So we should probably have put this up before the other one, but never mind…
[Video]
[5.83]
Martin Skidmore: It’s easy to forget that Nate made some singles where he wasn’t ‘ft’ – just five in a 17 year career, only three of them hits. This was the first of those hits. It’s hard to hear him as a lead voice, weirdly – his low, slightly nasal tones are so familiar as backing and hooks that it seems misplaced. This is a rather sleepy single, Snoop sounding very low-key on his guest verse.
[5]
Anthony Easton: This is my first time listening to Nate Dogg, but I want to listen to these as an exercise in expanding my range. There is something so sweet in this, profoundly lonely, and though it suffers from generalizing language (the woman he cannot live without does not have a name), the intensity of the emotional isolation is profound.
[8]
Asher Steinberg: Unsurprisingly, this Nate solo consists of a great hook and some completely aimless verses that sound like something I might come up with in the shower. However, the whole thing is unusually poignant for Nate, and young Snoop’s verse displays his rarely exercised but always quite effective sensitive side.
[6]
Al Shipley: Never heard this back when it was a hit, and somehow I don’t feel like I was missing much. Some nice keyboards coming in around the second verse, but they don’t quite outshine that shrill, ugly snare drum, and earnest midtempo is not my favorite mode to hear Nate in.
[5]
Alfred Soto: A rare example from the period of Snoop evoking seventies R&B (c/o a Roberta Flack sample) with an ease his colleague can’t match.
[5]
Ian Mathers: I really thought this was going to be more like Local H’s “Keep Your Girlfriend” (as in, “away from me”), because certainly most of these songs suggest that any woman having a putatively monogamous relationship with Nate ought to keep her eyes peeled. But nope, “Never Leave Me Alone” is an outright sentimental family/jail narrative, Nate fretting over the days when he won’t have a hit and Snoop contemplating the rest of his life in jail. The production is a little colourless, but there are enough grace notes here to elevate the whole thing a bit.
[6]