Album Review: Love You, Mean It by Patrick Paige II
A relationship album that mistakes the recording booth for a confession booth. It survives the mistake as every lyric tells on the man in the booth.
“I wanna make us a team, but I wanna be ref.” Patrick Paige II sings that line on “Let Me Down Easy,” wanting the partnership and the whistle inside it. He’d rather be wrong about himself out loud than right about himself quietly. The same song piles on more apology-shaped writing, “I’m a work in progress, overthink and stress,” “I done held the mirror up to people, now it’s time to face mine,” and a familiar criticism comes for any record this confessional, that self-flagellation is its own avoidance. Yet the ref couplet won’t soften. Most love songs would not say a thing that uncomfortable about wanting both partnership and authority over a partner, and once a writer says it once on a record this confessional, no other apology gets to play innocent.
Between his first love song and his first solo verse, Paige wedges a public service announcement. Supastar J Kwik hands down “Free Game” with the cadence of a radio uncle, addressing “all the lover boys, lover girls, and the hopeless romantics” before offering this navigation aid: “Feelings are not facts, they aren’t/They’re merely a compass, they are/Your GPS, so to speak, to take us places on our romantic journey.” This skit reroutes before any heartache occurs. With that warning cued up, every song that follows sounds like a case study the singer is running on himself, not a confession he’s offering to anyone in particular, which is a sharp move for a relationship album to make earlier on.
On “Cash That Receipt,” a flex chorus does the love writing better than the soft apology can. Paige raps “I got the bands, where the cash at, receipts/Finest fleet, small amounts to me,” and the boast spills into a love bar at the bottom: “You got me hooked up/’Cause you’re good with me, down when we kissin’.” Money talk doing love work (a register the soft songs can’t reach without sounding pious). Over on “Lemon/I’ll Gas I’ll Ride,” with ForteBowie crowding the back third before Charlie Myles drops a spoken outro, Paige sings “I love when you say you’re the one I wanted/Feeling is the same” with more conviction than any of the self-improvement couplets stacked nearby. Swagger does the love work here, not the soft apology a few tracks back.
Mid-city Los Angeles, “Intermission,” a singer walking back onto his own block after time away. The verse opens, “Spent some time in Caribou when it’s all through/I had to fly the coop, landed back up in my roots,” noting Drake’s Toronto, then leaving it behind for “Mid-city stepping, I ain’t down south of green/Still gonna rep the team, make a west side scene.” “It’s a mess, but I’ma still represent the west,” he repeats four times before a spoken outro cuts in: “King of hearts, cuz, grab my hand.” Bass walks underneath each pass of the hook. On the last one, his voice slips half a step into the spoken bit, like he’s saying it more to his block than to a listener.
Paige has a pilot’s license off the page. He built 2021’s If I Fail Are We Still Cool? around in-flight announcement skits, seventeen tracks, on Fat Possum. His 2018 debut Letters of Irrelevance was made about the death of his mother and a sister grown distant. That pacing instinct has been retooled into three interludes (DKWTCI Interlude, Intermission, Lmde Interlude) plus the Supastar J Kwik skit, and the cockpit has been swapped for a kitchen table. Bass duties on the album are his own, and that choice keeps every track from sounding programmed. “Free Game”’s GPS line now sounds like a callback that knows it’s a callback. Same architecture, lower altitude.
On “Real Talk,” the radio uncle is back. Kwik says, “You gotta be real with yourself before you attempt to be real with anyone else/If you ain’t gon’ stand on all ten with or without them, why stand at all?” Self-knowledge has to come first, and no outside party can fill in what’s missing inside. Hard to dispute that premise. Then the same instruction turns outward, “Better learn yourself again with me,” “Better trust yourself again with me,” “trust you more than me,” and the partner gets asked to do the work he’s been doing on himself. He’s still inside that loop. In verse three, “How many songs I gotta write?” sounds exhausted, addressed at once to a woman in the song and to the bass in his hands. He answers the question by writing one more.
Pink Siifu’s voice on “Panorama” runs hot and gravelly, ad-libs crowding the bar lines until the count starts to wobble. His guest verse messes up its host on the host’s own song, and Paige lets it happen. Where Paige raps “Panorama vision/Ain’t no pressure, just reflection when I’m in the picture,” Siifu raps “I was outside tryna get money/Shit, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go/That nigga do whatever I tell him” and blows the lid off. Both trade nearly identical lines about what people don’t see on the surface, but Siifu’s read goes paranoid and combative where his host’s goes patient, and Paige sounds relieved someone came in hot enough to mess up his composure.
“In my thirties with success, I’m twenty-two year old stressed,” he raps on “Thinkingalot,” couped up like a mob with the nostalgia, running miles on the road. He logs futures he can’t pray into shape, a love that rearranges itself daily, an algorithm he won’t praise since he’s busy praising himself. Permission to flow in peace gets asked for in the middle of the trenches, and the noise refuses to cease. Then a line: “All them other thoughts deceased, I finally found the peace/That piece of me that I was looking for in other shit.” Bass holds the room underneath while mid-city goes quiet around it. His partner sits this one out.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Cash That Receipt,” “Real Talk,” “Thinkingalot”