composed by Erykah Badu, Vikter Duplaix, and James Poyser
Despite the lengths she and her collaborators went to make this album sound like a throwback of sorts (not counting the scratchy-78 put-on that opens this track), Badu’s second album is very much the opposite, and one of its great pleasures is how it unassumingly obliges you to catch up to it well before you realize the effort was necessary. Another pleasure is the way the ambition of this ten-minute closing opus is validated by its modesty. Her ex hooks up with a "new friend," and familiarly she suddenly finds her rational thought entirely non-responsive. "I'm insecure," she admits, but not so much that she cannot get across what her inability to know what she feels actually feels like. Her voice rises only to cue structural transitions within the three discrete, rhythmically distinct (and equally gorgeous) songs that are interlaced together here. Although there are no words in this song that you have not heard before (or lived through), not excluding the lines that directly contradict what she has just said, this song - wrapped around her own vocal idiosyncrasies - is just about unique in making it possible to have all of these words in one place.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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