The Number Ones: Silk Sonic’s “Leave The Door Open”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Bruno Mars continues to occupy his own weird little space within the pop universe. He's a contemporary star who sometimes collaborates with other contemporary stars, often with tremendous success, but he doesn't really engage much with contemporary pop aesthetics or ideas. Instead, he fastidiously crafts his retro party-guy hook-machine songs with his small team, and he disappears for years at a time before returning to great fanfare with another short, polished collection of those retro-party guy hook-machine songs. So even when Mars went off on a side-project tangent, usually the time when pop stars are at their most artistically indulgent and least commercially successful, he pretty much just made another Bruno Mars album. This time, however, he had another Bruno Mars with him.

That's not entirely accurate. Anderson .Paak is not another Bruno Mars. He's just another smoothly silly soul singer who plays around with retro affectations, sometimes skirting the edge of self-parody, while flashing an extremely bright smile. Like Bruno Mars, he's a polymath multi-instrumentalist who's happy to engage in whatever brand activation will pay the most. Like Bruno Mars, he's a relentlessly charming all-around entertainer who once played drums during a Super Bowl Halftime Show. But no, he's different.

Mostly, Anderson .Paak's route to fame was different. Bruno Mars never, for instance, hung around in the indie-rap underground, and .Paak still does that sometimes. Bruno Mars never got booked on the third stage at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and I saw .Paak absolutely kill over there once. Unlike Bruno Mars, Anderson .Paak can rap without seeming like he's "rapping" in scare-quotes. And unlike Bruno Mars, Anderson .Paak had never really made a hit before Silk Sonic's lush Philly soul pastiche "Leave The Door Open."

On "Leave The Door Open," however, Anderson .Paak basically functions as a second Bruno Mars. If Mars released that song as a solo single, the end result and the presentation probably wouldn't be all that different. It's Mars inviting .Paak to come hang out in his world, not the other way around. This is not a problem. Bruno Mars is good at what he does, and An Evening With Silk Sonic, the Mars/.Paak duo's only album, is a fine example of what Mars does. Since their debut single reached #1, I get to write a(nother) Bruno Mars column about someone who is not Bruno Mars.

The column is still going to be about Bruno Mars, though. By necessity, Bruno Mars is the lead character in any Bruno Mars column, collaboration or not. The formation of Silk Sonic came in the aftermath of 2016's 24K Magic, which remains easily the best Bruno Mars album. (That's the one with "That's What I Like" on it.) Early in 2017, Mars went out to tour Europe for a few months. He brought along Anderson .Paak as his opening act, and the two of them became tight. Eventually, Mars invited .Paak to work with him, and the collaboration went well enough that it turned into a side project and an album. Since Mars does nothing quickly, that process took years. But before we get into that, we should talk about .Paak's history.

Brandon Paak Anderson grew up in the vaguely provincial California city of Oxnard, 60 miles north of Los Angeles. (When .Paak was born, Dionne Warwick & Friends' "That's What Friends Are For" was the #1 song in America.) .Paak's family story is crazy. His mother, the daughter of a Black man and a Korean woman, spent her infancy in an orphanage after the Korean War. A Black American family adopted her, and she grew up in Compton. .Paak's father was an Air Force mechanic who went to prison for beating up his mother. His mother went to prison, too. She had a successful business growing organic strawberries in Oxnard, but she got a seven-year sentence for defrauding investors when .Paak was in high school.

.Paak started out making music in his bedroom and playing drums in church. After his mother went to prison, he worked a series of odd jobs, got married, became a father, and found a steady job at a weed farm in Santa Barbara. When he unexpectedly lost that job, .Paak and his family became homeless, staying at a motel in LA's Chinatown until .Paak found work helping out other LA musicians and then playing drums for former American Idol contestant Haley Reinhart when she was on tour.

.Paak called himself Breezy Lovejoy for years, and he put out some music under that not-very-good name. In 2013, he switched over to his current stage name and released Cover Art, an EP of soul-style covers of songs from white rocker types like the White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. That earned him some attention, and he followed the EP with his independently released 2014 debut album Venice. He and underground rap producer Knxwledge also formed a group called NxWorries, and their 2015 debut single "Suede" came out on the storied California indie Stones Throw. That song landed .Paak on radar of some of the people who worked for Dr. Dre, a figure who has appeared in this column a bunch of times, and those people invited .Paak to a studio session with Dre. That was .Paak's big break.

