7. Dee Dee BridgewaterJust Family

Her voice is amazing. She’s someone that’s had a lot of different eras, and I lean towards the 70s, funky era of everybody’s music. She was pregnant when she recorded this album, and the cover is this beautiful silhouette of her, with her big pregnant belly. When she talks about this album, she talks about how being pregnant physically changed her voice – there were notes that she had access to that she hadn’t before, because of where the baby was sitting, and the quality of her voice was different, and she wanted to capture that. On this album, Dee Dee is singing to the heavens, and she gets way up there in her vocal range and can just hang out there. And there’s some incredible covers on there: she just massacres Elton John’s ‘Sorry Seems To be The Hardest Word’, it’s so beautiful. And that title track is so sweet, like being at the cookout and naming all of the family members who are there. I have a 16-month-old, and everything I do now is about my kid, and how aware she was of the changes in her life as a result of being pregnant is something I feel very palpably right now.