30 Years Later: Groove Theory, “Groove Theory”
October 23, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Hanif Abdurraqib | Longreads | October 23, 2025 | 3,684 words (13 minutes)
Throughout the fall, Hanif Abdurraqib will contend with major anniversaries of some of his favorite underconsidered albums. This week: R&B duo Groove Theory’s Groove Theory, released by Epic Records on October 24, 1995.
What I love is a city I can describe to you not in miles or landmarks. Not even in the hauntings of what was once but is no longer: the ghost of the long-gone corner store, the ghost of the basketball court and the community center, which is now an empty parking lot encased by empty condos no one can afford to live in. I most love a city I can describe to you by sound or song. Landmarks created via sonic moments, rather than the fleeting nature of architecture.
To put this another way: There is an outerbelt that runs around central Ohio. It is a circular highway, Interstate 270. It loops around the Columbus Metropolitan Area, which includes the center of the city, and then its outlying suburbs. There are few opportunities to tell any story of the American highway system without also telling a story of race, or displacement, or the long-tail impacts of prioritizing the convenience of people who have money and access and privilege over the people who do not. The outerbelt is no different. Though its construction in the 1950s didn’t tear through and effectively wipe out established Black neighborhoods like some of the highways it connects to, the function of 270 was, effectively, to create a loop for easy access to the suburbs while skirting the center of the city, avoiding Black neighborhoods entirely. It was a way of offering what could be perceived as a safe passage from one idyllic haven to the next.
I know this, and I am still romantic about it. I hold its history in one palm and ask for forgiveness in another. I believe I have rewritten the legacy of this highway, a loop that catches the city at all of its best angles, which are also not entirely honest angles, but you’ll forgive me, too, if I admit that I’ve fallen in love with lies before, and will likely do so again.
I can’t commit to the exact math now, but I do know that it used to take exactly 58 minutes and 10 seconds to drive the entirety of 270. This might vary, slightly, depending on where you enter the highway, which is the place you would also end. And when I say this precise time, I do mean it. I do mean that you must drive the speed limit and, in doing so, you must not feel self-conscious about the cars that speed past you, crawling down the slow lane, which, when I was younger, would shift between 55 mph and 65 mph. I know the exact time it takes to drive the 270 loop because Groove Theory’s debut (and only) album is 1 hour, 4 minutes, and a handful of seconds. And I know this because in the time it would take me to exit the freeway and drive to my old apartment, about five minutes from my exit point, I would pull into my parking spot in the exact moment at the end of “Boy At The Window,” the album’s final track, when Amel Larrieux’s voice performs a kind of alchemy on the word “care,” through a series of repetitions, stretching its vowels out in multiple, prolonged directions, with a sense of slight exhaustion, like when you put a fitted sheet on a bed in the wrong direction but believe you can extend to the last corner through sheer force of will. And then the song—and the album—ends, abruptly, with no resolution, on a somewhat hypothetical question, Are you even gonna care?, right as I’d take my keys out of my car and turn off the lights.
The moon is certainly there but the stars are only barely visible. You’ve seen it before, I hope. Have been as stunned by it as I am.
It may be hard to explain this now to someone who is precious about how much gas costs, which is me and everyone I know. But in the early 2000s, I had my first car. A 1994 Nissan Maxima, which was not aesthetically pleasing. It was brown and boxy, but it was mine. Its muffler rattled a bit, but the cost to repair it was the exact cost of installing a stereo system, and so I made the decision an 18-year-old makes. The sound coming from the speakers weighing down the trunk would cover the muffler clearing its throat or hacking up the occasional cloud of white smoke. That isn’t the hard-to-explain dilemma. That’s easy math. The hard-to-explain thing, in today’s terms, is having a car but not having enough money to do anything other than drive around in it, which meant having just enough money for a tank of gas and little else, which in 2002 meant having a $20 bill in your pocket.
