BOY SODA is not someone to do things by halves. When it came time to bring his neo-soul-jazz-funk-and-R&B-inspired debut album to life, the artist born Brae Luafalealo gathered an ensemble of musicians including a three-part horn section, string quartet, backing vocalists, live piano, drums, congas, and lap steel guitar. The result is a richly realized musical endeavor that collects influences such as J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and early-2000s R&B and combines them into what BOY SODA calls the “SOULSTAR parameters.” “It’s dynamics, it’s musicality, it’s expression at all costs,” he tells Apple Music. That last component was the dominant force in Luafalealo’s lyric writing and his determination to interrogate various elements of life, such as his relationship with his father and Samoan heritage (“A Father’s Heart”), the passing of a loved one (“SELFISH”), his issues with negative self-talk (“My Body”), and the end of a key romantic relationship (“Lil’ Obsession,” “Find a Way”). So driven was he to explore these issues with “brutal honesty” that recording tracks such as “Never the Same” and “SELFISH” brought him to tears. “There was a lot of emotional growth that happened in the process of making [the album],” he offers. “The questions that I wasn’t able to answer at the start of it, maybe I’m able to answer now because I went through the process.” Here, the Central-Coast-raised Luafalealo opens up on the experiences that informed SOULSTAR, track by track. “My Body” “I started that song feeling not very good. I wasn’t giving myself a lot of self-respect. I pride myself on treating other people with respect, and then I see the way I talk to myself and my body and I would never, ever communicate with someone like that. So it’s like, ‘Where is your self-respect?’” “Lil’ Obsession” “The whole album is born off just me feeling better after a bad breakup and everything that comes with that. Those eras of your life where you need to rebuild things or redefine what the pillars of yourself are. I just didn’t feel like I had a backbone, and ‘Lil’ Obsession’ was a great way for me to process that initial kind of butterfly event, or whatever they call it. It’s the beautiful reason that a lot of the music that came after it, i.e. the album, happened. It’s essentially me saying, ‘I don’t want anything to do with you.’ But the irony is, [I’m] probably a bit obsessed with the situation if [I’m] writing a whole song about it.” “Hit the Road!” “I just wanted the swing and the playfulness and the experimentation of tone that I love from artists like Erykah Badu or Smino or André 3K. That’s very G-funk inspired, bringing it into that land where the drums are shuffled in the way that all the Dilla, Badu stuff is shuffled. That one’s less serious. That’s just being in love with people in different area codes or whatever. But don’t play with me. I will come to your city!” “Never the Same” “It just felt like exactly what I wanted to say at the time. It’s born from a place of devastation. It was that fear after you go through something bad and you’re like, ‘I’m never going to be the same again.’ That feels like such a horrible, sad thing. Then, as you come to terms with things, and things change as they are supposed to, your lens of that is actually like, ‘Thank goodness things will never be the same.’” “A Father’s Heart” “I’ve always been a big admirer of my father. [He came] from an environment where the easy option was not to be a beautiful, gentle, emotionally regulated man. But he is. The closer I got to being an adult, the more I understood how incredible that was, and how much of a service that was to himself, but also to my family. Also, I’m 27, and I don’t know a lot of Samoan language. I want to be able to teach my kids that and be very intertwined with the culture. So it was an important song to acknowledge that my father’s a cycle-breaker. And for that reason, it’s my responsibility to pick up the torch and reintegrate that into my life.” “4K” (feat. Dean Brady) “That’s such an indicative song of the culture and community I’ve found in Sydney of live, jazzy, musical people. Just being able to make that song in Croydon where we live, and it come out and feel very D’Angelo-esque. To have the looseness in the harmonies of that era of music that we love and listen to all the time was really nice, and it just happened naturally.” “Blink Twice” “How much of the information that I see in the day is curated by other people? I’m really trying to manage that and see things that are inspiring, or not see things that are negative. Obviously, I want to know what’s going on in the world, but there’s a lot of things that just aren’t real on the internet. It’s really a song about championing self-thought and discernment over the things that we think. It’s like, ‘How many of our thoughts are actually our thoughts? Or how many of them are just a quote from that podcast and a quote from that video?’” “Good Morning” “Our reference was like a Jamie Foxx/Ludacris song, ‘Unpredictable.’ And like the end of ‘Heard ’Em Say’ by Kanye and Adam Levine. I was like, ‘We just have to imagine we’re on a balcony in Paris. We’re waking up, smells like cigarettes and coffee and like a bakery downstairs. And you’re waking up with the love of your life.’ What does that song feel like when you wake up in that little apartment and you pop the Venetian blinds and you look out onto the bustling street?” “PM” “I wanted this song to feel industrial and as dirty as possible without just being dirty for dirty’s sake. And I guess the notion of the song is just convenient relationships. Like, ‘We only see each other in the nighttime, but we don’t go on day dates. How convenient that I only am available at nighttime.’ And the lyric is like, ‘Baby, don’t confide in me, hit you in the PM.’ I feel like there was an era of my life where I was just approaching things with that casual [attitude]. And it’s something I wanted to talk about. But the song is also a way of saying I don’t respect this mindset at all.” “SLIPPERY” “That’s meant to be like the sexy, avant-garde babymaker; my version of all the 2000s songs I grew up on, if it was like USHER or Ne-Yo or Lloyd, or anyone that’s screaming in the rain about something. ‘SLIPPERY’ is a SOULSTYLE version of that.” “Find a Way” “That was the predecessor emotionally to ‘Lil’ Obsession,’ If ‘Lil’ Obsession’ was a bit like, ‘Please don’t talk to me,’ ‘Find a Way’ was like, ‘I want me to have my path and I want you to have your path and I want us both to find our ways.’ Similar industrial vibes to ‘PM’ on that song. That was an emotional one, too.” “SELFISH” “I made that in London. And my auntie had been diagnosed with cancer the night before. So being able to write that song, and capture that essence of, I know there’s peace and release for you on the other side of this. You’re going through a crazy thing. I want to write a song about how that makes me feel. It’s selfish for me to want you to stay, selfish for me to talk about how I feel. Even though it’s an emotional problem for me, it’s a real-life physical problem for you.’ It’ll forever be one of the most important songs I’ve ever written.” “Platonic & Sacred” “A lot of my closest friends are women. It’s a beautiful thing I wanted to write about. And I hear a lot of dialogue about, ‘No, you can’t have girlfriends outside of your relationship, or you can’t be friends with the same sex as your partner.’ It feels stupid to block those relationships from our life. They’re so important. You learn so much about yourself through important platonic relationships and not denying them. It was the perfect way to close the album, talking about things in such a beautiful way and leaving the project on a lovely note.”