walking upstream…
Ella Mai
sourcesWikipedia · Rolling Stone · TheThings · Vibe
Ella Mai Howell was born in London to a Jamaican mother and an English-Irish father, and named for her mother's favorite singer, Ella Fitzgerald; jazz shared the house with the Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott records her mother played on repeat, while her grandmother's church supplied her earliest vocal training. A teenage stretch in New York, where her mother took a teaching job, steeped her further in American R&B before she returned to London to study at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute. Her 2015 SoundCloud EP 'Troubled' caught DJ Mustard's ear, and he signed her to his 10 Summers label. The sleeper hit 'Boo'd Up,' tucked onto 2017's 'Ready' EP, became a surprise Billboard Hot 100 top-five smash and won the Grammy for Best R&B Song, launching her 2018 self-titled debut and, later, 'Heart on My Sleeve,' on which her onetime idol Mary J. Blige turned up to mentor her in kind.
the sound in question
2017
Boo'd UpElla Mai
walk the tributaries ↓
Mary J. Blige1990s · R&B / Hip hop soul / Soul
Mai's mother played Blige's music around the house from childhood on, and the admiration eventually became mutual mentorship: Blige appears in the spoken outros of 'Not Another Love Song' and 'Sink or Swim' on Mai's 'Heart on My Sleeve,' counseling her, as Mai put it, because 'there's nobody else I want to guide me if I'm speaking about love.' The hip-hop-soul blueprint Blige pioneered — sung confession set against a hard, sample-driven groove — is the chassis Mai's own diary-entry R&B runs on.
listen: upstream & heresource: HipHopDX ↗
1992
Real LoveMary J. Blige
2022
Sink Or SwimElla Mai
listen forPlay 'Real Love' next to 'Sink or Swim' — both ride a tough, mid-tempo boom-bap pocket under a vocal that stays conversational rather than showy, confession delivered like it's being said to a friend, not performed for an audience.
Lauryn Hill1990s · Hip hop soul / Neo soul / R&B / Reggae
Mai has said her mother 'always used to play The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill over and over and over again' in the house, and Rolling Stone likewise names Hill (alongside Missy Elliott) as one of the two artists her mother put on 'religiously' during her childhood. That record's mix of unguarded, journal-like lyricism with warm, live-feeling soul arrangements is the clearest template behind Mai's own plainspoken songs about vulnerability and self-acceptance.
listen: upstream & here
1998
Doo Wop (That Thing)Lauryn Hill
2018
NakedElla Mai
listen forSet 'Ex-Factor' beside 'Naked' — both let the lyric stay disarmingly literal about needing to be seen and accepted, over an arrangement that stays soft and unhurried rather than chasing a big pop hook.
Missy Elliott2000s · Hip hop / R&B / Neo soul
Rolling Stone's profile of Mai names Missy Elliott as the other artist her mother spun 'religiously' at home alongside Lauryn Hill, part of the innovative, hip-hop-inflected soul that shaped Mai before she'd written a song of her own. It surfaces less as a sonic copy than an appetite for playful, rhythmically loose vocal phrasing laid over a spare, hard-hitting beat — a lightness Elliott pioneered in R&B-adjacent hip-hop that Mai carries into her own hooks.
listen: upstream & here
2001
Get Ur Freak OnMissy Elliott
2018
WhatchamacallitElla Mai
listen forCompare 'Get Ur Freak On' with 'Whatchamacallit' — both ride a stripped-down, syncopated beat that leaves plenty of open space, with a vocal that plays with the rhythm in short, conversational bursts instead of long held notes.