Jasmine Sullivan popped onto the music scene late last year with “Need U Bad”, which I had heard while listening to The Wendy Williams Experience, but she really didn’t catch my attention until her second single was releasted, “Bust Your Windows”. It’s a brilliant, attention-getting song, and it definitely piqued my interest. I bought the card copy (people keep giving me book-store gift cards), and I was thrilled to see that the lyrics were included. I wasn’t so thrilled to see how much cheaper Fearless is on iTunes ($7.99) or that there was an album-only bonus track (“Best of Me”) that wasn't on my CD.
Sullivan’s album starts off with the second single, “Bust Your Windows”. The intro is a a string trill and descending scale, which immediately sets it apart from anything on the R&B charts. With the syncopated walking (string!) bass line, the minimal percussion (scratch, snap, clap), and unison string riffs (no harmony), the instrumental itself is pretty brilliant. Props to producer Salaam Remi. The first lyric stopped me in my tracks and demanded my undivided attention: “I bust the windows out your car.” The track doesn’t adopt the common practice of double tracking the background vocals (this makes them sound more smooth and blended), giving it a Miseducation of Lauryn Hill or early Missy Elliot (when she was singing) feel. 
One of my favorite moments in the song is when it takes a break for a descending tango line in the strings between verses. I’m not a fan of the word “but” being held over two notes in the chorus (lazy songwriting). 2nd verse adds a kick drum and more background vocals (which have clever interplay with the bass phrasing) to keep it building. In fact, throughout the song, the background vocals are constantly changing. Whereas the first verse seems calm and rational (despite the lyrics), Sullivan seems to flash back to her emotional state when she committed the act in question. I’d kill to see her sing this live. There doesn’t seem to be much of a bridge in the song; it’s mostly ad-libbing followed by a vamp by the background vocals and more ad-libbing. The Soulja Boy reference at the end always makes me giggle, but they had to pay him royalties for it (I still say Soulja Boy is a genius). The funny thing about the chorus is that it sounds like an extension of a verse. There's nothing extremely catchy about this song except for the first line (which acts like a 2-bar refrain).
Next up is the albums lead single, “Need U Bad”. Please tell me why hip hop still insists replacing “you” with “U”? That’s almost as bad as actually typing “dat” or “da”. Anyway, Missy Elliot produced this smooth reggae track (she’s also an executive producer for Fearless). One thing that bothers me about this track is the noticeable shift from the old-sounding quality of the Tapper Zukie sample in the verse and the newly composed chorus instrumental. I feel like this could have been avoided by applying a filter to the instrumental before laying down the vocals. Unless that’s what Missy was going for. Anyway, Sullivan gets points for pulling off the classic audience participation on the bridge without sounding corny (like a certain N’sync alum’s song “Señorita”).
“My Foolish Heart” almost has a jug-band sounding intro with a riff that’s doubled in muffled electric guitar and bass. And there’s a Beyoncé “Freakum Dress” type “oh-oh”, which is a sure way to win me over! Once the full track comes in, it almost sounds like a Method Man/WuTang track. It’s definitely sample-heavy. I love the clever songwriting technique she uses in repeating a word rather than dragging it out or having a silence in the line. It’s almost undetectable. The song builds to a very unique bridge where the background vocals sing broken syllables on each beat (think the chorus of Ne-yo’s “I Just Can’t Stop”). She does a very cool lead vocal technique where she echoes each syllable in the pauses between each syllable on the first of two iterations of the bridge (I wonder if that was part of the original composition or something she threw in later). On the second iteration, she adds some really cool chords, but they’re hard to figure out because they’re so staccato. 
“Lions, Tigers & Bears” was the third single. And how can you go wrong with plucked strings and 6/8 meter (counted in 3s instead of twos, like the National Anthem… the original arrangement, as opposed to every “unique” arrangement that thinks it’s revolutionary to change it to 4/4…)! And there’s no percussion. The instrumentation is all muted instruments except for unison strings in the background. Producer Rami samples his own previous work for this track ($$$). The words kind of remind me of Temptations’ “Can’t Get Next to You” in their extreme hyperbole. This song has an amazing bridge that has some very unpredictable chord changes. It reminds me of a classic movie soundtrack (perhaps a scene with two loves being reunited) with the flourish of strings. The bridge’s words serve the classic purpose of a bridge: confronting the conflict presented in the rest of the song. It’s also 16 bars, which is unusually long in pop/R&B music. Rami puts extreme reverb on everything, which makes it play like a dream sequence. And when the song cuts out on an unfinished chord it feels like it’s being cut short like dream often are.
The instrumental for “Call Me Guilty” starts out with obvious urgency in the echoy piano and the cymbal-heavy percussion. A conversation between a woman and her mother following an incidence of domestic violence plays over this soundtrack. “I’m‘a kill ‘em!” She starts the song in the lower part of her vocal range, and we’ve heard very little of this register so far. She sounds very much like Faith Evans. It’s interesting to hear a break beat (think Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” or Amerie’s “One Thing”) under a fully orchestrated track (both those songs are mostly just the break beat punctuated by heavy horns). The verses are very choppy; the producer recorded almost every phrase in separate takes and layered the end of each phrase over the beginning of the next phrase. So there’s no breaths. As odd as that sounds, it makes sense as a creative choice for this song.
