This Record Changed My Life – Miguel

It will probably be really weird or unexpected to hear but two albums – the first N.E.R.D album, the live version [In Search Of…] and Robin Thicke’s debut album [A Beautiful World] – completely changed everything for me.

I didn’t hear the original N.E.R.D album, I started with the live version. [The group re-released the record a year after its debut with a live band replacing the electronic backing. This is the version that broke through.] I had to be like 17 or 18, it was everything that I had been trying to be.

My father was this huge classic rock fan and his musical appetite, he was very veracious when it came to music, that became a part of my upbringing: to be open minded and to always be absorbing. So I knew rock ’n’ roll, or what we know rock ’n’ roll to be now, inspired me – no-one was doing it. I was trying to explain it to people and I wasn’t producing at the time and they just wouldn’t do it. Like were like, “What are you talking about?’

It was my way of starting to produce my own songs and really start to choose my own path creatively. And then that Robin Thicke album came out not long after that and I’ll never forget that first single he dropped: When I Get You Alone with Walter Murphy’s Beethoven symphony, it was soulful but it was progressive. It was rock ’n’ roll but it was still R’n’B.