After telling all on his juicy 2004 disc “Confessions,” Usher is all about settling down on “Here I Stand,” due this week via Jive. Here, the new husband and father embraces his maturation on cuts like the Dre and Vidal-crafted title track. “You ain’t a man until you a man to your woman,” he says. “This is the conversation that takes place.”
Alongside ballads “Moving Mountains” and “Love You Gently” (“the ultimate love-making record”) are tracks on the lighter side. The Will.i.am-crafted “What’s Your Name?” describes “the feeling you get when you run into a woman that makes you speak gibberish,” while the Bryan-Michael Cox creation “Before I Met You” revolves around “a modern-day gigolo [who] decides to change.”
Since the release of “Confessions,” the music business has taken a big hit. Though file-sharing is largely blamed for the downturn, Usher also cites a lack of quality material. “This industry is not producing an awful lot of substance-filled records,” he says. “You’ll get a Justin, a Kanye West, a Jay-Z that’ll come out with a banging album, or a Chris Brown, but every so often you need to have a big monster like Alicia Keys or somebody like that. So [Jive] was like, ‘We got to get you back in.’ And I wanted to.”
Amid all the business and non-music distractions of the past two years, Usher kept creating new material in his home studio in Atlanta. Early last year, he reconnected with longtime collaborator Jermaine Dupri, who co-produced several “Confessions” tracks, including “Burn” and “Confessions Part II.” “The most important part to me is to make sure that I’m always creating something new, giving you a new sound,” Usher says. “That’s why I work with Jermaine Dupri before I work with anybody else. And I put emphasis on making sure that this album was more musical than anything, because I wanted it to step outside the norm.”
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