For Sean Combs, the biggest red flag—to himself, and those who know him best—was when he didn’t feel like creating anymore. It’s been eight years since his last release, the mixtape Money Making Mitch, which was billed as a return to his Puff Daddy ‘90s roots, all flash and flexing. It’s been 13 since his last proper album, the paradigm-shifting R&B-techno-rap hybrid Last Train to Paris, which he released as the group Dirty Money. But no matter the moniker, or if it ever even saw the light of day the assumption was always that Diddy, one of the great music masterminds of the last 30 plus years, was always in the studio working on something.
Until he wasn’t. Diddy turned 50 in 2019—one year after the death of Kim Porter, the mother of three of his children, and one year before the death of his longtime mentor, Andre Harrell. Those events, in tandem with the normal rhythms of getting old while being rich, famous and a veteran of music’s youngest genre, contributed to one hell of a mid-life crisis. It’s small wonder Diddy stopped dancing.
“I was having a conversation with Jay-Z and I was like, ‘Yo, I don’t feel like going in the studio no more,’” Diddy tells me. “‘I was like, ‘Shit is just so… just different. I don’t know where the love is at. I don’t make music no more.’ And he was like, ‘Man, that’s really sad, bro.’”
It’s a somewhat startling account of a conversation between two rap titans who made some of the jiggiest music of the ‘90s—so much so that it startled Diddy himself to find a way to snap the hell out of it.
“I was like, ‘Damn that is sad,’” he laughs. “Fucking Jay-Z just told me that this shit was sad. I didn’t know how to turn it back on. And then, one day God came to me—and God’s a woman. So She was like, ‘It’s time, baby.’”
To find himself, to rediscover the work he had once loved doing, Diddy renamed himself Love (he legally made it his new middle name at the DMV) and went, as he describes it, “off the grid.” (Which, judging from the album’s appropriately grandiose trailer, meant exotic locales sans phone and plus female companionship, including sometimes partner Yung Miami of the City Girls.) Ergo, his first project in close to a decade: The Love Album: Off the Grid, which he’d just previewed to me and a few other writers at The Whitby Hotel in New York, one week before it dropped on September 15.
