“When I'm in the studio and try to make a record, I have to feel it that day,” Roy Woods tells Apple Music. “And if I don't feel it, I'm just not doing it. But sometimes, I'll make three different songs one day, because that's just how I feel. I'm never just feeling one way.” Arriving six years after its predecessor, Woods’ third album, Mixed Emotions, is a mammoth 17-track rollercoaster of an album that sticks to his chosen lane—moody yet melodic trap-slapped R&B—but takes you on an epic dramatic journey through the drunken debauchery, perpetual romantic trouble and clear-eyed maturation that have marked his evolution from teenage OVO Sound prodigy to 27-year-old pop idol juggling the demands of stardom and new fatherhood. “All the songs that I put together all tell a story—about my childhood, about my family, about love,” Woods says. “That's why this album is called Mixed Emotions: When you just keep the first two letters of Mixed Emotions and take away all the rest, it ends up being ME. That's really what I want everybody to take away from this: I'm putting all of myself on this album. I'm letting you guys know what I hate about myself and what I love about myself and all the shit I went through.” Here, Woods reveals the backstories to some of Mixed Emotions’ most intensely autobiographical tracks. “Made Mistakes” “When I was dropping my earlier projects, I was just a lost kid, right? Since then, everything has changed: My life has changed, I've changed. So this song is really me coming clean with myself, and letting my fans see that. I've accepted all these things about myself, and I just want to let them know I'm not perfect. I'm a fucked-up guy too. I make my mistakes. I have my flaws.” “Young Boy Problems” “There are two halves of me in this song, where I'm stuck in between two levels: I'm ready to grow up and I'm ready to change and I want to accept all these things about my life, but I'm still a young boy, and I'm still trying to get rid of all those habits that I created from me living fast and living dangerously. All these feelings that I'm feeling right now are amazing, and it makes me feel like this is the age I'm supposed to be living at now. But I still want to be young and live fast and free. So I'm just torn between the two.” “Don’t Love Me” “‘Don’t Love Me’ and ‘Young Boy Problems’ and ‘Test What I Know’ are all connected. This one started the little trilogy. I was in this situation where I was so over the top about this girl, and everything felt right…but everything felt right at the wrong moment. It’s like: ‘I want to go fast, you want to go slow, and I would love to go slow too, but I can't right now because my life is just so fast-moving. Committing to you is going to take a lot of time, right?’ So in the song I'm saying, ‘We could just be cool, and whatever will be will be—but I don't want love right now.’ So I just had to be really straight up about it, because I care about shawty—I don't really want to hurt her.” “Test What I Know” “This one is saying: We tried it out, and it didn't work. I felt my pain, she felt hers, and I felt it tenfold just knowing how she felt. It destroyed me. I didn't even know what to do with myself. I tried moving on, only for her to come back to me, full circle. So this is about me going through the motions of feeling hurt and feeling separated from something that I love, and I didn't really know that I would cherish [what I lost] so fast.” “Insecure”/“Bad Bad” “‘Insecure’ and ‘Bad Bad’ are one and the same. They're about a whole different story where I was still a young boy, wanting to change my life but not really taking the steps yet. And I felt so empty inside, I felt numb for a lot of things. So I had this girl come into my life, and she was the complete opposite of what I normally see in my life: She was a good girl, and it was very refreshing to have that feeling. I soaked it all up, I soaked up all her energy, and it helped me to grow and let me start really working on myself. It opened up a whole bunch of doors that I closed for years. These songs are about just allowing myself to be vulnerable, be open and feel love.” “Don’t Mind Me” “‘Don't Mind Me' is about a situation that I'd never been in before, and I really needed to figure out a way I could let it out and speak about it. So I figured I'd just be as raw as shit with it and not sugar-coat anything. I actually wrote this song years ago, pre-COVID. I brought the song idea to [producer] 40—he took the hook and I rewrote my verses from a new approach. It was a completely different idea before, but 40 helped me bring it alive in a different way that I didn't expect at all.” “I Just Wanna Love” “I had my daughter recently—she wasn't even a year old yet when I wrote this. Me and my baby mother were just kind of going through it, because I've known her since high school and she's still super in love with me but I had been falling out of love for years now. So this song is me really telling her that I'm ready to move on and do my own thing now, and I have to stop doing what I'm doing to lead her on. We're good co-parents, we're good friends, but not lovers, and I wanted her to really know that. Like, this is how our life is going to be—we're not going back to how you think it might go. So I just wanted to say, ‘I'm done, let's move on, and let's continue moving forward with our lives.’”