Inside Rolling Out Star Studio, the energy shifts the moment Jussie Smollett sits down. Before a single question about his music is asked, the room pauses to honor his receipts: four NAACP Image Award wins, BET and Teen Choice Award nods, TV Guide recognition for The Mighty Ducks — a résumé that’s as long as it is undeniable. But today isn’t about revisiting past glory. Today is about a new chapter, a new album, and a very intentional reset.
That new chapter is called Break Out, Smollett’s latest album, executive produced by Grammy-winning hitmaker Dallas Austin. The project marks a powerful collaboration between Smollett’s label Music of Sound and the relaunch of Austin’s legendary Rowdy Records — a name that anyone who grew up on ’90s and early 2000s R&B knows carries serious cultural weight.
“For me, it’s been a dream,” Smollett says, reflecting on working with Dallas. “We grew up in the ’90s and 2000s. We know what Rowdy Records has meant to the culture.”
Smollett had already been building the foundation for Break Out with his longtime musical partner David Michael A. Dallas stepped in like a seasoned architect, not to bulldoze, but to elevate. “He’d come into the studio, and he’d be like, ‘Maybe shorten this intro, maybe do this, maybe do that,’” Smollett explains. “That collaborative feel that he has … it was beautiful.”
The result? A body of work that feels deliberate, layered, and deeply personal — an album meant to live with you, not just play in the background.
Falling back in love with the studio
For all his success, Smollett admits there was a time when recording music stopped being fun. During the height of his TV career, the studio became less sanctuary and more obligation.
“I used to not like recording,” he admits. “When I was doing the show, everything was so fast. You get off set, go to the studio until two in the morning, then you’ve got to be back at work. My creativity and my voice suffered for it.”
There’s no bitterness in his voice when he says it — just honesty. That era was a blessing, but it was also a grind. The pace left little room for the kind of soulful, intentional recording process he craved.
With Break Out, he did the opposite of rushing.
“We really took our time with this album,” he says. The goal was simple but ambitious: “We wanted to make a timeless album you could dance to, run to, drive to, cook to, exercise to, clean to, make love to — whatever that is.”
It’s lifestyle music in the truest sense — the kind of project that scores your everyday life, from the loud moments to the quiet ones.
A storyteller first, always
One of the striking things about Break Out is how emotional and relatable it feels. The interviewer describes the sound as somewhere between Al Green and Brian McKnight, blended with Smollett’s own unique tone and vulnerability.
“It was the storytelling for me,” she tells him. “It was stuff you could relate to. It’s going to be one of those albums that takes you back — who you were with, who you broke up with, who you went to dinner with.”
Smollett lights up at that description. “That’s all I wanted,” he says. “That feeds me. That tells me we did what we were supposed to do.”
He explains that while there are two songs on the album he didn’t write, every other track is either written or co-written by him, rooted in deeply personal experiences. He was raised on artists who treated songwriting as autobiography: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Carly Simon, Janet Jackson. That DNA is all over Break Out.
“You’re always going to get that from me in my music,” he says. “As an actor, it’s fun to hide behind characters. But music? You can’t hide. It’s all you.”
Love, turmoil, and choosing joy
If there’s a thread that ties Smollett’s career together — from his earliest interviews to this moment — it’s his obsession with love. Not the cliché kind, but love as an antidote to a world that feels more divided and hostile every year.
“We’re in a world right now where there’s so much turmoil and so much divisive nature,” he says. “We have to take time to have moments of joy, moments of memories, all of those things.” The world is lacking love. Smollett smiles, but he doesn’t back away from the urgency. “Now it’s even worse,” he admits. “So, now we have to be furious about it. But we can’t be furious all the time.”
For him, anger is a tool, not a home. “We have to be angry enough that it pushes us to take action. But I don’t want to walk through the world as a divisive figure, always angry or sad or anxious. I want to feel the joy we all deserve to feel.”
And despite whatever storms he’s walked through publicly or privately, Smollett still shows up with warmth. He always greets people with love, remembers faces and moments, and makes time for connection.
He laughs and admits there is a little actor in that — he has to “hype himself up” sometimes to walk into rooms. But the love is real. “I genuinely like people,” he says. “I do care about human beings and living creatures in general. Just acknowledge people. Make people understand they’re not forgotten … there are enough people in this world telling us we don’t matter. If we have the chance to tell each other that we do, that’s what we should do.”
Dreaming of peace, family and a farm
Near the end of the conversation, the questions turn toward the future. Where does Jussie Smollett see himself in 10 years? The answer comes quickly and with surprising detail: peace, a farm, and a family.
“Absolutely, sis. That is all I want,” he says. “It takes work to be at peace. There are always elements trying to take that away. So, you’ve got to work your butt off to remember you are necessary and deserving of love and peace.”
He imagines taking his future 8-year-old child to school, collecting eggs from chickens on his land, and living a life shaped by intention, not obligation. “I don’t want to have to keep talking to people that don’t care about me,” he says plainly. “I want to be able to choose what I do and how I do it.”
For Smollett, Break Out isn’t just an album title — it’s a mission statement. It’s about breaking out of other people’s narratives, breaking out of fear, breaking out of the noise to reclaim joy, storytelling, and self-defined legacy.
Not because the world says he should. But because, as he puts it, he genuinely wants it.
Photography by Jakeem Smith