My aunt Renee never married and never explained herself, and her apartment parties were legendary enough that the same neighbors who complained kept showing up. When she passed she left me two things – her record collection and the mirror ball that hung over her living room longer than I’ve been alive. The ball lives in my bedroom now and I keep one rule about it: it only gets plugged in when I need to feel like the fucking main event again. Bad week or a dead phone, the ball goes on and the past clocks out. First spin of Jimani’s ‘Time Passes By’ and I was reaching for the plug before the first chorus, because this record sounds the way that little spinning light looks, old glamour doing brand new work. Renee would have played it at full volume on a Sunday and dared God to comment.
‘Time Passes By’ is disco-soaked R&B with a nostalgic streak – a record about glancing over your shoulder at everything that changed while your feet keep moving toward whatever comes next. Jimani pulls from the 70s and 80s dancefloor era and runs it through a modern R&B filter, soulful vocals gliding over grooves built to loosen your hips and your grip on old baggage in the same smooth-ass four minutes. Time keeps moving whether you cooperate or not, so she treats healing as something you can dance through rather than sit home journaling about. Love stays on the menu the whole way. It’s the rare reflective track that makes you want to put on lip gloss.
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The record states its thesis in two lines flat. “Time passes by / Can’t wait to feel alive.” That’s the whole assignment, the meter is running and she refuses to spend another damn season on pause. Jimani sings it with an ache underneath the sweetness, the sound of a woman who has done her waiting and is officially over it. The groove agrees with her. Everything in the arrangement pushes forward, and by the second listen I was making weekend plans I have no business making.
Then she gets to the part that made me raise an eyebrow at my speaker. “Right time / Wrong guy / Oh I’d kill for mine / My thighs / Your eyes / Oh my sweet delight.” The rhyme scheme alone is doing flirty work and pairing those two little rhymes in the middle is the kind of move that makes the buttoned-up crowd skip the track while the rest of us run it back. She wants the real thing badly enough to admit it out loud and she names the physical pull in the same breath as the longing. Wanting a great love and wanting to be wanted are the same appetite dressed differently, and Jimani serves them on one plate. Sweet delight is right.
The bridge questions come in a loop that folds back on itself. “What is the right way to love / Do you love enough to trust / What is the right way to trust / Do you trust enough to love.” Anyone who has been burned knows that shit gets tangled and Jimani lets the lines circle each other the way the real questions do at 2am. She never answers them, which is honest. The disco pulse underneath keeps the interrogation from getting heavy, so you end up swaying through questions that would wreck you in silence. Therapy with a four-on-the-floor kick is still cheaper than my copay.
Her prescription arrives in the next section and I’m filling it. “Take the time out to ease your mind / Come on girl leave the past behind / Now it’s time / Take the night / Spread your wings / Live your life.” She’s talking directly to us here, the girl-to-girl pep talk that goes down easier over a groove this smooth. Taking the night is the correct medicine and every woman I know self-administers. The past can keep the security deposit. Jimani’s delivery turns the encouragement into an invitation with heels by the door, and my RSVP is a hell yes.
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By the outro she’s down to pure want. “Oh / I wanna feel / I wanna fly / I wanna love / So can you take me away.” Wanting out loud takes nerve, and she lays hers out plainly before handing someone else the keys with that final line. Asking to be swept off somewhere is a loaded request, and over this groove it sounds like an excellent fucking plan. Somebody gas up the car.
Jimani is a Maryland singer whose silky R&B and soul-pop comes from a family steeped in church harmonies and musicianship so the voice has history before the first fucking hook even arrives. Formerly known as Jimani Luv she started carving out her own space in her teens – building a hair business alongside the music because she was always going to make room for every part of herself. Her work carries the calm of someone who has fought through real shit and chose tenderness with boundaries – the kind of softness that comes with an actual backbone. She also co-founded YANA – a community outreach project serving unhoused people in the DMV which tells you that care for people runs through her life as much as it runs through the songs. Jimani makes intimate records for women who have been through hell and learned to protect their peace on their own terms.
That ball is spinning as I finish writing this, middle of the afternoon, rule fully bent because Jimani earned the exception. Renee’s records are stacked next to the speaker and ‘Time Passes By’ slid into the rotation without a single seam showing, which is the highest compliment I can pay a new release. My aunt built a whole life out of taking the night, and somewhere in Maryland Jimani wrote her a sequel. Time is going to do what it does. I plan to be dancing while it happens.
