I liked singing and I knew all the songs on the radio, but I wanted to rap. “Before I started singing, I wanted to be a rapper. I went back and kind of studied and asked, 'What is the real cornerstone of the music that I make? What can I do without and what can I not do without?'

In the time since the pandemic, I've been reflecting a lot, listening to my mixtapes and albums. And it's because we fought that I was able to find a signature sound. We had to fight for me to remain who I was and what we wanted it to be. And when we got to the record label, it was a lot of chefs in the kitchen. “Before I got a record deal, it was just me and Troy Taylor, my mentor and producer. But physically, if you think about my first album photo shoot, my first video, they were actually at home in my hood, like right around the corner from my great-grandpop's house. And no matter where I go in the world, who I’ve become, no matter how much of a star I am to some people, sex symbol, whatever, back home I'm just Trey. “Over the last few years, with my grandfather passing, me having a son, I've spent a lot of time back home, literally. When you see the album cover, I ain’t even have no haircut.” Below, Trey Songz reflects on a 15-year career and tells Apple Music exactly how he got Back Home and what that idea means to him. “With this album, I wanted to strip it down. “I feel like R&B lately-and I've done this as well-has so much bravado and so much backbone and so much 'I'm that n***a' in our music,” he says. He says the COVID-19 pandemic had little affect on his recording process because he typically records and engineers himself anyway, but the solitude might have encouraged him to be a little more raw. This isn’t new for Trey Songz, but he’s dialed in to love and love-making here in a way that he hasn’t been for some time. The album has 22 tracks-18 full songs and four interludes-most of which, aside from a few notable exceptions (“2020 Riots: How Many Times,” Songz’s response to the civil unrest that plagued the summer of 2020 in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor) are of the baby-making variety. “When I'm working on an album, when I'm not, when I'm in an album cycle-music is kind of my refuge.” The Virginia-originating R&B star says he recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 songs while working on Back Home, his eighth studio album.

“I never stop making music,” Trey Songz tells Apple Music. Trey Songz talks about what it means to go back home and how that fed into his eighth album.

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