![]() ![]() The songs bore titles like “You Bring Me Joy” and “Same Ole Love (365 Days a Year),” tributes to the endurance of love and happiness, to the comfort of repetition when the things being repeated are shared warmth and tenderness. She returned with five compositions, adding three more she either co-wrote or wrote herself, all of which ended up forming a kind of album-length suite of affirmation. Baker wanted a whole album in this mode so the mood wouldn’t be disturbed by the more aggressive and mechanical pop-R&B productions that were in vogue at the time. In the mid-’80s, when Anita Baker was shopping for songs for her second album, she kept asking the publishing houses for “fireside love songs with jazz overtones”-in other words, quiet storm songs, songs that have fireplaces flickering inside of them. So even if you didn’t own a nice couch or a large bathtub, you could turn on the radio and settle into the swoon of the music itself, and find yourself drawn into a desire deep enough to seem closer to unconscious dreaming than physical reality. The format particularly excelled at simulating the slow-motion atmosphere of romance, a physical and mental connection so strong it could make the molecules in the air around it lag. This is the lifestyle of comfort and intimacy that the genre implicitly sold to its listeners, soul music one could sink into after a long day of work, like a couch or a bath or a steady long-term relationship. ![]() There is a haze of steam in the air, the sound of bathwater running in another room. Indoors, sealed away from the weather, someone sheds their coat and it forms a soft vortex on a bare wood floor. Play “ Choosey Lover” by the Isley Brothers or even Smokey Robinson’s original “ Quiet Storm.” Notice how the skies in those songs are bruised with dark purple clouds, thunder brewing inside them. Quiet storm, a Black radio format that developed in the late-’70s around pebble-smooth R&B balladry, is one of the rare subgenre names that suggests the ideal context for itself. Today we revisit Anita Baker’s timeless 1986 album, a slow-burning and symphonic piece of quiet storm R&B that floods every sense. Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. ![]()
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