30 Years Later: Phyllis Hyman, “I Refuse to Be Lonely”

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Hanif Abdurraqib | Longreads | January 8, 2026 | 2,984 words (11 minutes)

Over the past few months, Hanif Abdurraqib has contended with major anniversaries of some of his favorite underconsidered albums. This week: Phyllis Hyman’s I Refuse to Be Lonely, released by Philadelphia International Records on November 21, 1995.

The video of Phyllis Hyman I love most is barely a Phyllis Hyman video at all. It is a vibrant, if brief, 58-second appearance in a 1991 clip of Patti LaBelle on the BET show Video Soul. 

As LaBelle talks to host Donnie Simpson about her shopping habits—“I don’t like trying on stuff and all that jazz,” she says, before grinning slyly and adding “but I love clothes”—the feed cuts to another camera trained on the pair and a door behind them. The door is open, and through it walks a woman who, from this angle, looks to be mostly a large hat carrying flowers, attempting to slip in unnoticed, but she’s spotted early in her not-so-silent journey to the couch. Simpson can hardly hide his delight, grinning as he glances behind LaBelle. This prompts to look over her shoulder and shout “I HEARD SOMETHING!” and there is Phyllis Hyman, her white and tan hat so low you can’t see her eyes, but you can see the giant gold earrings swinging from her ears. Phyllis drops the flowers in Patti’s lap, and Patti urges her to stay, tells her to join her on the couch. Phyllis insists that she’s gotta go, she’s gotta go, but Patti refuses to take no for an answer, so Phyllis comes around, for just a moment, and the two revel in 20 seconds of mutual affection and admiration before Phyllis swears that she really must be going, spoken as she is already sliding off of the couch. And then, like that, she’s off, Patti shouting after her I’ll make you some chicken when I get home! as the door slides shut.

When I think about this moment, I think about Phyllis Hyman’s exit as much as her entrance. As much as the fact that her dear friend is eager to cover her in roses. I think about how urgently Hyman wanted to leave.

There are, primarily, two types of posthumous albums. There is the album that stitches the pieces of a dead artist back together. Vocals from unreleased demos are paired with newer production or guest vocalists in an attempt to bolster the feeling that the dead are not quite as dead as you believe them to be, not gone for as long as time tells us they have been. One prominent example of this is the 1980 Minnie Riperton album Love Lives Forever, which took vocals from sessions Riperton did in 1978. To fill out the results of those sessions, the album employed a who’s who of ’80s pop and R&B: Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Peabo Bryson, and Roberta Flack, among others. Despite its real, earnest attempt, the album feels disjointed, like a voice echoing in from beyond to briefly mingle with voices from the living world.

The other type of album is posthumous by circumstance rather than design. An album was recorded and largely completed by the time of the artist’s death, and was perhaps even slated to be released before the tragedy occurred. I find myself more haunted by this more immediate reanimation of the dead, particularly if the record comes out within weeks or months of the loss of an artist. Phyllis Hyman’s I Refuse to Be Lonely is one of these.

Hyman worked on and recorded I Refuse to Be Lonely through much of 1994 and early 1995. She had captured a wave of success in recent years, with her 1991 album Prime Of My Life going gold, and its lead single, “Don’t Wanna Change The World,” topping the R&B charts—the only song in her career to do so. There’s a 1992 interview from Blues & Soul magazine, which was supposed to capture Hyman riding high off of another burst of success. I have read the interview several times over several years, because I relate to what lurks below the expected exuberance. Hyman is joyful, but she is also tentative, seemingly uncomfortable. She talks about how much she loves being inside. One of the advantages of living in New York, she says, is cable television. She doesn’t listen to music, doesn’t even own a record player. She insists that she’d like to be working all the time if she were able. She insists that she no longer needs men. She’s writing love songs for the sake of what love can do, and nothing else. She jokes about her relationship with her vibrator, in an all-time interview moment: “I haven’t had physical human contact for a year, but the electricity bills were PAID! You know what I mean?” she says to the interviewer (who does not, he says, know what she means).

The interview attempted to highlight the life of an artist in a moment that should, for many artists, be cherished, but all Hyman wanted to talk about was falling in love with her own isolation. The reason she wanted to work so much was because it got her out of the house, but beyond that, there was nothing outside for her. No worthwhile reason to be anywhere.

