Taylor Simone Harvey was born for this. The daughter of the late great r&b singer Dee Harvey, she grew up watching her dad sing backgrounds for legends like Patti LaBelle and Dionne Warwick — even as he struggled to achieve a solo stardom that never quite came. Taylor was raised in Los Angeles by a community of renowned soul musicians, learning to sing among aunties and uncles who told her she was the one: destined for greatness. “You’re gonna do what your dad never did.” But what happens to your heart when you grow up watching your father crushed by the pain of a dream unfulfilled? What happens when the expectation of inheritance — of one day making it — becomes more of a weight around your neck than a pair of wings?

Taylor moved from her native LA to New York at 18, cutting her teeth in Harlem’s jam sessions and fronting the indie r&b collective Jazze Belle. After her father passed on in 2012, she chased the dream harder than ever. “I think I was doing it because he couldn’t,” she says now. But after spending her twenties on the grind opening for artists like Noname and Jamila Woods, she hit a wall. Mentally and emotionally exhausted, she left her band and the life she’d built and moved back into her mom’s house in LA, uncertain of what to do next but certain she needed to come home.

Taylor’s debut album Everybody’s On Stage is the sound of that homecoming, but it’s also the sound of a young artist coming into her own. In the tradition of Solange’s A Seat At The Table and Tyler the Creator’s Flower Boy, she dances across genre lines and steps boldly into her queerness, sounding just as lithe singing classic soul as she does spitting a quick 16. Co-produced with longtime collaborators Jess Best and Connor Schultze, Stage is a warm album full of lush r&b harmonies, swung breakbeats, disco glitter, and deep g-funk bass. Across this canvas, Taylor’s style is rife with dualities. She is brash and tender, surefooted and conflicted, swaggering and vulnerable, irreverent and deeply reverent.

Everybody’s On Stage is an ode to Black music, but also to selfhood and family. The album’s centerpiece is a suite of songs exploring two interweaving stories: Taylor’s first steps into queer love and her journey to honor her father’s memory. On “Papa,” she’s in full storyteller mode, painting a picture of her legendary dad through the eyes of a child growing up just enough to see the cracks in his armor. Embodying his trademark swagger, she pivots into “I Flirt with Fame,” making eyes at stardom like a new crush across the room. Finally, Taylor covers her father’s 1991 r&b hit “Leave Well Enough Alone,” using his ode to forbidden love to explore her own first steps into queer desire. It ends with a faint sample of her dad’s voice from an old live recording. “I heard that baby,” he says, a father and daughter communing between songs, his spirit alive on wax.

Everybody’s On Stage is nothing if not a journey. We listen as Taylor flirts, falters, flexes, and wrestles with the questions in her gut. Is my dream of success worth the risk of failure? Can I stay true to myself in an oppressive industry? How do I bear the burden of expectations? How do I carry my father forward with nuance and purpose? As she slowly unearths answers, we can feel her bravery — not a lack of fear, but an ability to stay in process with her fears until she can work through them in song. Somewhere between the self-liberatory snarl of “Breathe” and the closing meditation “Everybody’s On Stage,” we hear Taylor finally set down other people’s dreams for her and begin to make some for herself. Yes, Taylor Simone Harvey was born for this. But even as she honors her lineage she’s carving out something new, on no one’s terms but her own.