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Ne-Yo is going back to his roots. The crooner is looking to give his fans R&B-based material on on his next album, which will serve as the follow-up to 2012’s R.E.D.
“As of right this second my main focus is my new album,” he tells Billboard. “It’ll be out probably towards the summertime, predominately R&B this time.”
So why the switch? Ne-Yo reveals, “I had a little stint with the dance music and all of that, which I had a good time with — and I love the audience, I love them for accepting me doing it — but I had to go home on this one. Had to take it back to my roots, and not to say that there won’t be one, maybe two songs on there that the dance crowd can get into, but the majority, the girth of the album, will be R&B.”
Despite the success of his pop tracks like “Let Me Love You,” which peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100, Ne-Yo says that he’s wanted to return to his R&B roots for “two albums now.”
“There wasn’t a lot of R&B cats doing songs at 120 beats per minute before ‘Closer,’ which I take full credit and responsibility for,” he says. “That’s all good, but it was an experiment. You experiment with something, if it goes good, cool, but you never forget where you come from and R&B is where I come from.”
The crooner treated his fans to a three-song EP, titled 3 Simple Rules, on Valentine’s Day.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio
