Quiet storm, a Black radio format that developed in the late-’70s around pebble-smooth R&B balladry, is one of the rare subgenre names that suggests the ideal context for itself. Play “Choosey Lover” by the Isley Brothers or even Smokey Robinson’s original “Quiet Storm.” Notice how the skies in those songs are bruised with dark purple clouds, thunder brewing inside them. Indoors, sealed away from the weather, someone sheds their coat and it forms a soft vortex on a bare wood floor. There is a haze of steam in the air, the sound of bathwater running in another room. This is the lifestyle of comfort and intimacy that the genre implicitly sold to its listeners, soul music one could sink into after a long day of work, like a couch or a bath or a steady long-term relationship. The format particularly excelled at simulating the slow-motion atmosphere of romance, a physical and mental connection so strong it could make the molecules in the air around it lag. So even if you didn’t own a nice couch or a large bathtub, you could turn on the radio and settle into the swoon of the music itself, and find yourself drawn into a desire deep enough to seem closer to unconscious dreaming than physical reality.
In the mid-’80s, when Anita Baker was shopping for songs for her second album, she kept asking the publishing houses for “fireside love songs with jazz overtones”—in other words, quiet storm songs, songs that have fireplaces flickering inside of them. Baker wanted a whole album in this mode so the mood wouldn’t be disturbed by the more aggressive and mechanical pop-R&B productions that were in vogue at the time. She returned with five compositions, adding three more she either co-wrote or wrote herself, all of which ended up forming a kind of album-length suite of affirmation. The songs bore titles like “You Bring Me Joy” and “Same Ole Love (365 Days a Year),” tributes to the endurance of love and happiness, to the comfort of repetition when the things being repeated are shared warmth and tenderness. She named the album Rapture, and true to the title, the music is always floating a few inches above the ground, as if being spirited away by the depth of the devotion it feels.
Baker’s taste at the time was like a crosshatching of the music she grew up with as a young girl in Detroit. She learned to sing in church; her first memory of herself as a singer, in fact, takes place in one, standing at a podium, singing a gospel song that a family member taught her so she wouldn’t fall asleep during the service. As Baker grew older, though, her love of gospel would merge with a deepening interest in jazz, her attention lingering on singers whose voices twisted like corkscrews, like her idol, Sarah Vaughan. In the early ’80s, Baker sang for a local Detroit disco/funk group called Chapter 8, who made one record before their label dropped them. Disillusioned, she drifted away from the music industry, waiting tables and briefly working as a receptionist for a law firm. She only returned to singing when she was courted by a new label called Beverly Glen, with whom she released her debut solo album, The Songstress, in 1983.