Calvin Harris first contacted Jessie Reyez after hearing “Figures.” He sent her a message on Twitter and invited her to Los Angeles for a session that was supposed to last a day. They worked together for a week.
“Figures” introduced listeners to a singer willing to put an ugly breakup into painfully plain language. The Harris sessions opened another part of her career: writing songs that other singers would record. By 2018, someone could know a Reyez co-write by heart without ever having heard her name.
Reyez recalled the visit in a 2018 FADER interview. Asked how writing for someone else differed from making her own music, she answered: “The creation process is the same to be honest with you.” She preferred improvising to arriving with a subject already assigned.
The partnership first reached listeners on Harris’s 2017 album Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1. Reyez sang “Hard to Love” and co-wrote “Faking It” with Harris and Lil Yachty, with Kehlani taking the lead vocal. “Kehlani smashed it, she killed that,” Reyez told The FADER. She loved “Faking It,” but “Hard to Love” was the song that felt like home to her. On the same album, she could hear what happened when she kept a song and when someone else sang it.
Reyez and Harris continued working together. Their next major hit, “One Kiss,” co-written with Dua Lipa, spent eight weeks at No. 1 in the U.K. and became the country’s biggest song of 2018, narrowly beating Drake’s “God’s Plan” in the year-end tally. Lipa’s house single was a long way from the heartbreak of “Figures,” and Reyez wasn’t singing on it. Her contribution was in the writing.
“Promises” followed that August, with Harris, Sam Smith and Reyez sharing the songwriting credits. It became another U.K. No. 1. This time, Reyez also contributed vocals, alongside Smith’s lead.
In October, Harris and Normani released their two-song joint EP. Reyez co-wrote “Slow Down” with them, adding a third lead singer to her run of Harris collaborations that year.
Normani had already appeared on a Reyez release. She and Kehlani joined the “Body Count” remix that August, ahead of Being Human in Public. Within two months, Normani went from guesting on Reyez’s record to releasing a song they helped write together. The collaborations moved in both directions.
That exchange continued with Kehlani. On 2022’s Blue Water Road, “More Than I Should” reunited them for a duet about an attraction outside their relationships. Reyez is credited as a lyricist and featured vocalist. It belongs in this story as a continuing writing partnership, with Reyez joining Kehlani on the recording.
Lisa’s 2024 single “Moonlit Floor” took her writing into the Blackpink member’s solo catalogue. Its credits list Reyez, producer Ryan Williamson, known as Rykeyz, and Matt Slocum, the writer of Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me.” The song interpolates that familiar chorus into a flirtation set in Paris. Lisa premiered it at New York’s Global Citizen Festival before its October release, following “Rockstar” and “New Woman,” her collaboration with Rosalía.
Meanwhile, Reyez’s own catalogue has grown to four studio albums, including A Little Vengeance, released June 12. Keeping songs for herself remains part of the same process that produces her outside collaborations.
She has a practical explanation for making that choice. “Sometimes I love the sweater but it’s just too small or tight or whatever,” she told DuJour. Loving a song doesn’t mean she has to be the singer who records it.
That leaves another way into her work. Someone who comes to Reyez through “Figures” can follow her credits to “One Kiss,” “Slow Down” and “Moonlit Floor,” hearing songs they already know in the context of her career. Her second catalogue has been hiding in their listening history.
Reyez’s upcoming tour begins Nov. 3 in Seattle and ends Nov. 24 at Toronto’s Coca-Cola Coliseum.