🍦Just an Old Fashioned Love Song, Coming Down in Three Part Harmony☕️
A Babyface-penned duet with Kehlani puts one of R&B's great voices back on the chart. Whether it means anything more than that is the question worth asking.
Kehlani dropped her self-titled fifth album on April 24th — her 31st birthday, a date she apparently treats as a gift to the rest of us as well — and buried inside its seventeen tracks is a moment that will register differently depending on your vintage as an R&B fan. Track eight is titled Shoulda Never, featuring Usher. It is penned by Babyface. It is on the Billboard Hot 100. If you are of a certain age, you are permitted a quiet exhale.
The collaboration has a backstory worth knowing. Kehlani had originally wanted Usher for the remix of Folded, the breakout single that earned her first two Grammy wins, and became something of a generational anthem for a younger R&B audience. Usher was on the road — his Past Present Future tour had him in Europe — and the timing didn't work. Kehlani said as much on Apple Music radio last November, describing him as her dream pick and confirming that a studio collaboration was already underway for the album. That's not a label pairing. That's an artist making a deliberate call.
Shoulda Never nods gently to Usher spelling out his name in Nice & Slow. For anyone who's been a fan since 1997, that's a small kindness. A wink across the years.
The track itself is warm and unhurried — understated percussion, soulful grooves, two vocalists working through shared regret over a lover who took more than they gave. It is a proper duet, not a feature as an afterthought. Kehlani holds her ground alongside him throughout, which is exactly how it should be. Pitchfork noted that Usher brings the ardor that remains his to command. Billboard's track review called it catnip for R&B devotees. Both descriptions are fair. Shoulda Never earns its place on the album, without leaning on nostalgia as a crutch.
For longtime Usher fans, though, context matters. Between 2017 and 2022, he reached the Hot 100 only three times and never as a solo lead. His 2024 album Coming Home — which arrived around his Super Bowl Halftime performance — was genuinely excellent and is worth your time if you haven't revisited it. But chart performance has been a different story. Getting back onto the Hot 100, even as a featured artist on someone else's record, is not nothing.
Usher has long supported Georgia's youth through organizations including the Boys & Girls Clubs of Atlanta and his own New Look Foundation, which he founded at 19. His charitable footprint across the state reflects decades of genuine investment in arts access, and opportunity for young people — the kind of work that doesn't end when the chart runs do.
Is this a comeback? Not quite — and it would be a mistake to frame it as one. This feels more like what happens when an artist of Usher's standing says yes to a collaboration that's genuinely worth saying yes to, and the stars are finally aligned. Kehlani wanted him specifically. Babyface wrote the song. The result is a legitimate piece of R&B craft, not a nostalgia exercise. Whether it signals anything about his own next chapter remains to be seen. For now, the man is on the chart, on a Grammy-winner's album, doing what he does. That's enough to notice — and enough to enjoy without attaching more weight to it than it can hold.
