After nearly two decades in the game, Rapsody’s left no room for doubt when it comes to her formidable pen. But it wasn’t until 2020, when she began piecing together her fourth studio album, Please Don’t Cry, that Marlanna Evans realised that she’d shared very little of herself beyond her mic skills. “People had to put up a mirror for me,” she admitted to Apple Music’s Ebro Darden, recalling a pivotal conversation with the producer No ID. “He was like, ‘Everybody knows you can rap, but I can’t tell you five things that I know about you.’” Thus began the North Carolina native’s journey inward: Before she could reintroduce herself to her fans, she’d have to know herself first. The result of that journey, Please Don’t Cry, is Rapsody’s deepest and boldest work yet. “Who are you in your rawest state?” asks the gentle voice of the album’s narrator, Phylicia Rashad. Making the record, Rapsody found her mind wandering towards The Matrix, in particular the relationship between Neo and the Oracle. “He’s trying to find his way, trying to find himself…and she’s kind of his guiding voice,” she tells Darden. “I was like, ‘That’s kind of what this journey has been for me, but who would be my Oracle?’” Rashad was the first name that came to mind. Through interludes, the Tony Award winner nudges Rapsody further down the path of vulnerability: “Who are you when you’re joyful? What makes you sad? Why do you cry?” Rapsody doesn’t hold back her answers on tracks like “Diary of a Mad Bitch”, a cathartic shit-talking session, or the bittersweet “Loose Rocks”, where she grapples with a loved one’s dementia diagnosis with backup vocals from Alex Isley (yes, that Isley). Intense emotions are countered with airy, meditative beats on the gorgeous “3:AM”, a late-night love song with a hook from Erykah Badu, and the balmy reggae jam “Never Enough”. By the closing track “Forget Me Not”, her fear of vulnerability feels like a distant memory as she raps: “I want to know everything/I want to feel, I want to be alive/It’s too good.”