Leslie Odom Jr. could’ve played it safe. After all, he won a Tony and a Grammy for reinventing Aaron Burr as Broadway’s suavest revolutionary in Hamilton. Then he made a jazz record, dropped a Christmas album, sang with symphonies—and probably could’ve coasted forever as the most versatile dinner guest in New York. Instead, he decided to write a whole album from scratch and call it Mr. Because sure, why not create something “incredibly personal” with a 15-person writing camp and drop a Sidney Poitier quote in the middle of it for dramatic effect?
“This one, it was just… yeah. A lot of these songs started as journal entries,” he tells me. “So they were incredibly personal—and I didn’t make it alone.” Cue Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’s glorified tech-yoga retreat for creatives. Odom gathered a crew of writers to help make sense of his voice memos and diary scraps. “I really needed help organizing my thoughts,” he admits. “I didn’t want to just put out singles—I wanted a single work. A piece of work.”
What came out the other end is Mr., a sleek, stylish, genre-jumping record that aims for Nat King Cole if he were alive in the streaming age and forced to share a playlist with SZA. “When I signed my record deal, I said I wanted to make the kind of music Nat King Cole might make today,” he says, immediately questioning if that came through. It did. The opening track, “Stronger Magic,” starts with the plush velvet of a jazz lounge before flipping into something that sounds like a Pharrell party beat.
“That song is the thesis,” Odom says. “If you make it to the end of that tune, all bets are off. Everything that follows makes sense.”
He's not wrong. The album dances through throwback hooks, smooth orchestration, a little Cab Calloway nod on “Go Crazy,” and then lands right in the middle of something heavier. The track “Standards” kicks off with that quote from In the Heat of the Night—“They call me Mr. Tibbs”—and it doesn’t feel ornamental. “That one was essential,” he says. “Everybody knows that quote. So when it hits, you sort of understand you’re about to hear something more poignant.”
That theme—what it means to be a “Mr.” in America, to take up space, to have something to say and a way to say it—echoes through the record like reverb. “Once the title came to me, I started to explore what that might mean to me,” he says. “I just started finding all these connections—and questions, really.”
Around the same time, Odom was filming Harriet, playing abolitionist William Still. And oh yeah, also shooting the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark, which takes place during the Newark riots. Art imitating life? Or just life barging in with a script?
“You sort of call certain things into your life when you’re ready to,” he says. “I had a kid, and suddenly people started offering me dad roles. Got married, started playing husbands. So yeah, I do think all these things—this album, those films—they inform each other.”
And now, he’s taking the album on tour. Not with a philharmonic, but in a bus, for the first time. “People look at me like I’m insane when I say I can’t wait to get on the bus,” he laughs. “But I’ve never done that. This is my first real tour. We’re playing small rooms. Curating really special experiences for small groups of people.”
It’s a shift—back to basics, but with purpose. “I’ve got grand ideas. Big ideas,” he says. “But it takes time.”
Apparently not too much time. “It’s probably not an accident that three years after leaving Hamilton, all of us are dropping albums at the same time,” he notes. “Anthony Ramos, Davi Diggs, me. It took us a minute to clear the slate, but now we’re all hitting our stride.”
And for Odom, that stride looks a lot like a man in a sharp suit, stepping into the spotlight and finally owning the title.
Listen to the interview above and then check out their 2020 interview below.
