Album Review: Confessions of a People Pleaser by CJ Monét
Her debut hands the first words on the record to her late grandmother. Everything that follows is written under that supervision.
Jean leaves the first voicemail her granddaughter has ever opened an album with, and Jean signs off “Okay, later, love ya.” After a piano figure carries Jean’s absence over, the granddaughter sings her own way into “The Wheel” with “Hello, hey/My name is CJ, and I’m learnin’ how to find my way/But I keep fallin’ down, down, down to the ground.” A daughter introduces herself under the gaze of the woman who introduced her first.
Before the music caught up, Monét filed her work as a painter at the Durham studio. Now that off-true instinct comes pre-loaded in her writing. Bookkeeping becomes the way into “Come Get Me,” where her count of past hurts shows up as “three or four times, babe/And I can’t take no more.” Three or four. A round number would have been cleaner, but the vagueness keeps the count honest, since that is how heartbreak gets remembered.
Inside the song’s wind-down, Monét’s demand shrinks further: “Buy me some flowers and I’ll be fine./Just take me to dinner and let me know that you’re mine.” Another singer would have inflated the ask. She sings her way smaller instead. “Buy me some flowers” is the whole demand on one line. “Just take me to dinner” is the whole demand on the next. When she lands on “Let me know you’re mine,” the interior life of the woman in the title sits inside that one quiet repetition.
A lover is church at first on “Serotonin.” “You feel like church to me/Meet me at the altar and you’ll get what you need.” Monét holds the chemical metaphor through both verses, dopamine on her mind, serotonin on her lips, a partner lighting fires inside the same room they are being asked to put them out. By the closing chorus, the altar has been emptied. “I keep coming to your altar and I leave feeling empty.” Her cleanest reversal on the record, and the closest a contemporary R&B singer has come this year to writing a faith song that is actually about losing one.
Halfway through “Lucid Dreaming,” Sonny Miles arrives with his own subject already in his mouth, and the duet refuses to adjust to accommodate him. Monét’s verse is a love song catching anxiety from the room around her (“Panic in the air”). Miles answers in political speech: “Why for freedom must we cry?/They cycle same statements/It’s all lies, know we tired.” His pledge stays direct. “I know the truth, you’re my neighbor, protect you/Know we share love, share life/And if they take you, they took mine/And I’ll stay guard ’til the sunrise.” Her bridge refuses the obligation to translate: “I don’t know how to fix what’s going on/But I know I’m holding on to you.” Two voices stay in separate rooms, yet she keeps her love song her own next to Miles’s protest.
Her writing goes thin on “Living For” in a way none of the previous songs permitted for more than a single line at a time. “We’re really all the same just behind separate skins and separate doors/You just gotta find what you’re livin’ for.” A travelogue line, “Been to twenty-eight countries and I’ve seen it all before,” gets filed where the lyric did not need filling. Up against the precision of “three or four times” and the small ask of “Buy me some flowers and I’ll be fine,” “Living For” reads as inspirational poster. Still, ten songs of specific evidence hold the line against this one closer becoming a fatal wound.
Inside “Face the Music,” four self-indictments arrive in a row without consolation: “Why can’t I just face myself?/I’m my own worst enemy/I struggle to ask for help/I judge myself too harshly.” Leeville drops in for a verse and keeps Monét on her subject. Then she piles on with “I let the devil talk on my shoulder for too long/Never let the angel sing her song.” Up against this hook, Monét’s earlier reaches locate the image they were searching for, an image that does the work her Lion King line could not: “I pray I’m not the bee that drowns in her honey.”
On “Too Late,” the granddaughter draws her boundary in plain language. “I must be speaking French ‘cause it’s not making sense to you.” Then a clock starts ticking: “How long do you think that I can keep holding on and on and on?” She asks the question once and lets the answer hang. Ten songs after the message that opened the record, she has learned the line she has to say back. “I don’t wanna keep holding on and on and on and on and on.”
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Serotonin,” “Face the Music,” “Too Late”