July 30, 2002, Amerie released her debut album. This year, her album turned 20 years old. Let us take a look at her debut album, All I Have, and the relevance it still holds now. She begins the album with her first release, “Why Don’t We Fall In Love”, a song with nice complex harmonies and excellent background instruments. The song’s premise is about  her falling in love with a person she’s been hiding her feelings for and asking the question “Why don’t we fall in love?” The next track, which happens to be her second solo release,  is “Talkin’ To Me” discussing how her and the person she’s fallen in love with don’t need anything else than their eyes to speak their inner truths to one another. All of the tracks of the album match one another in terms of quality. Another standout track is “I Just Died”, which contains a fresh beat with melodic mixtures with her vocals. The song uses an analogy of falling in love with that of dying as if to say she loves her man to death and does not desire to be brought back to life. 

2003 was a pivotal year for R&B, with releases from Brandy and Ashanti, but with Amerie’s debut album, it was indeed the epitome of the genre, showing she was an artist to look out for. She released her debut LP, All I Have in the midst of the heavy competition in the R&B scene with the album peaking at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and stayed in the Top 20 for about two weeks. In 2003, Amerie walked away from the Soul Train Music Awards with the R&B/Hip-Hop Best New Artist Award. With Amerie as a new found R&B superstar, she later then released her 2005 sophomore album Touch and its instantly ubiquitous lead single “1 Thing.”

20 years after her debut, her music has continued to be relevant in pop-culture and media, with her music being found being used all over social media app, TikTok. On TikTok, it is very common to find popular songs sped up or altered in some form. The sped-up version of Amerie’s “I Just Died” has over 19.6k videos with the song being used. Amerie, although no longer in the music industry, has left her mark on the R&B genre with her complex harmonies and melodious voice.