At the time, Dre was supposedly working on Detox, the long-promised album that famously never came out. In 2015, Dre suddenly abandoned his Detox plans and released something else instead. The hugely successful N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton was about to come out, so Dre released an album called Compton, which I liked at the time and which I haven't listened to since the weeks after it came out. Dre loved .Paak, and he put him on six songs from Compton, including tracks with Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and Ice Cube. .Paak didn't know that Compton was ever going to come out, and he didn't know whether any of the music he'd recorded would make the cut, since tons of people had recorded tons of unreleased music with Dre. But the album came out, and .Paak's contributions stood out.

After Compton, Dre signed .Paak to his Aftermath label, and .Paak became part of the same XXL Freshman class as past Number Ones artists Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, and Desiigner. Early in 2016, .Paak released Malibu, an independent album that was in the works before he signed. It's a good record, and it got good reviews. He was already about 30 when his career took off, and he already knew how to perform.

.Paak can sing and rap while playing drums, which is one of those freaky superpowers that I simply do not understand. He can do it while displaying absolute showmanship, too. It's eerie. He toured heavily and charmed a whole lot of people. That was when I saw him at the Pitchfork Festival, and I was honestly blown away. Right around the same time, .Paak played a mega-viral Tiny Desk Concert that's still one of the most popular in the history of that series. As a performer, .Paak moved fluidly and instinctively among genres, using everything available to him to serve his exploratory funkateer drive. It just didn't seem fair that anyone could be that talented.

An Anderson .Paak record with Dr. Dre production seemed like a can't-miss prospect, but .Paak might be the rare artist who became less popular by working with Dre. That's probably an unfair exaggeration, but 2018's Oxnard, .Paak's first album on Aftermath, was a slight letdown. Dr. Dre was heavily involved in the making of Oxnard, and it had guests like Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, and J. Cole. But it just didn't have the exciting underdog charm of Ventura or the 2016 NxWorries album Yes Lawd!, and it ultimately didn't sell as well as Malibu. The same thing happened with 2019's Ventura, which had guests like André 3000 and Smokey Robinson. In all those pre-Silk Sonic years, .Paak only reached the Hot 100 once — as a guest on Eminem's 2020 song "Lock It Up," which peaked at #89.

Anderson .Paak righted the ship when he made friends with Bruno Mars. He opened that Mars tour in 2017, and the two of them supposedly worked on It's About Time, the 2018 comeback album from Chic, a band that's been in this column a couple of times. (.Paak co-wrote of one track from that LP, and Mars doesn't appear in the credits at all.) Mars co-wrote .Paak's Oxnard track "Anywhere," as well as "Fire In The Sky," a solo .Paak track that came out on the Shang-Chi soundtrack in 2021. Early in 2021, Mars and .Paak announced that they'd gotten together to record a collaborative album under the name Silk Sonic. "Leave The Door Open," their first single together, came out a week later.

The combination made sense. Anderson .Paak had been hovering close to stardom for a few years, but he hadn't gotten there, and Bruno Mars could get him there. Mars had tons of hits but not that much cool-kid credibility, and .Paak could get him some of that. More importantly, though, the two seemed aesthetically and philosophically aligned. They chased the same feeling.

Mars and .Paak claimed that they got their Silk Sonic name from beloved funk elder Bootsy Collins, who they brought in to "host" their album. (Collins has no Hot 100 hits as lead artist, but he guested on Deee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart," which reached #4 in 1990. It's a 10.) That story looks a bit like PR copy, but I actually believe it. "Silk Sonic" seems like the kind of name that would naturally occur to Bootsy Collins. It's a very good name for this particular project, even if it means that I have to continually resist the urge to use the adjective "silky" in this column.

The team who worked on the Silk Sonic record was only slightly different from Bruno Mars' regular team. "Leave The Door Open," for instance, has songwriting credits for Mars, .Paak, and longstanding Mars guy Brody Brown, who's been in this column for working on three previous Mars tracks. It's also got a credit for Dernst Emile II, who goes by D'Mile.