At least a couple times a week, this was what I was faced with. Usually the Thursday night before payday, or the Monday night after a weekend where I’d spent a paycheck too recklessly. And so, I’d drive the 270 loop, and I’d do it at sunset, and I’d time it perfectly so that I’d hit the freeway in the exact moment when the clouds began to blush, slightly, against the backdrop of the sun’s flirtations with vanishing. And by the time I’d make it around the entire circle, it would be the perfect moment, the moment when the handoff between light and dark is mostly finished, but the two seem to be locking eyes, fondly, before taking to their respective tasks of ending and beginning. The moon is certainly there but the stars are only barely visible. You’ve seen it before, I hope. Have been as stunned by it as I am. Groove Theory was the perfect album for these excursions, not only because its length synced up so perfectly with the drive, but because so many of the songs organize themselves around a relentless commitment to longing. To relaying the pleasures of the earliest moments of being in love, and insisting that nothing requires those moments to feel fleeting. They can reshape the history of what we know about love. They can return, and keep returning. Reliable as light, reliable as darkness.
In 1995, R&B was in what I would classify as one of its golden eras. This was due not only to the sheer volume of R&B that flooded the airwaves, but also the breadth and diversity of the songs, of the artists making the songs, of the producers and songwriters. TLC was firmly grounding themselves in a sometimes incendiary and sometimes introspective sensuality. Montell Jordan was chasing the club hit, and often succeeding. There was a youth movement of artists like Brandy, Monica, and Soul for Real, who all topped the R&B charts with songs about the brutalities of youthful feeling detached from a world that could understand it. Brandy, longing in the certain landscape of her own bedroom. Monica, bemoaning a shit day and asking for grace. Soul for Real, opening “Candy Rain” with the lyric “have you ever loved someone / so much you thought you’d die?”
For all of its brilliance and for all of its range, it would be inaccurate to say that mid-’90s R&B hung its hat on subtlety, nuance, or quietude. There were occasional moments of the patient, understated ballad; Whitney’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” for example. But by 1995, so much of the engine of R&B had become about the grand and urgent spectacle, being thrown into the chaos of the heart and surrendering oneself to whatever the heart demands. I love this, to be clear. In SWV’s 1992 hit “Weak,” I love the insistence that the feeling of a crush is akin to an Actual Condition, one that renders the person in the throes of the crush entirely incapable of language or movement. I will make my jokes at the expense of Boyz II Men, for all of their undignified pleading, however I also admire it, understanding that the loss of love—specifically if you are the type to not cherish it when it is in your palms and then ache for it when the wind carries it away—should leave you stripped of your dignity, on your knees, screaming into the rain.
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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Into this landscape came Groove Theory, the duo of vocalist/writer Amel Larrieux and producer Bryce Wilson, who had spent a brief moment in the electro-hip-hop group Mantronix before it disbanded in 1991. From its inception, Groove Theory was an insular project, just the two central artists touching every part of the process. Wilson met Larrieux in 1993 when she was working the front desk at Rondor Music, which had signed Wilson to a production deal. Wilson heard the receptionist was also a singer and songwriter, and from that point, things moved relatively quickly. The group signed a deal with Epic Records by 1994, and shortly thereafter, found themselves in the studio, working on their debut album.
It is true that the album’s opening track, “10 Minute High,” does not seem like the thematic entry point that best defines the album’s concerns. It’s a cautionary tale about a teenage girl who, due to a childhood where she witnessed familial violence, and a sibling who was taken away from her by the state, falls into a cycle of drug use, which eventually leads to a fatal overdose. It is not an entirely uncommon song when placed within the long lineage of R&B Cautionary Tales, like, for example, Tony! Toni! Toné!’s “Little Walter” before it, or City High’s “What Would You Do?” after it, though a closer reading of “10 Minute High” actually does unveil the central thesis of the album to come, because one of the song’s main conclusions, it seems, is that love, alone, could have saved this person. The idea that whatever place she was going to within those 10 minutes of a high is a place that could have been constructed without it, a prolonged feeling of renewal and return, which love, alone, would provide. I’m not saying that this is what my personal belief system is, but I am saying that the album begins with this devastating tale, this story of someone who could not be saved, and it does this so that the subsequent songs can operate as patient and thoughtful odes to that which might save your soul, or theirs.
The reason I always picked sunset to make these circular drives around the outerbelt is because as a commitment to my sometimes unwieldy romanticism, I surrender to the reality of the infinite catalog of sunsets. That each one falls upon the city a different way every time that it happens, and therefore, the veil of light’s final walk drags itself across the corners of this place with a different pace or ferocity each day. A different tone of red catches the glass windows of the mundane rows of office buildings that are, by the miracle of radiance, made a bit more spectacular. The giant Frisch’s Big Boy mascot atop the restaurant—a large, grinning child in overalls, holding a burger on a plate, wide-eyed and eager—catches shards of gleaming orange across his hands.
