Yaya Bey had grown weary of reading about her own grief. After a few album cycles defined by it—familial, ancestral, societal—the R&B singer and songwriter began to suspect her “grief” had become a cartoon thought bubble above her head: Everyone could see it, but it lived outside of her. Bey writes about these feelings eloquently in a lovely essay that she penned to accompany Fidelity , her latest album. “Grief became the ethos of my work and I couldn’t escape that perception of me,” she writes. “My grief went from human to specifically Black and tasty on the lips of outsiders.” And yet, I confess I have never once in my life listened to Yaya Bey’s vital, warm, familiar, and fondly lustful music and meditated on grief. I put on Bey’s music, I suspect, for the reason many do: to feel the comforting presence of Bey herself, who feels like a friend at this point, one whose murmured personal jokes I am lucky enough to catch if I stay within earshot.…