Paris Jones, who records as PJ, told REVOLT in August that she had spent about six years writing songs about one man. There are enough records that the project collecting them now carries a title pointed straight at him, I Hate You, Marcus Johnson. She traced the fixation to infatuation and to a period of low self-esteem in which, by her own account, she put up with a bad situation for three to six years.

The latest single tied to that project, “Two Steps,” arrived in September with production from J. Cole. Its black-and-white video was directed by Kiyana C, and Cole appears in it as well. The song covers the moment someone you had nearly cut off reaches out after weeks of silence and you answer anyway, a pattern PJ summed up as "two steps forward, three steps back."

PJ applied the phrase well beyond romance, pointing to people trying to save money or buy a house. She described her approach to the vocal as calm and collected, closer in tone to a mob boss sizing up a situation than to a singer pleading with anybody. She also said she expected listeners to be surprised by the first sound of her voice.

PJ and J. Cole

When the single was announced, PJ told YouKnowIGotSoul that she started with a man as the subject and that “somewhere in the process I realized it was really about me.” She described the finished song as being about breaking old habits and recognizing the cycles that keep pulling a person backward. The hardest part, in her telling, was walking away from the version of herself that kept going back.

She has devised the larger project the same way. "Everybody has one person who shaped how they see relationships," she told REVOLT, "whether that person marked the moment they figured things out or the moment everything came apart." She hopes the recovery process written into these songs helps listeners work through their own relationships, and she promised the project would also be fun to hear.

On the record, Cole keeps the arrangement thin under the opening lines, and PJ comes in speaking more than singing. She works her way into the verse with a conversational delivery instead of opening on a run, and irritation and resignation share the same verses without either one winning out. The song does not present leaving as a finished job, which is a more honest place to land than the clean breakup anthem its title might suggest.

PJ met J. Cole at Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta, during a camp of producers and writers working on The Fall-Off that she attended at Omen's invitation. Cole played her the song that became “Legacy,” explained what it was about, and let her listen for an opening, and she freestyled the melody that became her part over its breakdown. Cole now explains the song to the crowd before performing it each night, she said, and audiences have started singing her part back to her.

“Legacy” went to radio as the album's second single on May 19. PJ then spent the North American leg of The Fall-Off Tour opening each night with her own songs and returning during Cole's headlining set to sing it with him. Her family, she said, had no idea that second appearance was coming when the run began in Charlotte.

That tour included five New York-area arena dates this summer, a run HitsCulture covered from the floor at UBS Arena in Elmont. For a writer who said she had long felt that most people did not know she existed, those arenas were a different order of audience. After one Charlotte show, fans outside an afterparty called her name and asked her to sign whatever they were holding, and she first assumed they were waiting for Cole.

Cole has said The Fall-Off will close his discography. The tour's U.S. leg wrapped on Sept. 23 in his hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina, before moving on to Europe, the U.K. and Australia. With his own album catalog declared finished, the beats he hands to other artists are the likeliest place new Cole production will surface.

He has been making those beats for a long time. Cole produced “HiiiPower” for Kendrick Lamar in 2011, and in recent years he has kept returning to one pairing in particular, the North Carolina rapper Cordae and Anderson .Paak of Silk Sonic.

Cole produced “RNP,” the third single from Cordae's 2019 debut album The Lost Boy, on which Cordae and .Paak trade lines back and forth. The two reunited over his production in January 2023 for “Two Tens,” which Cole co-produced with Dem Jointz. That same week, Cordae told Apple Music's Zane Lowe that the three had more recorded than anyone had heard, saying "we got an EP full of joints with me, Paak, and Cole beats."

“Summer Drop,” released in August 2024 with Cole as its sole producer, made it three singles. It appeared that November on Cordae's third album, The Crossroads, with “Two Tens” included as a bonus track.

The pairing now has an album of its own. Cordae and .Paak are releasing Heavy Is the Crown on Oct. 23 through APESHIT, Mass Appeal and EMPIRE, introduced by “A Good Day,” a single built on a sample of Bill Withers' “Lovely Day.” Whether any of the Cole-produced songs Cordae described in 2023 make the final tracklist has not been confirmed during the rollout.

PJ has writing credits with Usher, Chris Brown, Latto, Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa, and she sang as a recurring vocalist across both volumes of Common's A Beautiful Revolution. Her songs have also been placed in television series including Insecure.

Her previous single, “To The Ones,” was produced by T-Minus, Cole's co-producer on “Middle Child,” along with Steve Bilodeau. PJ wrote it for women navigating toxic and abusive relationships, and it was placed in the season finale of Showtime's The Chi. That song spoke outward to other women about getting free, while “Two Steps” stays on her own decisions, the calls she kept answering and the habits she eventually recognized as hers.