To put this another way: There are more ways to fall out of love than there are to fall in love. Statistics tell that story. Your friend, crying on the end of a phone for the second time this year, tells that story. The velocity of the crush when measured against the exhaustion of several realities tells that story. And so, the circle makes sense to me. The series of returns makes sense, to say, I am not done seeking you, I am not done figuring out every way the light can fall over every part of you it hasn’t been fortunate enough to fall upon yet.
The series of returns makes sense, to say, I am not done seeking you, I am not done figuring out every way the light can fall over every part of you it hasn’t been fortunate enough to fall upon yet.
Groove Theory is the soundtrack because the album is precisely concerned with the passage of time and maintaining a sense of wonder, or the simplicity that comes with trying to make the work of staying in love feel as easy as possible, even when it isn’t. “Time Flies” is about the crisis of nostalgia wearing thin on affection. Spend too much time turned toward what was, and what is slips out the door quietly. It’s not a sad song, and it isn’t a song carrying a warning label. It’s an upbeat shrug, ending on the looped refrain “oh how time flies since we said hi / But now it’s time we said goodbye,” a repetition that fades out instead of hitting a hard stop, which is one of my favorite kind of tricks a song can offer up, particularly a song like this, where at the end, so much of the weight of exit shakes itself off and what remains is a long pathway through a renewed garden, laden with possibility. Yes, it’s over and I have to leave, but I loved you once, and I get to keep that, I get to carry it into loving someone else.
The heat of Groove Theory, the album’s most aggressive and stunning turn into its romantic obsessions, arrives in the run from tracks five through nine: “Baby Luv,” “Tell Me,” “Hey U,” a cover of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me,” and “Good 2 Me”—all of the songs stunning, with a somewhat claustrophobic approach, shrinking the room in which you are but a witness, while a speaker addresses the beloved just outside of your vision, maybe on the other side of the door, maybe outside of a window. And they accumulate, though not in their sense of urgency or panic, as many of the one-to-one direct address R&B songs of the time were doing. Groove Theory’s approach to the love song is, instead, to ask the question: What if the spectacle is patience? Or what if the spectacle is slow, consistent sacrifice? What if, upon realizing my bewilderment at the reality of us finding each other, I turn to you and ask how I can be good, or how you can be good, or how we can be good?
“Baby Luv” overflows with uncomplicated gratitude, and also operates as a song that is romantic in nature but not specifically orbiting a romantic relationship, no matter what my own heart projected upon it while driving through the haze of a sunset’s second act. Its lyrics are a nudge, a call to someone that says “I love you, and I would like you to be happy, and I am so glad you’re here.” That is the song’s entire function. It doesn’t move from the place it begins, because it doesn’t have to. It opens a site of wonder, and then stays there: Listen to your laugh! Look at the way that your laugh, when it exhausts itself, transforms into a long-lingering smile! I will make time for you! I will return, and return, and return!
“Tell Me,” the album’s biggest hit, gives off the feeling of someone who has seemingly worn themselves out with the expressions of affection before running back through the threshold, exuberant and not yet finished—though the song’s tone does veer more into the strict romantic, with little room for platonic interpretation, it is, lyrically and thematically, a continuation of the previous tune, overrun with delight and wonder, and the disbelief that someone is not only here but that you have built the here together.
These five songs work seamlessly as the album’s heart, because they follow a narrative arc. “Hey U” explores the turning point in a relationship, where the shine of the early moments wears off, the performance of perfection naturally dwindles, and tensions arise. It pairs perfectly with the Rundgren cover that follows: While “Hello, It’s Me” is a cover in name and some lyrical matches, in tone and emotional engine it takes a different approach. Rundgren’s song is a narrative built around an amicable breakup, or a loving but needed dismissal, the central resolution of which is that the speaker doesn’t want his beloved to change for him, so they have to part ways. Groove Theory pulls on that thread with more tenderness, stretching out the idea.
The little-known remix! The remix that played once on a radio show and never again! The remix that sounded like it was recorded in a bathtub but you had to have it anyway!