D'Mile, an R&B producer from New York, started out as a protege of Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins, and he began working with human awards magnet H.E.R. when she was a child prodigy. (H.E.R.'s highest-charting lead artist single is the 2019 YG collab "Slide," which peaked at #43. She also guested on Jhené Aiko's "B.S.," which peaked at #24. Neither of those is a D'Mile production, but D'Mile did win a 2021 Oscar for co-writing her Judas & The Black Messiah song "Fight For You," which did not chart.) Mars liked D'Mile's work with the singer Lucky Daye, and he invited him to the studio. D'Mile became a regular part of Mars' camp, and we'll see his work in this column again.

"Leave The Door Open," the song that introduced Silk Sonic to the world, does the things that Bruno Mars songs do. It's the kind of '70s-style slow jam that could never be described as a love song. Instead, it's a flirtation song, an eyebrow-waggle in musical form. There's no vulnerability to it. Like so many Mars songs, it's a slightly self-parodic pickup line, an extended "just joking, unless you're into it" situation. The seduction is in the craft and the cleverness, not in the passion. The group went through multiple versions of the track, tinkering with it for a year, before they decided that it was ready for release. That's how Mars does it with his pastiches. There's no room for left turns.

My favorite part of "Leave The Door Open" might've qualified as a slight left turn, but it does not exist. On the second verse, Anderson .Paak sings a line that I misheard for a very long time. Here's what I thought he sang: "If you smoke, I got the haze/ And if you're hungry, girl, I got the Lays." Unfortunately, .Paak is not inviting you to come sexily eat mediocre potato chips with him. Instead, the line is "I got filets," which I find infinitely less interesting. It makes more sense, but it's less interesting. If he was really offering you Lays, he'd be breaking character just slightly and admitting that his proposition was at least a little bit silly. I can picture .Paak doing that on his own, but the Bruno Mars method is to fully inhabit the lounge-lizard character.

Even without the potato chips, though, the "Leave The Door Open" lyrics are pretty fun. The message of the song is just that Mars and .Paak are ready and waiting, just in case you feel like hooking up with someone tonight. They lay out luxurious visions of what's waiting for you at their houses, like heated pools and bathtubs full of rose petals. It's all relaxed and casual, and they never betray any sense of need. If they felt too strongly that you should come over, maybe the invitation wouldn't be so tempting. In any case, both singers pretty much play the same guy, and their smooth tenors blur into each other. Anderson .Paak has slightly more rasp to his voice than Mars, but he fits right into the tapestry. He belongs.

"Leave The Door Open" is a clear, open attempt to evoke early-'70s records from groups like the Stylistics and the Manhattans. It does that with great care and devotion. All the pieces are in place: the delicately funky drums, the lush cascades of piano, the echo-drenched guitar-shiver on the intro. The call-and-response vocals are a little more syncopated and less serious than anything you might've heard on those older records, but the chiffon harmonies are dead-on. Mars and his collaborators put great care into all of their genre pastiches, but they also know how to write their own hooks. "Leave The Door Open" pulls off the neat trick of tapping into the collective memory of those old sounds while still feeling perfectly at home on contemporary pop radio. Nobody this century has pulled off that trick quite as consistently as Bruno Mars.

"Leave The Door Open" rises above its genre-pastiche station on the bridge, when the strings swirl and Mars' voice goes airborne. He hits his "la la la" notes with gusto, and he almost gives the impression that he actually cares whether or not you come to see him tonight, baby. But he's really just hitting the middle eight and the key change with the ease of a practiced professional, and the song ends before it gets too sincere. That's a good thing. In recent days, we've gotten to see what happens when a late-period Bruno Mars song gets too sincere. We're all better off when he stays in his half-joking zone.

Bruno Mars co-directed the "Leave The Door Open" video with Florent Dechard, and it's a charmingly over-stylized vision of a '70s recording session — one where all the musicians hit lightly synchronized moves when they're laying tracks down. The song came out in February 2021, and it debuted at #4 behind the three songs that Drake released on the same day. But those three Drake songs quickly disappeared, and "Leave The Door Open" did not.

