LOS ANGELES — “My first funeral, I was 7 years old,” Raphael Saadiq said. “They called my name: ‘Charlie Ray Wiggins, limousine three!’ I never liked limousines after that.”

He was sitting in a control room at his studio, Blakeslee Recording, surrounded by totems of the past — a trophy from the first talent show he won at Elmhurst Junior High in Oakland, Calif., an Amy Winehouse prayer candle and enough vintage guitars to stock three pawnshops.

Saadiq, 53, wore a pale-blue T-shirt and periodically tugged at his twists of hair. He was talking about family and addiction and loss, about a life marked by a string of tragedies, and about why it took him until now, more than two decades into his career, to bring these stories into his music.

His new album “Jimmy Lee,” out this week, is his first in eight years. It is named for his brother Jimmy Lee Baker, who overdosed in the 1990s after contracting H.I.V., but uses his story to tell a broader one about lives under pressure. It wasn’t Saadiq’s plan to make a concept album, let alone one that digs into stories this personal. But over the course of a few nights in this studio in early 2019, he began to hear the ghosts speak.