Tarrey Torae is a singer, songwriter, and a six-time “Showtime at the Apollo” winner known for her work on Grammy-winning albums with John Legend and Ye West, and Grammy-nominated albums with J. Ivy. She has also toured with Talib Kweli, Common, J. Ivy and The Roots.
Torae talked to rolling out about her album, Catching Feelings, and what it means to her, and what the younger generation should be looking for when it comes to love.
How did you come up with the title, Catching Feelings?
Catching Feelings for me was something that I thought we should be catching a whole lot more of these days. I thought we need more love and why don’t we catch some of that? It was a great flip on what it actually really means. I think it’s a good thing to catch feelings for somebody you love [or] with someone that you could potentially build a life with, or somebody you can have a good season or good chapter with, so I thought the love songs would would be a good complement to that.
What will people experience when they listen to this album?
I think catching feelings is an idea. It is a concept of love, and I wanted to try to achieve that myself. It’s almost like a note to self like, this is where I want to go. I literally need to remind myself that love is an action. It’s a verb of loving someone and learning someone, getting the imperfections and the perfection all in one breath, but still achieving this ultimate space of love is what I thought the album should inspire. So I got some inspiration and I felt like they needed a soundtrack. Also, with the way the state of R&B is, there’s a lot of beautiful artists out here and I wanted to contribute to that atmosphere to where love songs took us places without telling us where they were taking us.
What would you say to young Black couples who are looking for love?
I would say to them, you’re looking for perfection, but you got to look for the imperfection, and figure out who you want to do that imperfection with for the rest of your life, instead of doing it the opposite way. I think the opposite way is too cookie-cutter and has too much fantasy attached to it. I think love is a very gangster thing to do. It’s not an easy decision to decide to love. It’s a responsibility that we all deserve. It’s a beautiful gift. The younger generation deserves to have that old-fashioned, soulful, moving love. I gave my life to music and on the career side, I asked God to put me where I was happiest so that I could serve the world properly with a smile, and I wanted to give something that would move people’s souls.
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