Music history is about to get a firsthand account from one of its most influential architects.
On February 10, Grammy Award–winning producer and songwriter Teddy Riley will release his long-awaited memoir, Remember the Times, a candid look at a career that helped reshape R&B, hip-hop, and pop music over the last four decades. The book will be released on the Simon & Schuster imprint.
The title is a direct nod to "Remember the Time," the iconic Michael Jackson hit Riley co-wrote and co-produced during the Dangerous era. The book traces Riley’s fingerprints across generations of sound, from the rise of New Jack Swing to modern global pop.
Written with award-winning biographer Jake Brown, Remember the Times pulls back the curtain on Riley’s journey from a Harlem prodigy to a genre-defining force. The memoir covers his early experiments blending hip-hop rhythms with R&B melodies, a fusion that eventually became New Jack Swing and set the tone for an entire era of Black music innovation.
Riley doesn’t just focus on chart success. The book explores collaboration, conflict, and survival within an industry undergoing rapid change. Readers will find stories behind the creation of his own groups Guy and Blackstreet, as well as the making of era-shifting records like Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” and Doug E. Fresh’s “The Show.”
Along the way, Riley reflects on working with artists such as Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Lady Gaga, and, of course, Michael Jackson.
When the memoir was first announced, Riley described the project as a way of preserving cultural ownership. “I successfully created the New Jack Swing genre 40 years ago so we could have our own generation of music, not their generation, and our own history,” he said to Rolling Stone. “I’m so excited to share that history with my fans around the world.”
Early praise suggests the book delivers exactly that. Pharrell Williams called Riley “an incredible mixologist of so many different styles,” while Library Journal noted that fans of his work will be “wildly entertained.” Publishers Weekly highlighted the memoir’s conversational tone and its wide-angle view of how popular music evolved alongside Riley’s career.