At the Grammys in March, D'Mile won the Song Of The Year trophy for co-writing H.E.R.'s protest song "I Can't Breathe," and Silk Sonic gave their first-ever performance. They were a surprise last-minute addition to the Grammys telecast, and they went full '70s with everything about their performance, right down to the amber filters on the cameras. It was a delightful performance, and it probably helped boost the song to #1, or at least helped it linger around the charts. But then, the song probably didn't need the help. Radio loved it, and it simply stuck around. It reached #1 for the first time in April, and then it dipped from the chart for four weeks before returning to the top spot in May.

It would've made too much sense for Silk Sonic to drop their album while "Leave The Door Open" was on top of the world. That's not what they did. Instead, they kept pushing that one song for months, giving similarly elaborate performances at the iHeartRadio Awards and then at the BET Awards. Silk Sonic didn't even bother putting out another single until the end of July, when they finally dropped the lithe, funky soul-disco jam "Skate." I like that song, but it peaked at #14, never achieving anything like what "Leave The Door Open" did.

Silk Sonic's album An Evening With Silk Sonic came out in November, and they scored a second proper chart hit when "Smokin Out The Window," their third Soul Train homage single, peaked at #5. (It's a 7.) The album itself is a short, tight collection of tracks just like the singles, though some of the deep cuts get just a little bit more rambunctious. The record isn't anyone's idea of an artistic achievement, but when you're in the right mood, it hits the spot.

Silk Sonic never toured, but they did a 2022 Las Vegas residency that must've been fun to witness. Vegas will always be Bruno Mars' domain. When he reaches his legacy-act stage, the world might not even notice, since he's basically always been doing that old-school Vegas legacy-act routine. The duo's album went platinum, and they opened the 2022 Grammys with a performance of their deep cuts "777" and "Hot Music." That same night, "Leave The Door Open" won the trophies for Record and Song Of The Year. Mars already had an Album Of The Year trophy on this shelf, and those wins further cemented him as a paragon of the kind of respectable craftsmanship that Grammy voters have always loved so much. That's the same year that Jon Batiste won Album Of The Year, and it might be the last truly deranged Grammy year before the show took its tentative steps toward becoming less embarrassing.

Once the Vegas residency wrapped up, Silk Sonic were gone. They haven't been back since. Instead, Bruno Mars went back into his cave and didn't release another solo album for many years. He's finally got one on the market now, and he has the #1 song in America this very moment, so we'll see him in the column again. Anderson .Paak returned to the fringes of pop stardom, and he actually hasn't released a solo album since 2019, though NxWorries did drop another one in 2024. He finally found his way back onto the Hot 100 when he guested on "1-800 Heartbreak," a Summer Walker song that peaked at #80 last November. Also, he's the star, director, and co-writer of K-Pops!, a family comedy that's apparently coming out this year. The trailer makes it clear that the film is full of annoying celebrity cameos, but it looks pretty cute anyway.

The success of "Leave The Door Open" doesn't really tell us much of anything about the state of pop music in 2021. It's just a well-executed, not-too-serious genre exercise, and there will always be a market for that kind of friendly competence. I'm not complaining. I like friendly competence as much as the next guy, and I continue to think that "Leave The Door Open" is a pretty good song. If Silk Sonic ever return, to this column or anywhere else, I'll be happy to see them.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's fan footage of En Vogue covering "Leave The Door Open" at a 2025 show in Amsterdam:

(The Funky Divas absolutely should've appeared in this column at some point, but instead they're one of these Creedence Clearwater Revival situations where a group reaches #2 a bunch of times without ever quite going all the way to #1. En Vogue made it to #2 with "Hold On" in 1990, "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" in 1992, and "Don't Let Go (Love)" in 1996. They're all 9s.)

THE NUMBER TWOS: This one's going to take some explanation. Dua Lipa's shimmering mega-disco earworm "Levitating" eventually became Billboard's #1 single of 2021, partly thanks to a remix with former Number Ones artist DaBaby. (When DaBaby went into a homophobic PR spiral after saying some fucked up shit at a music festival, Lipa's team stopped pushing that version of the song.) But "Levitating" never actually reached #1 on the weekly Hot 100 because of a few songs that boxed it out and halted its ascension. We'll get into the main spoiler song in a few weeks, but "Levitating" first peaked at #2 behind "Leave The Door Open." It's an 8.

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I ain't playing no games, every word that I say is coming straight from my heart. So if you're trying to buy a copy of the book, I'ma leave the link here.