“One Night Stand” sounds totally acoustic except for the electronic clap layered on the snare. Its’ a break from all the dramatic reverb on the last two tracks as her voice has a much more natural sound here. The vamping piano and the classic syncopation in the drum set make this a very cool track, and the non-double-tracked vocals add to the live-performance feel of the song. To visualize the words of this song, think Lil Kim or Trina falling for a guy they were trying to play. “After the Hurricane” sounds like a mid-90s R&B track. This song uses great symbolism, paralleling an approaching break up to a hurricane. Unlike many songs I’ve listened to recently, this song’s best instrumental section is its chorus. Mainly because the percussion is so uninteresting and unsophisticated and the rest of the instrumentation is significantly superior as it builds during the chorus. With this song, we don’t lose the hot percussion (because it doesn’t exist) for disappointing power chords (which happened quite often on Lady Gaga’s album). Stargate (the production team, also known for "Please Don't Stop the Music" by Rihanna among other hits), are you guys doing this on purpose or should you have hired an engineer for this one?
“This is a Jazmin Exclusive”. Missy brings us back to Back to Under Construction in her intro to “Dream Big”. This song is trying really hard to be hot (hip-hop fog horn, the instrumental stops in the verse). The weird cheap-sounding flute doesn’t do it for me. The track is another example of how hard it is to make an inspirational be a club banger. And her final vocalizations on the end of the track don’t sound final at all. It just sounds like someone tripped over a cord and unplugged her mic.
“Live a Lie” sounds like a very old sample, but it’s Rami’s work sampled again. This is quite a regretful song, saying, “If a lie gon’ get me through/ I’d rather not know the truth.” The end of the 2nd verse has very catchy repetition that speaks to the clever songwriting skills of either Sullivan or Rami. Rami uses the same filter on the lead vocal on the bridge as he does on the background vocals on the chorus, which creates the slight illusion of another singer stepping up from behind to take over.
The credits for “Fear” are a long list, including 12 songwriters (the last of which is Stevie Wonder). Upon further reading, one sees that 10 of these 12 songwriters were listed because they wrote one of the 3 works that this song samples (and of course one of them is from a previous song by Rami). These are the lowest vocals we’ve heard from Sullivan yet, and she even half speaks the lowest notes. She lists a bunch of fears and reasons behind those fears, juxtaposing the seemingly ridiculous with the more believable. Then she brilliantly puts it into perspective: “so don’t pretend it ain’t you too… ‘cause you ain’t human without fear.” In the place of a bridge is an instrumental break with some background vocals. The song sails to a close on a chorus of “hey”s and vamping strings. Did anybody notice an ever-so-slight skip in the instrumental at 3:37 where the kick drum drops out?
“In Love with Another Man” is a painfully honest song from the first line. The lyrics portray the irrationality of love. The track starts out with only a sparse piano accompaniment, soon joined by soft oos and, later, unison strings. The second verse goes back to where it started instrumentally, but soon adds punctuation in the background vocals and a brief organ flourish followed by a dramatic timpani (those big bass orchestral drums) roll. The tension in the (very dramatic) bridge is carried by the piano, and the vocals (with long organ chords under). She stays in the lower register of her voice for the first 2:40 of the song, which, as a performer, is hard to make oneself do. But her restraint pays off because it makes the last half of the bridge that much more dramatic when she finally goes into her belt. It actually feels like a top-notch church performance with the simple (yet well-done) accompaniment. She ends the bridge with a really-high-head-voice-but-not-whistle-register note. Usually I hate those, but she does it very well. It has a similar effect to Lauryn Hill’s actual whistle-register note at the end of “Zion”. There’s an odd 15 seconds of silence at the end. Not sure if that’s a mastering mistake or to emphasize that the next track is a “bonus track” (remember hidden tracks?). 
“Switch!” is a hilariously honest song. It has a very 50s feel in the track with this clap over the snare drum and the marching piano (not far from Solange’s style). Even the way she says “store” and “more” in the first couplet reads “old-school, corny teenager who would say ‘swell’ as she’s sipping on her milkshake at the diner.” The spoken part in the middle of the song definitely supports the throw-back styling of the song. The bridge, with it’s staccato background vocals singing in the 3rd person (as if they were performing as a group crowded around a microphone and pointing to their lead singer), made me laugh out loud, especially since Sullivan does all her background vocals.This is such a solid album! She definitely deserved the 5 Grammy nominations (most of them not for new-artist categories, mind you). Really, there’s only one song that I don’t like. Sullivan gets primary writing credits on every single track, and she even got a secondary producer credit (on the grammy-nominated “In Love with Another Man”). I’d love to see her perform live because so many of these songs are written for live performance (something that’s becoming more and more rare in pop music). Sullivan’s lyrics are honest and relatable. Sometimes she says what you were thinking but wouldn’t dare to say out loud, and she makes it sound good. But this Rami guy seems a little shady. Maybe I’m a purist, but there seems to be an ethical question with producing a song and sampling your own previous work (which the label has to pay you to license), especially when it happens on every track you produce. But the guy knew what he was doing because he had a big hand in making this album so good.
Suggested tracks:
“Bust Your Windows”
“Lions, Tigers, and Bears”
“Call Me Guilty”
“One Night Stand”
“In Love with Another Man”
“Switch!”
Maybe:
Basically everything but “Dream Big”… and maybe “Live a Lie”.
Check out my review of Solange's latest here.
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