Jam & Lewis Shaped Pop History. They’re Working on Its Future, Too.

The writing and production duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis helped give Janet Jackson and others decades of hits. Now they’re bringing their “newstalgic” sound to their own LP.

Has this ever happened you? You’re at a party or dinner or the gym, when out of nowhere, the person you’re talking to stops speaking. They look around as if they’re being called, which is funny because you don’t hear an emergency. Just Cheryl Lynn’s 1983 R&B hit “Encore.” They run to the dance floor. They make their own dance floor — right there in that restaurant, that bodega, that Target. If this has ever happened to you, the dancer was probably me. But it’s not my fault. It’s Jimmy and Terry’s. They wrote “Encore.” And for the three-and-a-half minutes it’s on, with its rocket-ship keyboards, juicy funk groove and Lynn’s mighty, muscled introductory ooh yeah, the only conversation I want to have is with this song. It’s not just me. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have been doing this to people for almost 40 years — using live instruments and state-of-the art studio wizardry to produce music strong enough to snatch a body and render it a Gyratron.