"I'm not saying that pain doesn't exist no more in our life," says Mary J. Blige in
the spoken intro to her 10th studio album. "But now we know how to navigate it." Navigating pain has always been her subject. On this sequel to 1994's My Life, Blige is, as usual, a voyager on storm-tossed emotional seas, swinging from bliss to anguish and back again. My Life II is packed with guest stars (Drake, Beyoncé) and top producers (Danja, Rico Love). But Blige is admirably unfashionable, staying in her sweet spot of midtempo hip-hop soul. After all these years, she can still make pain pleasurable.

Listen to "Feel Inside":  

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“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.