Pop Music - Too Cool?

The breeziness of Miguel.

- Hua Hsu

Sex, a cup of coffee the morning after, a quality bag of weed: as the thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles R. & B. singer Miguel puts it, in a single from 2014, it is the “simple-things” that make life worthwhile. Miguel has made a career out of finding creative ways to render small pleasures in sound. But, unlike many of his colleagues in the sex-anthem industry, there’s a quality to his freakiness that feels bounded, almost safe. There are limits to yearning for its own sake. He sings with a teasing and flirty confidence, yet there’s always a sense of calm and self-control. Where others treat sex as conquest, he plays the part of the dutiful full-service lover. Indeed, he somehow managed to make a song called “The Pussy Is Mine,” from “Kaleidoscope Dream” (2012), sound gentle and soulful, and not at all grabby.

There’s been a steady push and pull to Miguel’s career. When his début album, “All I Want Is You,” was released, in 2010, after a legal dispute between his record label and production company had kept it shelved for two years, it seemed reasonable to believe that he might never find the audience that his talents merited. The record was stylistically promiscuous, full of R. & B. songs that borrowed from alternative rock and electronic music, all of it lunging for some kind of distant, post-genre future. “Kaleidoscope Dream” was a more grounded affair, as Miguel grew more literal about the earthiness of his desires. The album was driven by the single “Adorn,” which sounds like a slightly hurried take on Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” shorn of Gaye’s neediness. His last album, “Wildheart,” from 2015, experimented with structure, trading in catchy hooks for lavish, psychedelic sounds.