream on Paramount+.

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