On its face, the song could still be read as a parting tune, but its long, looping outro, alternating “don’t change, don’t change” with declarations like “I’ll come around” and “I love you just the way you are,” suggests added depth. The exit isn’t promised; what comes to life more vividly is the desire to shrink the distance that organically emerges from within tenured affection, of choosing to love not just one person, but every version of the person there is to come, even the ones you can’t see yet, and at some point, you wake up and there’s a new plank in an ever-growing bridge, and you have to decide whether or not you want to tear the bridge apart or keep moving along its unfamiliar and occasionally treacherous architecture. Where Rundgren was saying “I’m out,” Groove Theory was saying “I’d like to at least see how it feels to be all in.”
And forgive this slight detour, a slight spin off of an exit ramp in our circular journey, but to think of the cover song is also, for me, to think of the magic of the remix, and I cannot pay homage to Groove Theory without paying homage to the remixes it spawned, and this is important, because when I took to the road in my shitty Nissan with a stereo system worth as much as the car itself, it was in the early 2000s, which meant that it was the absolute height of the peer-to-peer sharing network, the absolute peak of me setting songs or full albums to download before heading to a college class and then coming back to burn the songs or albums onto CDs, and the miracle of this era was not what you could easily find or obtain, it was the era of the remix. The little-known remix! The remix that played once on a radio show and never again! But the audio was ripped by some advantageous listener! The remix that sounded like it was recorded in a bathtub but you had to have it anyway! There were so many remixes of “Tell Me” and “Baby Luv” and they were pretty much all good, even the ones that had some amateur rapping laid over them, even the ones that were mixed in bizarre ways to render Amel’s vocals too high or too low. The songs on Groove Theory lent themselves to the late ’90s/early ’00s boom of remixes because of Bryce Wilson’s foundational production material, songs that were, in their original form, built from sparse and precise elements. Propulsive but understated basslines. Steady and infectious drumming. Piano so airy and light that you forget it exists. This might not sound like a compliment, but Wilson’s production was made to be deconstructed and then rebuilt, not because it needed to be, but because every element was so pure, it could be built upon. The remix is an homage, not a slight. The remix, too, is a type of romance. The remix doesn’t say I can do this better, at least not always. The remix says I want to spend more time with you, I want to see the light fall on you from every possible angle.
Almost every song on Groove Theory ends on a fade-out rather than a hard stop. Some repetition, lyrics collapsing on top of chorus, or a rhetorical question on a loop, like at the end of “Didja Know,” which ends with the repetition of “did you know it? did you know it?”—not frantic, but measured, if not delighted, with a slight tone of disbelief, which matches the song’s spirit, a song where the speaker insists that she didn’t believe falling in love to this depth was possible, but here she is, wandering the halls of her heart’s inventions, and surrendering.
What I love about this frequent occurrence of the fade-out on the album, as it aligned with my evening drives, is that, particularly on CD, before streaming, it felt seamless, like the songs were being gently and affectionately handed off. One would stumble into the arms of another and then you’d be off, to a different place. I loved this, and I still love remembering it, because the sunset, too, was operating within a small series of exchanges, of handoffs. The sky becomes a crisis of color, as a final show, and then, one by one, each color falls into the arms of darkness.
I loved hearing Amel Larrieux’s voice expand the opening vowel of the word “Angel,” making the letter “A” sound like there were five different words tucked inside of it, and I loved hearing this while watching the sky’s red, once a blaring announcement, calm itself into quiet. I loved hearing this while driving on a familiar freeway and dreaming it into unfamiliarity. Watching the lone light flicker in an otherwise dark office building and imagining someone inside, so in love that they’ve daydreamed beyond their reasonable working hours. Watching the cluster of lights in a suburban enclave that I would have no interest in otherwise, besides the fact that there are people there, tonight, and as unlikely as it is, one of them may be thinking of me, maybe we crossed paths somewhere or locked eyes somewhere and that’s all it took. And it’s all a myth, of course. Someone forgets to turn a light off in an office and goes home. Within the suburban homes, people go about their lives like their lives are the only lives. A highway runs in a circle so that no one has to see what a city actually is, how a city actually lives and breathes, and who keeps the city honest. I get it. My brain is not immune to the realities of history. The heart, though, is a machine that can be more easily fueled by mythology, by invention. By a singer’s voice, aching with possibility, aching with wonder, unfolding before you and asking, almost with disbelief, what if love could always feel as wonderful as a circle, where you catch all of the colors the sky is done with. Until tomorrow.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/23/groove-theory-30th-anniversary/
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