Much of Hyman’s career hinged on a relatable tension: I want to be left alone, but I don’t want to be lonely. I want to love, deeply, but I don’t trust anyone with my heart, which has been broken so much that it has become fragile to the touch. It’s what makes I Refuse to Be Lonely such a triumphant project, one steeped in a rich and vulnerable ache. Beyond simply being excellent, though, the album should be celebrated as the bravest of her career—an album wherein she complicates her own sadness and unfulfilled desires, and attempts to assert autonomy over them.

The potential for that was lost when Hyman was found unconscious in her apartment on the afternoon of June 30, 1995. She had overdosed on the sedative Tuinal, mixing it with vodka, and left this world later that day. She was days away from turning 46, and was slated to perform at the Apollo Theater that very evening. The note she left behind began: I’m tired. I’m tired.

Few people understand loneliness and even fewer understand depression, and even fewer still understand what it is to want to die. I have grace for this. All of these things are concepts and realities the average person attempts to avoid confronting. 

Phyllis Hyman was a gifted singer and a singular performer. The kind of performer who could stand still at a microphone for an hour, barely moving, and deliver a full show, her voice doing all the work. The gift within Hyman’s gift, though, was a thin veil that stood between the confessional candor of her songs and the way that she expressed her own discomforts and displeasures with the real, actual world. She talked often, openly, about her loneliness and her desire for love, a desire that often went unfulfilled. Her friends would say that she intimidated men. She was towering in stature at 6’1” and also in personality, towering in talent. Men were hesitant to approach her, and when they did, they would often be the kind of men who were interested in dragging her down to a level they found more tolerable. She also talked openly about her depression (Hyman was bipolar) and her desire to not be alive.

This sort of suffering is made more palatable to people when it is seen through a lens of art, and significantly more jarring when it is plainspoken. Heartbreak makes for a delicious spectacle, from afar. The heartbroken make art for the heartbreak of others, and we all roll around in it until the clouds part, but fewer people seem to have an interest in the moment when the song ends, and the person who made the song steps beyond it, and they take their clouds with them. Their darkness is theirs, and yours is your own, and it’s nice to think that the song was born out of something temporary for both the singer and the listener. Some ache that vanished as soon as the music was laid down.

I don’t spend much time trying to make sense of depression for other people, in part because there is no single way to make sense of depression. Mine may be different than yours, may be different than the depression of someone you know intimately and love, or someone you want to learn how to love better. And it’s best if I don’t cloud the waters of anyone’s good intentions. Also, people are obsessed with confirmation. We are a society eager for proof, something that firms and fastens us to our preconceived notions. On the clip I love, where Hyman surprises her dear friend with roses, YouTube comments insist that you can see how sad Hyman looks, despite her beaming with laughter. That you can see the pain she carries. 

All of these things, at least to some degree, are animated by the knowledge of her loss, or, more specifically, of the way she left us. Because depression does not look a single way, and is therefore difficult to make legible to the broad and general public, The Depressed Person becomes a caricature, only possible to be understood clearly through the lens of what others understand as immense sadness, or at least the performance and manifestation of immense sadness. Though not too directly. Not in a way that surrenders control to a monolithic image of sadness. I think of this as uniquely devastating for Phyllis Hyman, who was open and direct about the shape of her crisis, but who also laughed with friends, who also wrote love songs, who also longed for that which could not find her. 

It is easy, after someone has died in a uniquely tragic fashion, to imagine the final work they made as a prolonged death note, a project haunted by the desire for an exit. To read I Refuse To Be Lonely only in this way is to strip it of its overwhelming sense of tenderness, the grief that comes alongside feeling massively unfulfilled, failed not by your own desires, but by the inability of the world to meet your desires where they are. And Hyman’s desires, as laid out on this record—and in much of her music—are not unreasonable desires, which is what makes their lack of fulfillment more stifling, more devastating than it would be if she were begging for the moon. She wanted to be loved as she was. It wasn’t as if she were demanding love to save her life, just realizing it would be nice to have the kind of love that brought her life into focus.

And still, to reduce the album to its primary color of sadness is also unfair. The album is not an album of surrender. “This Too Shall Pass” rides an upbeat rhythm in the name of Hyman’s search for defiance; yes, she is close to weeping, but she is not. Yes, sleep is not coming easy, but she’s still going to close her eyes and try, because on the other side of the long night is something else. There’s another thing which might be better than the current thing, and it’s worth staying for. You stay alive by hours, sometimes by minutes. Inch by inch, because something better might exist. “I’m Truly Yours” is one of the great ballads of Hyman’s career, and it is, by definition, a love song, even if it is a love song to an absence. The love simply exists in past tense. “I gave you my all.” “I meant it, every word.” The love of a lifetime is gone, but it isn’t a sad song, as much as it is a song of gratitude. There is someone in the world who received all I had to give them, and they are gone, but they still carry what I offered, and I still carry a part of them, which is lonely, but also not.

