Coco Jones is here to “modernize” R&B

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Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

Coco Jones recently released the new single “Here We Go (Uh Oh),” and she hopes her R&B sound reaches all types of audiences.  

“I think what people are really looking for is songs that inspire a feeling,” she tells NME in a new interview. “Songs that have some sense of urgency, and it’s in the genre of R&B but it’s really this feeling thing that people are looking for mainly.” 

She adds, “I’m just doing the things that make me feel something, that’ll relate to whoever the right audience is.”

Coco’s family helped develop her love of R&B music. “I think what draws me to R&B is familiarity and relatability,” she explains. “I feel like whatever music you’re raised on, you naturally gravitate more towards – R&B feels like home to me.”

“R&B has so much cultural impact in Black American culture, and [other genres like] soul is Black history – so a lot of why I like it is because I’m a Black woman and it’s my history,” she adds.

But as much as Coco grew up on R&B, she’s setting out to change things up and put her own stamp on it.

“I just want to outdo everything I’ve already done, and experiment with new sounds,” she says. “R&B is more of a patience game, whereas something like pop could be a trend overnight. With R&B, it’s like a seed that needs to sprout and then grow. I want to modernize R&B.”

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