

The title track interpolates the hook and ascending three-note keyboard from Ayers’ 1976 “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” creating a healthy tension between Blige’s blue mood and the sample’s shafts of light.

These ancestral voices reassure but offer subtle contrasts, too. There's Isaac Hayes and Barry White, Roy Ayres and Slick Rick-history as group therapy. Sandwiched between the buoyant debut What’s the 411? (1992) and the austere, inevitable divadom of Share My World (1997), My Life positions Blige as heiress to an R&B fortune, thanks in large part to the sampling acumen of Bad Boy’s Hitmen team members Chucky Thompson and Sean “Puffy” Combs.
