Kelvin ‘Pos’ Mercer reflects on De La Soul’s healing new album

VPM | By Lauren Frayer and Eleana Tworek

Published November 30, 2025 at 1:14 PM EST

Vincent Mason, left, David Jude Jolicoeur and Kelvin Mercer from the band De La Soul perform on day two of the Governors Ball Music Festival on Saturday, June 4, 2016, in New York.

Three has always been “The Magic Number” for hip hop trio De La Soul. But, with one voice gone, how do you keep making the magic?

Founding member David Jude “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur passed away in 2023. It was at his memorial where his sister, Cindy, gave the surviving De La Soul members, Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, the motivation to continue on.

“If y’all stop, then Dave stops,” Mercer remembers Cindy saying. “Cindy said, you know what? I don’t know what you and Mase were thinking, but the family have been talking and we would love for y’all to keep going,” he tells NPR’s Lauren Frayer for Weekend Edition Sunday. “Me and Mase had already had a similar conversation. So to have the blessing of his family, it was just all guns ahead from that point on.”

It took almost two years, but the result is De La Soul’s latest album, Cabin in the Sky, a celebration of Jolicoeur and a way to honor his legacy.

“It was very important for us to make sure that the quality of what De La [Soul] has been known for remained,” Mercer says. Many of the songs on Cabin in the Sky include vocals and rhymes Jolicoeur recorded years earlier. Others lean on beats he produced, like the track “YUDONTSTOP,” where Mercer raps about that conversation with Jolicoeur’s sister at his memorial.

Yet, honoring Jolicoeur also meant ensuring the music they created together could reach new listeners. About a month after his death, De La Soul’s first six albums released on music streaming platforms, a milestone long delayed because of copyright issues surrounding samples used in their songs.

“I really know how much damage it did for people to not know that music,” Mercer says. Those early albums were left out of the digital music era, meaning today’s younger generations of De La Soul’s listeners couldn’t discover the group’s older and foundational work. Even when “The Magic Number” became a pop culture touchstone – appearing in Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021 – the song wasn’t available to stream until two years later.

“However your music is available, whether it’s through streaming or being played in a movie or TV show, it becomes the soundtrack for someone’s life to make our catalog continue to matter. Not only to the people who were there from the beginning, but the younger people who come on later,” Mercer says.

Despite the challenges, Cabin in the Sky maintains De La Soul’s signature sound. The title track blends a Moog synthesizer riff with vocals from Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” Over that patchwork, Mercer reflects on Jolicoeur’s passing, the broader ache of losing loved ones, and his own mortality. “Still in disbelief, lost my brother Dave // But what keeps me sane from the grief // Is to stay rooted in if the winds gets severe // Every line in the song holds love in the tears,” he raps.

Mercer says he’s been moved by listener reactions, many of whom find the song deeply relatable. “When I wrote those rhymes I was crying. You know it’s therapy. And I’m glad that people feel that it can be therapy for them as well.”

Cabin in the Sky is De La Soul honoring what was, embracing what is, and carrying forward the magic that – even now – remains unbreakably three.

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Lauren Frayer

Lauren Frayer covers South Asia for NPR News. In 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.

She has covered the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the aftermath of Sri Lanka's civil war and the power of a 19^th century short story to combat racism against Afghan refugees. In 2019, she met the Dalai Lama at his monastery in northern India, and reported on the sticky geopolitics of who decides his successor. On Mahatma Gandhi's 150^th birthday, Frayer examined how his legacy has changed.

When a 6-year-old Indian girl died of heat stroke on the U.S.-Mexico border, Frayer traced her path back to the Punjab, met her grieving grandparents – and uncovered a smuggling ring responsible for a 10,000% spike in the number of Indians detained on that border. For a year, Frayer followed an interfaith couple whose wedding plans were upended by 'Love Jihad' – an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that's now law in several Indian states.

In 2022, Frayer was awarded the Overseas Press Club of America's Lowell Thomas Award for her coverage of India's COVID-19 outbreak, and a Gracie Award for coverage of India's farmer protests.

Frayer reported on caste discrimination for a 2020 episode of NPR's Rough Translation podcast, and is working on a new podcast about love marriage in India.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Frayer was in the first batch of NPR reporters to cross from Poland into the embattled country. She chronicled the flow of Ukrainian refugees out, and military volunteers in. She also reported on the surprisingly long history of Ukrainian women in combat, a spiritual revolt among Orthodox Christians and how Ukrainian rock stars are turning their trauma into art.

Before moving to India, Frayer was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.

In Europe, Frayer profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. In the fall of 2015, Frayer spent two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.

Farther afield, she has introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.

Frayer has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.

Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq.

On a break from journalism, Frayer drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.

Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Frayer holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.

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