Jupiter
Nao released her debut album, 2016’s *For All We Know*, to universal acclaim, but it was her 2018 follow-up effort, *Saturn*, that saw the stars truly align for the Nottingham-born, East London-raised singer-songwriter. Drawing inspiration from the tumult of her first Saturn return—a concept astrologers explain as a transitional life stage that recurs every 27 years or so—the record was a Mercury Prize- and Grammy Award-nominated triumph. *Jupiter*, the de facto sequel to *Saturn*, picks up with Nao seven years, two children, and one life-changing diagnosis later. Much has changed. “When I wrote *Saturn* I was in my Saturn return and going through a difficult time because I had gone through a breakup, and then I got an autoimmune condition called chronic fatigue syndrome,” she tells Apple Music. “I became a mother in that time, so that seven- or eight-year period was really difficult because I was ill for most of it. I went on a big healing journey and mostly recovered. And I felt like when I came to make this album and I saw that Jupiter was the planet of joy, growth, and good fortune, I was like, ‘You know what? I feel like after everything I’ve been through and come out the other end, I feel like Jupiter is the perfect way to symbolize that.’ So it is the sister album to *Saturn*, I would say.” Nao first felt the “itch” to get back in the studio two years after the release of her third album, *And Then Life Was Beautiful* (2021). By her own admission, “the tunes were basically not very good,” and it took another year for her to find her rhythm again. “I was just out of practice,” she says. “I didn’t know what the theme was when I started writing, but I knew I was ready to start trying. That’s a really important part of creativity—you don’t need to have the full plan, you just follow your ideas through and see what happens, and usually it all falls into place. Once the engine got going, all these records were written in quite a short space of time.” *Jupiter* may owe its thematic identity to the cosmos, but the radiant, sun-drenched energy infused in every beat and harmony comes from a purely terrestrial source. “I was recovering from my autoimmune condition when this record finally started coming together, and being in the sun was a really important part of that,” Nao says. “I moved to LA with my partner and my kids for six months, and I ended up doing a lot of the work there. I created the vibe with LOXE and Stint, who I’ve worked with before on all my previous records, and I would just invite musicians and songwriters to come in throughout the days.” Weaving those cohesive threads into contributions from a host of new collaborators—among them Toby Gad, the songwriter behind hits for superstars including Beyoncé and John Legend—has resulted in Nao’s most self-assured body of work to date. Effervescent pop songs like “Happy People” and the cool, sparkling groove of “Poolside” blend seamlessly with the open-hearted lyricism of “30 Something” or the exquisitely minimal balladry of “Light Years.” Even “Elevate,” which leans more towards the neo-soul/R&B soundscape of previous records, has been spiked with something fresh—an electrifying guitar solo that marks the track as a highlight in an album packed full of them. The unifying factor tying this “eclectic, but consistent” package together, of course, is Jupiter itself. As Nao explains: “\[I want\] this album to find anybody that wants hope at the end of struggle. Something really cool about Jupiter is that it’s usually the planet you can see when you look up to the moon—it’s visible, so it’s always kind of hovering around us. I like the idea that we can just look up and know that good things are quite close by—we just have to keep going.” **“Wildflowers”** “I sort of imagined the program *Euphoria* when I was creating ‘Wildflowers.’ It’s this ode to time running out and fuck it, let’s just live. Let’s fall in love 100% and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t, but we lived life fully and we loved deeply. There’s this idea that we’re always getting older and older and it’s so important to be present and to live 100% of every day. We touched briefly on anxiety as well—I feel like it’s come on in the last few years, I’ve never had it before. Definitely something I need to spend time working through, but I don’t believe I’ll have it forever. And I think that idea is also a way of helping me get out of my head a little bit and stop overthinking things, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to.” **“Elevate”** “This was written from a place similar to ‘Wildflowers.’ That moment where you do find someone and you fall in love and the rush of that early stage of a relationship when everything’s just amazing and even basic tasks, just like walking to the shop, feel so much fun. It does feel like a bit of a drug or whatever, and I know that that stage wears off for a lot of us, but it’s just trying to capture that moment in a song.” **“Happy People”** “‘Happy People’ is about finding your tribe, no matter how small it is. I think that when you get older you kind of shed a lot of things: friends or community or family that you don’t necessarily connect with anymore. The kind of people that are in my tribe are quite eccentric personalities. I feel like if I was to put them all together in the room, it would be like, ‘What is going on here?’ But they are friends that feel like family to me. My social world is quite small, and just finding contentment in that—it might be small, but it’s meaningful.” **“Light Years”** “I wrote ‘Light Years’ and I was like, ‘Oh, it feels like a really beautiful song. It feels really reminiscent of another lifetime or like an orbit.’ That was the moment where I was like, ‘I love this song. I think it’s fantastic.’ It’s this big song about love and meeting someone and knowing that you would wait for them in any realm, in any time and place. And obviously it’s got this nod to space within the song—that led me to Jupiter, which is where I found the concept and the theme. That was the real beginning of the album.” **“We All Win”** “If ‘Happy People’ is about finding your tribe, ‘We All Win’ is also about trying to bring each other up as well. How can we help and do things for each other that mean something? It’s this idea that if I win, you win too, so it’s about bringing each other up, leaving no one behind. A lot of my friends are musicians, so I feel like when someone’s making it, you feel a sense of guilt. I felt almost uncomfortable with making it, and I felt like a way of combatting that is to include people.” **“Poolside”** “This is supposed to be pure joy. Just pure fun. It’s probably the most pop-sounding record I’ve ever done. I studied jazz for four years and the culture of that was anti anything commercial, so I think I carried that with me for quite a long time. But I love commercial music. When I started ‘Poolside,’ it wasn’t my intention for it to come out that way, but it did, and I made peace with it and I was like, ‘This is kind of fire, actually.’ So in the spirit of Jupiter and joy, ‘Poolside’ made it on the record because that’s what I feel it brings.” **“30 Something”** “Coming into my thirties and not being well for a lot of it was an interesting transition. I love this song because I feel like it’s telling the story really clearly. And obviously before I was 30, I was healthy and well and living life in a way that I could absolutely do, so there was this nostalgia of holding on to being in my twenties or younger. This song is about acceptance of where I am at the moment and making peace with that… and I think I’ve definitely got there.” **“Just Dive”** “I’m in a place where I’m working on trying to find as much joy in everything that I’m doing, so ‘Just Dive’ is about taking a risk, taking the plunge, doing things in life that scare you, but doing it anyway. It’s a promise to myself in the future. I’d like to take a year out to travel with my kids. I know that might not sound risky, but I do rely a lot on \[my\] community to help me, especially with my health condition, so going at it, just my kids and my partner for a year, with no community, that’s risky for me. It sounds so small, but I\'m hoping just to do it anyway.” **“Jupiter”** “Perhaps ‘Jupiter’ has a similar message to ‘Elevate’: Finding someone that you love and who loves you and feeling like it’s taking you to another ether, and you want to stay there and not come down from it… but we always do.” **“All Of Me”** “Every album needs a sexy number. A late-night number. ‘All Of Me’ is that song. Once you hear the chorus and the bassline come together and it invokes that particular mood, you can’t help but go with it. It could be this deeply sad, heartbreaking song, it doesn’t matter who’s in the room, if the song calls for that, I’m happy to explore it. So it’s the same for a sexy number as well—if the song calls for it, I’m happy to go there.” **“Better Days”** “For me, ‘Better Days’ is a song about someone that I was close to or that I have a fractured relationship with. The chorus says it all—that I’m just waiting for a better day when it’s not so fractious and things settle themselves. I’m sure a lot of listeners can relate to that. I rarely imagine that people don’t have a fractious relationship with a sibling or a father or a cousin or a friend, but at least want it to be better. So it’s a hopeful song that this relationship can finally heal at some point.”
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