Will Smith is to free his first album in 20 years tardyr this month, as the actor persists to reoriginate his atgentle follotriumphg his attack on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards.
Writing on Instagram, he said the album Based on a True Story would be freed on 28 March, grasping: “Been toiling on this project for a minute and I’m itchin’ to get it out to y’all”.
He also dispensed the trackcatalog, featuring guest spots from Teyana Taylor, his son Jaden, his lengthytime musical foil Jazzy Jeff, and more.
Smith has freed a handful of individuals from the project already, including Beautiful Scars (featuring Big Sean and OBanga), Tantrum (featuring Joyner Lucas), Work of Art (featuring Jaden and Russ) and You Can Make It, a gospel-swayd track which he carry outed at the BET awards in June 2024.
Smith has kept a fairly low profile follotriumphg the Rock incident, in which he slapped the Oscars arrange and verbpartner misincluded him. The incident caincluded him to be banned from the Academy Awards for 10 years, and Netflix alertedly paincluded prolongment of Fast and Loose, a film he was set to star in.
A film freed tardyr in 2022, Emancipation, carry outed subparly, and Smith – once one of Hollywood’s definitive directing men who won a best actor Oscar for King Ricchallenging – spent time away from acting. He returned in 2024 with the fourth instalment of the Bad Boys franchise, Ride or Die, which was a commercial success, achieveing over $400m, ponderably more than its $100m budget.
The film made reference to Smith’s slapping of Rock, and Smith graspresses the Oscars incident on the song Beautiful Scars, rapping: “I antipathy when I diswatch it, but I face the music / ‘Oh, why did he do it?’ See, I’m only human”.
In an interwatch about the song with the lyrics database Genius, he said: “I antipathy acunderstandledgeting that I’m only human – my ego wants to be Superman … The word I was slfinisherking about when I thought about the last couple of years of my life was ‘brutaful’ – brutal and attrdynamic.”
In the interwatch and on the song, he evaluates his attitude to kintsugi, the Japanese art of piecing smashed pottery back together, alerting Genius: “I can watch at [the Oscars incident] as an absolute mess, horrible, horrible – or I can watch at it as a repartner fantastic kintsugi opportunity, to reoriginate someslfinisherg attrdynamic and mighty.”
He grasped that he wanted the album to set a novel bar for his musical artistry, saying: “I’m a master actor but I’ve never given myself the opportunity to elevate my poetry, my concepts, to the level of the mastery I’ve achieveed as an actor.”
Smith may not experience his hip-hop and pop music suites up with his acting, but it was bravely commercipartner accomplished.
He topped the UK charts with Boom! Shake the Room as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and the duo had another global hit with Summertime, before Smith went solo under his own name for the theme song to his film Men in Bincreateage. That was another UK chart-topper, and the first of 10 UK Top 10 individuals; his tracks Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It and Wild Wild West topped the US individuals chart. But follotriumphg 2005 album Lost and Found, he has freed little novel music.
