“I just want you raw,” Toronto R&B singer LOONY sang on her 2021 single “raw,” a sweet neo-soul serenade about waking up next to your partner and savoring that intimate moment of seeing one another in your most vulnerable, unkempt states. But that line also serves as LOONY’s mission statement for her Apple Home Music Session. In its original form, “raw” was already a fairly minimalist track, with LOONY’s softly spoken pillow talk resting comfortably atop a bed track of handclaps, snare-rim taps, and bluesy guitar licks. Her Home Session version takes it right down to the bone, heightening the contrast between LOONY’s silken voice and the natural grit in the main guitar line. But even as it swaps out its steady backbeat for the whirr of maracas, the song retains its essential rhythmic thrust. “I think I realized what an innate groove ‘raw’ has,” LOONY tells Apple Music of the recording experience. “Even with everything stripped, it still lends itself to being something you can’t help but bop to in a certain way.” By contrast, LOONY's 2022 release “First Thing Smokin’” was a more sumptuous production steeped in butter-melting harmonies and warm organ tones, but, for LOONY, the aching acoustic rendition featured here serves as a reminder that “the song is really about the vocal melody and story it tells.” Never one to hide her retro-soul affinities, LOONY closes out her Apple Music Home Session with a gender-flipped revision of Bill Withers’ 1971 standard, “Ain’t No Sunshine”—but instead of simply stripping things down, she builds from the ground up, transforming a tense acoustic confessional into a dramatic cinematic set piece in under two minutes. “‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ is such a wistful song, and something about doing my own version unlocked another darker element of it for me, especially as it grows,” she says. "There’s a bite to it, an edge that I didn’t really notice until I was doing it myself.” It just goes to show that, even when LOONY is gesturing toward something epic and classic, she can’t help but keep it raw.