Music
by Joss Stone (featuring Lauryn Hill)

Album: Introducing Joss Stone (2007)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is British soul artist Joss Stone's love letter to music. While people are unreliable and let you down, music is always there to support you through the bad times. "I really think that everybody goes through life looking for love in all the wrong places – in human beings," Stone elaborated in an interview MTV in 2006. "Unconditional love is impossible to get from a human being, but it's not impossible to get from music."
  • "Music" samples "The Mask" by the Fugees from their 1996 album The Score. The song also features a guest verse by the Fugees frontwoman Lauryn Hill. Hill is famously reclusive, but Stone managed to convince her to appear on "Music" after calling her mom every day. Stone reflected to Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Story Behind the Song in 2009: "I called her every two days, sometimes daily, for two months. I apologized but told her I wouldn't quit until I got a final 'yes' or 'no' from Lauryn. She said that Lauryn was busy and that she was interested. I prayed on it a lot and remained confident."

    "Time went by and by then I was in the studio recording. Everyone was still laughing at the idea that Lauryn would do this. I didn't want to hear negativity. One comment was, 'You have more of a chance of getting the Pope.' It only made me push harder. In the end, her mom gave me her manager's number and I got her to do it. She even did two different versions. I think she liked the concept."
  • In an interview with SPIN in 2022, Stone listed The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as one of the albums she can't live without. "That is an album I have played over and over and over again since long before I was a professional singer," Stone said. "I love the sound of the whole thing. I love her lyrics, I love her flow... and also she's a great singer... she's not just a great rapper or a great poet. And that album really shaped me as a music listener and then, essentially, shaped me as a music maker."

    Released in 1998, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is Hill's only solo album. A critically acclaimed opus, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill won five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. Consequently, it became the first hip-hop record to receive the prestigious honor.
  • Stone performs a reprise of this song at the end of Introducing Joss Stone. "Music (Outro)" has a runtime of 1:40. It's then followed by silence until 3:10, when a short hidden song starts featuring Stone and British actor Vinnie Jones.
  • Introducing Joss Stone is Stone's third album. She recorded most of it at Compass Point, the Bahamas recording studio where Australian rock legends AC/DC made Back in Black in 1980.

    Speaking to MTV, Stone explained the meaning behind the "Introducing" part of the album title: "I feel like it's really my album – like, I made it. I decided who to work with, and what songs to put on there. I wrote the songs. This is what I want to hear when I hear my album."

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