Qamil Wright wraps a trio of slow-cooked EPs with ‘Dessert’

The journey to Comfort Food took roughly five years but encompassed multiple lifetimes, with singer Qamil Wright navigating new motherhood, crushing postpartum depression, her March 2025 wedding to the Columbus rapper Jai Carey, and the deaths of three grandparents on the way to releasing the three-part album, the final installment of which, Dessert, releases on Friday, Feb. 27. (Appetizers and Dinner, from July and November, respectively, are currently available online.)

These collective experiences helped to inform and shape the music, with Wright delivering a string of songs aimed at “grown people who are living, working, taking care of kids, and still trying to find time to appreciate love,” as she explained in a mid-February interview. As such, the lush R&B tracks populating the trio of EPs are imbued with fallibility, grace, and maturity, focused not on decadent youthful fantasies but on those moments of passion that can be snatched from the grind that needs to be navigated daily to keep a home and a family in functioning order. It’s an approach that bleeds over into Wright’s vocals, with the singer often adopting a more conversational tone that makes these songs feel deeply lived-in, the moments of respite unequivocally earned. 

“Every song has a moment, almost like an Easter egg, where something went wrong and I left it in there,” Wright said. “Most people won’t even notice, but I know where they are. I might be [performing] live, and my voice will crack, and that’s fine, we’re going to keep it going. I’m a real person, and that’s what I want to convey in my music. I’m writing songs and changing pull-ups every single day.”

While Appetizers established a tone for the project, with Wright focusing her attentions on the necessity of stoking romantic passions amid the swirl of family life, Dessert is threaded through with an unshakeable sense of gratitude, the musician paying tribute to the buoyant power of love (“Girl of Your Dreams” and “Fly High,” the latter written by Wright’s sister, Qwalisha Barfield, who also contributed backing vocals, and featuring a guest verse from her husband Carey) and the personal growth that has enabled her to not just overcome recent hurdles but to find new ways to thrive (“Thank God”). 

“At the end of a good meal, you’re satisfied, you’re grateful,” Wright said, and laughed. “And I’m absolutely grateful, in general, to be in the most creative space I’ve ever been in throughout my career.”

A self-described people-pleaser by nature, Wright said she only reached this point 15 years into her music career by finally learning how to say no a couple of years back. “When I look at the things I’ve done in my career, I would always say yes, and I’d be out there every weekend singing songs. ‘Do you want to do this?’ Yes. And I’d always be overextending myself,” Wright said. “And then early in 2024, in the midst of writing this album off and on, I just felt really unhealthy, mentally, physically. … My body was achy and I was like, ‘I can’t continue to do this. I’m not living my best live. I’m not being who I could be, because I don’t feel well.’ And I remember being in the hallway crying to my then-fiancé, like, ‘I’m going to give this all up and be a soccer mom.’ And he was like, ‘You could never. If you weren’t doing music, what would you do?’ And I remember being like, ‘Okay, you’re right, but then I have to figure out how to take care of myself.’”

These and other life lessons reverberate through “Thank God,” with Wright singing about how she finally learned to protect her peace amid relentless demands on her time and extolling the advice she absorbed from her grandparents. “My granddad said tomorrow will take care of itself,” she offers on the track, singing with an ease and a grace that suggests his words have long taken deep root within.

“[My grandparents] were everything to me, and I wouldn’t be here, literally, if it wasn’t for them,” said Wright, who sees aspects of each elder within herself, having inherited her grandmother’s beaming smile and her grandfather’s feisty temperament, among other traits. “The lessons that they gave me, like the ones they mention in the song, those got me here. And I wanted to honor them in that way.”

In considering the impact of those lost, Wright recalled the last time she saw her maternal grandmother, which was not long after she appeared on the local news for her involvement in Black Artist Solidarity Day at the height of the 2020 George Floyd protests.

“And I went to visit her, and she told me my mama sent her the clip, and she told me how proud she was of me,” Wright said. “And I didn’t know then that was going to be the last time I saw her, but I remember her face, and I remember how I felt when she told me she was proud of me. And so, I’m going to keep going, because that’s what she would want.”