It Was Good Until It Wasn’t

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“This album was so many albums before it was this one,” Kehlani tells Apple Music of <i>It Was Good Until It Wasn't</i>. Yet her second proper studio album arrives perfectly suited for this moment that is filled with uncertainty—when so many are taking stock of the things we often take for granted and yearning for closeness we can't have, whether due to physical or emotional separation. As she aptly sums up in the initial seconds of “Toxic,” the slick opening track, “I get real accountable when I'm alone.” A central and familiar theme emerges early: the eternal war between need and want, between the sentimental and the carnal. Songs like “Can I,” a lurid come-on, and “Water,” an astrological seduction, smolder with sexual appetite that masquerades as control and confidence. But she offsets the posture in turns—“Hate the Club,” gilded by Masego's golden saxophone line, is passive-aggressive; “Can You Blame Me” reflects the push-pull of desire at odds with pride, and “Open (Passionate)” portrays the insecurity of emotional nakedne. Taken together, it's a revelation about how easily, as she proclaims on “F&MU,” “'I hate you' turns into 'I love you' in the bedroom.” But the whole picture isn't one that is so neat or simple; the album's real feat is its depiction of how we are all many things at once, often contradictory but sincere nonethele. Kehlani's rendering of the personal as universal is a matter of course, but it's when she mines her experiences with unblinking specificity that she becomes transcendent. “I'm kind of in a relationship that has put me in a space of almost processing my parents a little bit,” the Oakland-born singer say, adding that her father passed away from a “gang-related situation” when she was young. “I started diving into [that] headspace with the music I was making.” That link emerges most explicitly on “Bad New,” one of the album's most poignant performance, which finds her pleading with a lover to choose her over a lifestyle which threatens to pull them apart. Kehlani has always been powerful when she's vulnerable—the essence and through line of her music is in the way she allows that which makes her weak to make her strong again. .

via Apple Music

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