Emmett Hughes, What Will I Do: How Reggae and Soul Built a Love Song Out of a What-If

A Long Island Songwriter Sets Relationship Doubts to a Lilting Groove and Warm Horns

In April 2023 Emmett Hughes uploaded What Will I Do to his SoundCloud page and filed it under world music. He added a two-line note about the what-if questions that come up in every relationship. The finished single, released on 19 February 2024, carries that worry on a reggae lilt, bright guitars and a horn line. It remains the clearest way into the Huntington, New York songwriter.

Emmett Hughes’s music is in the playlist below, and his coverage history sits on his artist profile. What Will I Do came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Have a listen, then keep reading for how Hughes put the song together.

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Emmett Hughes Hangs What Will I Do on a Single Question and Lets the Groove Carry the Doubt

The hook starts with the title. What Will I Do is the question nobody asks out loud in a good week. It arrives when someone pictures life without the person they love. Hughes wrote both the words and the music. He puts that question at the front of the song, then lets the arrangement answer it.

The answer is the groove. Rather than slowing the tempo to match the worry, he sets it over a funk and reggae pocket that keeps moving. Clinking percussion and warm guitar open the record before the voice comes in. After that, the rhythm never sits down.

So the question stays heavy while the floor under it stays light. That tension is the hook, and it is why the song plays as contemporary pop rather than as a lament.

The Lyric Turns a Private What-If Into a Love Song, Sung in a Deep and Unshowy Voice

His own note on the track is short. It says that what-if questions come up all the time between two people. Dwelling on them, it adds, can lead a person astray. The lyric works from inside that habit.

In 2024, reviewers described Hughes facing his deepest fears while confessing an undying love for his partner. Both halves are audible. The fear sits in the question, and the devotion sits in the way he keeps asking it.

The vocal does the rest. Hughes has a deep, rounded voice, and reviewers heard sincerity in it rather than showmanship. As a result, it sounds like a man talking himself down, which is exactly what the words are doing.

Writing that kind of lyric is a craft choice as much as a confession. A song about fearing loss can easily tip into self-pity. Likewise, a love song can easily turn into a list of compliments. Hughes avoids both by building the song on one question. The listener fills in the rest from their own life.

The Arrangement Holds Its Lift Back, Following a Line From Johnny Nash to Grover Washington Jr.

At four minutes and fifteen seconds, What Will I Do takes its time. The arrangement pays that time back. Hughes is a multi-instrumentalist who sings and plays guitar, bass and keyboards. On his SoundCloud profile he says that new sounds, production techniques and arranging ideas excite him. The way he assembles this song shows it.

The percussion and guitar set the pulse first. Then the horns bring the warmth, and he saves the joyful backing vocals for the very end. Held back like that, they turn the closing stretch from a question into something closer to reassurance.

The lineage is worth tracing, because Hughes lists both reggae and Motown among his influences. Johnny Nash, a Houston singer, became one of the first artists from outside Jamaica to record reggae in Kingston. In 1972 his I Can See Clearly Now took that rhythm to number one in the United States. It is a song about coming through dark weather, built on a Jamaican pulse. Hughes, a New Yorker writing pop songs on the same pulse, belongs to that tradition.

Grover Washington Jr. supplies the other half of the picture. Bill Withers sang on Washington’s 1980 recording Just the Two of Us. Saxophone and a warm, unhurried voice carry that devotion song, and it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. What Will I Do asks the darker version of its question. What happens if it is no longer the two of us? Hughes answers with the same warmth.

From the BlackSounds.News Curator Team: “What stays with us is the restraint. A song about the fear of losing someone could easily have been slow and heavy. Emmett Hughes chose a rhythm you can sway to instead. That choice says more about love than any big chorus could: you keep moving towards it, even when you are scared.”

Two Years After Its Release, Emmett Hughes Brings What Will I Do to a New Set of Listeners

When the single first came out, it drew reviews from Illustrate Magazine and The Musical Road. Two years on, it is finding new listeners. That says something about the song’s design, because the question in the title does not belong to any one year.

Listeners raised on the pop-reggae crossovers of the 1970s and 1980s will recognise the shape. So will anyone who likes soft rock with some funk in the rhythm section. Hughes also plays his songs live with the Emmett Hughes Band around the New York metro area. Meanwhile, he talked about his open-ended approach to new sounds and arranging with host Steve Yusko. That conversation went out on The Long Island Sound podcast.

Stream What Will I Do on Spotify and Apple Music. Then follow Emmett Hughes on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, YouTube channel, Instagram, Facebook and his official site.

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