Once Again, John Legend presents soulful recursion at its best… with no end in sight.
Rarely did Legend’s debut, the platinum-selling Get Lifted, display the sort of raw vocal virtuosity associated with male soul greats. There’s something implacably aged in his vocals, a slightly ragged, geriatric quality that doesn’t always assuage the listener’s ear. If Legend’s voice isn’t the always the most enticing, he and his collaborators know exactly how to nest, layer, and counterbalance it to produce powerful, polished numbers. Fittingly, Get Lifted surpassed much of new millennium male soul albums with the precision of its glorious arrangements.
On the technical side of things, Once Again picks up where Get Lifted left off: argue with the songwriting on early cuts like “Heaven” and “Each Day Gets Better,” but not with their structures. Pleasantly surprising, however, is the expanded vocal range Legend displays this time around. Who knew he had a slightly raspy, trembling falsetto (“Show Me,” as touching as “Stay with You,” with extra heartbreak on the side)? Who knew he could give Sam Cooke a run for his money on some o-runs? I’ve long referred to Cooke as “The Master of the Sung-‘O’”: dig up an old cut like “Only Sixteen” and listen to how he drags out the ever important vowels (“with eyes that would glooooo-OOO-www”). Legend still can’t touch Cooke note-for-note, but he tries his damnedest to surpass the past master on “Slow Dance.”
“I propose / That we go / To the flo’ / And we sloooooooooooooooooooooooooow
dance… Let the music make you mOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOve.”
Hat’s off.
Legend’s lyrics and trademark piano accompaniments still occasionally cross the line from smooth to schmaltz (“Coming Home”). Nevertheless, his words can now vie with his arrangements. At the heart of the album is Legend’s on-going, self-reflexive preoccupation with the writer’s dream: the hope that, with a few artful twirls of the pen, straight lines can be bent into perfect circles. From the frame-breaking, album-opening meta-entrée, “Save Room” to the penultimate pleas of “Another Again,” he all but begs the listener to return over and over, layering listening upon relistening in an unending loop of soul.
Legend v.Once Again is a figure sick not just with love – who among his many peers and predecessors wouldn’t fit that description? – but moreso with the always near-graspable possibility of completion and permanence achieved through words. If only, Once Again suggests, one could find the words – and arrange them just so – that would make further words worthless, that would entice another to enter and stay on forever – so that one could finally rest knowing
“It’s not over, there’s another again.”
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