Most of the album’s songs are shouting into a void left by love. Sometimes the shouting is tinted with gratitude, other times it is simply grief, but it is always more complex than it got credit for. Hyman, perhaps because she did spend so much time in her own interior world, analyzes her own heartbreak and desire with a precision that can be overwhelming. On “Why Not Me,” Hyman grinds through a fight between knowing, firmly, who she is, while also wrestling with the overwhelming evidence (as she understands it and has lived it) that who she is will not find her the love she wants. In the verses, she insists that she doesn’t want to surrender who she is for the sake of some man; in the chorus, she questions whether it is a crime to be herself, before insisting that everyone deserves to find the dream of someone who loves them for who they are, though she just can’t figure out why the dream eludes her and her alone.

I don’t spend much time trying to make sense out of depression, as it affects me, for the sake of other people. I said that and I meant it. But still. Imagine a mirror, clouded with myths. Some of them about you, some of them things you’ve told yourself or have been told. Some of them you have invented, imagined for so long that they have doubled or tripled in size. Some of the myths are about the world outside, and how others see you, or what others believe about you, whether or not there’s any confirmation of the belief. Mythology doesn’t require accuracy as much as it requires an active imagination. And now, imagine that you have to stand in front of the mirror, and find yourself in it. Not an approximation of yourself. Your actual self, something that resembles what you know and understand yourself to look like. And the harder it gets to find a lucid reflection, the harder it is to remember what you’re looking for in the first place. Worse, the memory collapses in a matter of seconds, and to retrieve it can take hours, or days, or months.

I say all this for a reason. In trying to reclaim I Refuse To Be Lonely, to reframe how it is presently understood, the best thing I can say is that it feels like a person standing in front of a mirror blurred with myths, trying to find one clean beam of light to step into in order to remember themselves, their full selves, a self worthy of love, worthy of staying. And the work of trying to stay is not heartbreaking work. It is not the work of foreshadowing an eventual exit. It is bravery. Hyman, in every song, is fighting for some form of reminder. The person she loved has left her, but she’s holding on to a memory to propel her toward the next opportunity for a new memory. She doesn’t understand why she isn’t good enough as she is to find love, but she refuses to change, because she is all she has. The stakes are clear and defined throughout the record. I’ll find something, I’ll keep looking, until I get something that moves me another hour, and another hour after that. It’s only sad if you believe that her death meant that she failed, and not that she was failed.

The project of saying, out loud, that the world is not tenable for you, but could be, is brave, I think, because so often what makes the world more tenable for people can seem so far beyond our immediate control. Yes, it would be ideal to be less lonely, but this is a phenomenally isolating era—even more than it was in 1995, when Hyman put the finishing touches on I Refuse To Be Lonely. The world is increasingly engineered to keep people away from each other. The harder it gets to seek each other, the less worthwhile it will feel for people to do so, and the radius of our aloneness will expand. If there is a foreshadowing happening within Hyman’s work, and specifically on I Refuse To Be Lonely, it’s this: Love is not only worth fighting for if and when you find it. The seeking of it, too, is a fight that is worth taking up, a fight that is worth sustaining.

I think, often, about the central part of the note that was found next to Hyman’s body: I’m tired. I’m tired. The final song on I Refuse To Be Lonely,“Give Me One Good Reason To Stay,” is, narratively speaking, a somewhat typical Jaded Lover Song. Her bags are packed, and she’s ready to leave, but she turns to ask some man what he’s got to say. There is a door, and she is going to soon be on the other side of it, but he can keep her, for just a bit longer, if he can find a reason why her staying might be worthwhile. And in these songs, you so often only hear the side of the speaker, and you are left to imagine the universe the conflict exists in, the man (and it is most often a man) stumbling over lies and excuses, or perhaps deep in thought about what might do the trick this time. And, in this instance, there’s Hyman, her voice shrinking to an exhausted near-whisper by the end of the song. I’ve taken all I can take. Tell me why you want me here. One good reason.

And then, after a slight pause: I’d stay.

It really is about the heart, and nothing else. I’ve given all I can, I’ve exhausted every imaginable avenue. If you have something for me, I promise I would stay. But you don’t have anything. It’s almost like, in the song, the asking is a formality. So that you remember that she really did try. She really did give it her all. 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands