Enough with being mad, I wanna cut to…
[Video]
[7.86]
[8]
Josh Winters: The way Steve Lacy isolates a fracturing dynamic here has a sultry familiarity to it. It feels less like a polished R&B torch song and more like sitting on a porch in the late-summer heat, watching a sudden downpour hit the asphalt — that specific second the air thickens and you know, deep in your gut, that everything’s about to shift. Coming off the maximalist charm of his past era, “The Feeling” operates on a propulsive loop of visceral friction. Instead of an insular acoustic retreat, crisp drums, a prominent synth bassline, and soaring violin arrangements carry the track forward, driving a sprawling panic straight into the open. Lacy has always had an incisive knack for turning the exhausting minutiae of yearning into an art form, but here, the exhaustion is the whole point. When he steps back to let those unvarnished questions hang in the air — “Am I your baby?” — the song drops its guard completely. It captures the erratic nature of a frantic late-night crisis, tripping in an Airbnb where any semblance of a logical boundary was surrendered from the very start. It’s a messy but tender piece of total obsession that refuses to apologize for its vulnerability, recognizing that sometimes survival just means letting yourself feel the devastation.
[9]
Julian Axelrod: Steve Lacy’s superpower is making technical proficiency sound effortlessly casual. But “The Feeling” is his most nakedly ambitious song yet, piling squelchy synths and ghostly vocal wisps into a leaning tower of bisexual panic. Yet Lacy’s vocal is his most earnest and tender to date, the backing choir of Wailing Steves undercutting any shred of irony in his pleas for connection. He’s not making beats on his iPhone anymore, but he still sounds like a lost little kid looking for his place in the world. (Maybe that’s because the chorus sounds like he’s singing, “Am I a baby???”)
[8]
Taylor Alatorre: I love how pathetic he can make himself sound! The central question, “Am I your baby?”, would be a tragic one in most contexts, not just because it implies a possible “no,” but because the mere existence of the question points painfully toward that answer. For Lacy, though, the question is a godsend, because the mirror image of the possible “no” is the possible “yes,” something which refuses to show its face anywhere else in the song. He latches on to that possibility in his besotted refusal to admit defeat, even as the descending vocal hook that opens the song would seem to know the score before Lacy does. The progressive specificity of the lyrics, from gauzy generalities like “down to the wire” to pre-COVID Airbnb interaries, mirrors the go-for-broke desperation of the narrator, who’s “heart’s on [his] sleeve but it don’t even matter.” It’s the kind of emotional honesty that makes me not mind the deriviative sound–no time to be tracing out influences when you’re thumbing through past regrets.
[8]
Ian Mathers: I don’t know whether Steve Lacy is a one-hit wonder to the wider world (or even if he properly had a hit), but between bouncing off the rest of Gemini Rights and finding this one pleasant but inessential, for me he definitely is. I just kind of want to relisten to “Bad Habit,” y’know? Except when one stretch a few minutes in suddenly reminds me of Thieves’ “Unworthy” and now I really just want to play “Unworthy” instead. So I do!
[6]
Alfred Soto: Imagine Miguel cooing over the space and backing track a decade ago, even doubling the harmonies himself; he’d savor the saccharine melody. Steve Lacy does well enough and it sounds good on the radio.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Steve Lacy comfortably fits into the Al Green/Maxwell/Miguel lane (one in which Malcolm Todd, his Tommy Richman/Eminem/Teena Marie, is trying to interlope), where his plaintive and bright voice, though not strong, is allowed the lush, vivid assemblages of synths, guitar, bass and drum programming, the backing of Alice Smith and the additional dabbling of Nightfeelings. But ultimately this is a Steve Lacy song, one that possesses the historical context and musical lushness he has been displaying since his arrival in 2013 as part of the Internet and then in 2017 as a solo artist. It is genuinely stunning he has achieved such a pointed and distinct voice by his late 20’s. But why, exactly, is this voice so appealing? It’s that fragility. Whenever he layers and stacks his voice, it still contains that fragility, but somehow intensifies it, makes it appear more crumpled and wrinkled, pressed so close it can have the weight and durability he is aiming for. And as for his lead vocal, it’s soft, lean and plaintive, co-writer Matthew Castellanos adding the pathos and tenderness Lacy and Smith are assembling, worryingly, to a much more vivid and crushing effect (compare “if I could wish for anything, i would all come back around” to “the heart takes what it wants, I’m not scared to bleed, you know our history.” Who are Lacy and Castellanos fooling by letting Todd embarrass himself next to the genuine article?) that sucks you in for that gut punch of “am I your baby?” There is the vulnerability that so many black male musicians are terrified of showing in the slightest, since our vulnerability is a weakness that allows for our abuse or death. But here is Steve, foolishly, fruitlessly, desperately, bravely opening up and allowing us to harm him. But we are too afraid, too afraid to love him, to love ourselves back. Am i your baby? No, you can’t be. I can’t face the failure of dropping you. You’re too fragile, you might not survive.
[10]