Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, the debut album from vocalist Liv.e, is like a series of thought bubbles you can hear. This raw, loose, and sometimes shapeless exploration of the R&B form feels like it’s mapping the mind, but instead of diagramming a brain under love’s thrall, it traces the idle musings in the margins. It understands that romance isn’t all dialogue, overtures, and sex; a lot of it is waiting, awkward silences, and deciding what to text back and when. Sung, spoken, and rapped, these delightful songs exude personality. They explore anticipation, longing, eagerness, hesitation, indecision—the in-between moments, when love is passive, when you’re making up your mind, when you’re ready or anxious. Liv.e performs each state of being with skill, sounding more and more confident in her voice.
The Dallas-raised, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, rapper, and producer has eclectic taste. She started her career as a DJ at Dolfin Records, and early mixes on her SoundCloud demonstrate a fascination with the alt rap underground (Knxwledge, Mndsgn, etc.). The turntablist impulse to create something new using familiar components also informs the music she makes as Liv.e, pulling from classic soul, neo soul, jazz, and hip-hop. Her breakout project, the 10.4 ROG-produced ::hoopdreams::, earned her a few famous fans (Erykah Badu and Earl Sweatshirt), but Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is far more evolved. She wrote and recorded it in a month while staying with her mother in St. Louis, and she describes its songs as pages out of a diary representing the perspectives of different characters she made up.
But the 20 tracks feel less like diary entries and more like snippets from an anthology. Their episodic structure resembles the prismatic Whack World; even when the songs sound unrelated, they are still bound by a shared aesthetic vision. Fleeting and intense yet somehow interconnected, they share a sort of dream logic. Several are under 90 seconds; some play with mantra, others with structure. The whimsical elevator Muzak of “Lessons From My Mistakes...but I Lost Your Number” eventually transforms into a groovy upright bass riff as Liv.e explains the concept of entropy. Many songs do not have hooks; they just settle until they dissolve. “About Love at 21” bleeds seamlessly into “She’s My Brand New Crush.” The fluidity of her mindset mirrors the fluidity with which she transitions between rich soul soundscapes.
Many songs are co-produced by experimental jazz looper mejiwahn and multi-instrumentalist Daoud Anthony, producer on Saba’s CARE FOR ME and composer of music for the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project. The music fits somewhere on the spectrum with Nick Hakim’s smelting psychedelic soul, SAULT’s revolutionary synth-funk, and KeiyaA’s third-eye R&B reflections. Liv.e’s sound is unique in its adherence to lo-fi beatmaker aesthetics and reimagining of throwback R&B vibes. The songs on ::hoopdreams:: seemed to smudge together into a continuous 16-minute track, but Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is full of distinctive moments that form a whole. And Liv.e is much surer of herself as a performer, centering her ideas as much as her taste.
Her writing is casual, sometimes bearing the informal tone of an internal monologue, sometimes conversational and curious. Her songs peer into specific scenarios, capturing feelings the way emojis do—with hyper-specific gestures and expressions. There’s the novelty of a crush; the empowering freedom of finally moving on; the certainty that someone is The One (“I want this to last forever more!” she sings on “You the One Fish in the Sea”); the ambivalence of not wanting to pursue a lover, but remaining hopeful that they care enough to close the distance themselves. “I stopped calling, you was acting kinda funny/You expected me to act all types of bubbly,” she sings on “LazyEaterBetsOnHerLikeness.” “I can’t play myself because I’m not over you/I’ma choose myself, I hope that you choose me too.” What might initially scan as a scatterbrained or unrefined approach to songwriting is actually a subtle consideration of several interlinked headspaces.
The storytelling comes into sharper focus than on Liv.e’s previous projects, but the greatest developments on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You are her execution and vocal technique. She has spoken in the past about warping her vocals as if they were a beat in Ableton and getting real “sciencey” with effects, and here it is as if she knows just what is required at a given time. The raw harmonies of “I Been Livin” spill out over the quiet knock of the beat, the reverb echoing across the distorted piano. The spoken-word flows unravel into the spacey production during “Cut to the Chase.” On “How She Stay Conflicted...i Hope He Understands,” she duets with the sample. Her singing has garnered comparisons to Badu and Tweet, but throughout Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e is becoming an unmistakable and singular artist. Even when it feels like we’re merely privy to what’s inside her head, her thoughts resonate outward.
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