R&B innovator Miguel Pimentel is the kind of guy who’ll tell you he feels “vulnerable” even when he sings lyrics like, “I wanna fuck you like we’re filming in the Valley.”
The lyrics are from “The Valley,” the most sexually upfront song on the Grammy winner’s newest album, Wildheart. “I’m your pimp, I’m your pope, I’m your pastor, baby / Confess your sins to me while you masturbate,” he pleads elsewhere on the track, low and soft, inviting you into bed. Before you know it, he’s breaking carnality down to its purest, most primal parts: “I’m talking lips, tits, clit, slit, lips, tits, clit, slit,” he sings.
Sex oozes this way off nearly every track on the album—and from most of its surrounding imagery as well. It’s there in this Wildheart-themed promo image of the singer, eyes closed and jeans ripped at the crotch, daring us to tilt our heads and peek inside.
It’s in the album’s cover art, in which Miguel gazes imperiously at us from the heavens, his hands pressed firmly onto the torso of a naked woman bent across his lap. (The image represents “empowerment” and “mastery of your aspirations,” says the Artist Most Frequently Compared to Prince.)
And of course, it’s in songs like “The Valley,” an ode to Miguel’s beloved hometown, Los Angeles, and the porn industry headquartered some 20 miles away in the San Fernando Valley. “I grew up here, I love porn. Who doesn’t like porn? Hooray for porn!” the 29-year-old laughs over the phone from L.A.
He adds that the song “gives you a sense of where I’m from, what I know about where I’m from, and how aggressive I can be … I suppose.” Miguel, all quiet, Zen-like confidence over the phone, suddenly seems hesitant. “In certain situations. I don’t know. Does that make sense?”
Aggressive in what situations? I ask, though I think I already know the answer.
“I mean, obviously, sexually,” he replies.
Obviously.
Miguel’s velvet-voiced sex appeal is what got him noticed at the Grammy Awards two years ago, after an electrifying performance of “Adorn,” the lead single off his critically acclaimed breakthrough record, Kaleidoscope Dream. The falsetto-flaunting number prompted a hot and bothered Kelly Clarkson to blurt out onstage, “Miguel, I don’t know who the hell you are, but we need to sing together. I mean, good God. That was the sexiest damn thing I’ve ever seen.” (That dream duet never happened, but the Elusive Chanteuse herself, Mariah Carey, snatched Miguel up a few months later for her hashtag-ready single, “#Beautiful.”)
While 2013 was undoubtedly Miguel’s breakthrough year—along with contemporaries like Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, he helped bring alternative R&B out of “Trend of the Year” territory and into the mainstream—he acknowledges moments that played out “maybe not in the most ideal way.”
He got arrested for driving under the influence (he later pled no contest) and became a living Internet meme after accidentally dropkicking two fans at that year’s Billboard Music Awards. The ill-timed stage dive came back to haunt him last month, when one of the two fans, Cindy Tsai, filed a lawsuit against the singer for medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering.
When I ask him about the timing of the lawsuit, two years after the fall, Miguel pauses for a long time. “Honestly, I don’t even know if it’s even worth addressing,” he finally says. “I think it’s pretty obvious to the average person what the intention [behind the lawsuit] is, you know? I mean, you said it. Two years after the fact? Right after I drop my first single for an album? Like, what is their intention?”
“People are stupid,” he mutters in conclusion.
Miguel’s desire to leave the past behind—or at least, to never settle for doing the same thing twice—crops up again and again in our discussion of Wildheart, an atmospheric collection of personal meditations on drugs, seduction, identity, and L.A. The album colors confidently outside the lines, veering from psychedelic funk to west coast gangster rap to electro-pop and everywhere in between.
Wildheart’s lead single, “Coffee,” is easily the album’s most romantic moment—a glowing ode to pillow talk and morning-after sex (featuring a Fifty Shades-referencing Wale). “Old souls, we found a new religion / Now I’m swimming in that sin, baptism / Peach-colored skies we feel the sunrise / Two lost angels discover salvation / Don’t you wish we could run away now?” Miguel sings.
But while radio-destined, slow-burn pop jam “Adorn” may have won him a Grammy, Miguel’s not aiming for another Kaleidoscope Dream here. “I’m an evolving person,” he says. “The music should and will represent that.”
That includes “evolving” past conventions of genre. “I don’t feel the need to conform to people’s expectations of what I should or should not create. Like this idea of ‘genre,’” Miguel continues. “Genres are made for businesses, so people can go, ‘This is where the person that likes this can find it.’ That’s what genres are for.”
How to Be a Wildheart 101: no dwelling on the past and no identity checkboxes required, musical or otherwise. The lesson crystallizes in “What’s Normal Anyway,” when Miguel, whose father is Mexican and mother is African-American, sings, “Too proper for the black kids, too black for the Mexicans / Too square to be a hood nigga, what’s normal anyway?”
“Growing up and always being reminded that I was different was a challenging thing to really navigate,” Miguel says. “In school, you take standardized tests and they ask you, after you fill in your name, the next thing is: Are you Caucasian? Are you African-American? Are you Hispanic? Blah, blah, blah. I didn’t have a box. There was no box for me.”
But Wildhearts always look on the bright side: “It’s kind of perfect because I don’t feel that way now,” he says. “All the better.”