Album Review: Talk to Her Like This by Alvin Garrett
A Tuscaloosa preacher’s son turns his father’s pillow talk into a ten-song manual for grown men. Alvin Garrett built a concept record about talking to women. It earns its sincerity.
There is a memory underneath every song on this record. A boy in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, watching his father speak to his mother. Not shouting, not performing, not reciting something borrowed from a greeting card. Just talking to her. The boy, Alvin Garrett, a preacher’s kid who’d been handed his first bass guitar at eleven and grew up between quartet gospel and his uncle’s Earth, Wind & Fire records, kept watching. He kept listening. He eventually asked his father about romance and chivalry, and what came back was simple enough to carry into adulthood and specific enough to title a record. Son, talk to her like this. Garrett’s fifth studio LP takes that sentence and lays it across ten tracks, each one a different angle on the same instruction. He’s a Grammy-nominated songwriter who co-founded the band that gave Ruben Studdard a stage before American Idol found him, and he’s spent decades writing songs for other people. Joe, Kelly Rowland, Fantasia, Johnny Gill, and others. Talk to Her Like This is where he finally turned the notebook back toward himself.
The title cut is the record’s most direct moment. A woman’s smile, Garrett warns, may be camouflage. She may dress up the damage if you mess things up, and you might never notice. The instruction is plain: touch more than her body, massage her heart, look her in the eyes, grab her by the hands, and talk to her. The rest of the number goes further. Tell her you’re listening, tell her you’re more than a lover, tell her you’re her friend, tell her she’s beautiful, tell her you’ll catch her if she falls. It could scan as preachy from someone else, but Garrett writes it as fatherly, a guy passing something along because somebody passed it to him first. “When You Step Away” picks up from a different position. Garrett opens with a spoken admission that his mind has been elsewhere, that he’s seemed distant, and assures the woman she’s his top priority. The rest of the tune says he misses her even when she’s gone for a moment. One line from late in the track cuts clean:
“Like a dollar short one quarter, that’s how much I miss you.”
It’s a small, odd comparison, and it sticks precisely because it doesn’t strain for poetry. Then “Every Little Thing” drops the grand statements entirely and keeps a running list of reasons he’s devoted. Her giggle when he tells a joke. Her touch when he’s feeling low. The smile on her face after he’s made a big mistake. Even when he’s slow to apologize, her eyes tell him it’s okay. The whole argument is that devotion is a noticing discipline, not a feeling that arrives on its own.
The LP splits between two kinds of physical closeness, and the distance between them says more than either one alone. “All Night” is the party cut, pulling a woman to the dance floor, calling them a dynamic duo, absorbing her energy, telling her to box him in. He’d like the clock to disappear. One moment grabs a science-class word: “Snap, photosynthesis/I’m breathing your oxygen.” It’s playful and slightly ridiculous in the right way, a guy too caught up to filter his metaphors. “Can I Just Lay” lives in a completely different room. Here, Garrett can’t find the words for what he’s feeling. He’d rather write it in her skin with his fingers because language has failed him. The chorus just asks to stay:
“Sometimes I don’t know what to say
These feelings I can’t translate
So can I just lay right here?”
The second verse tells her to keep her arms around him while he’s melting, to bury him right here in heaven. That’s not performance intimacy or seduction. It’s someone who has given up trying to explain and just needs to be held. Sitting between these two is “Babies,” which takes physical closeness somewhere else entirely. “How my dreams gonna grow if I don’t plant them inside you,” Garrett sings, and later in the tune he lifts the sex beyond the bedroom:
“The love that we’re making is more than physical
The babies we’re making are so spiritual.”
Two songs share a common confession. Before her, he was nobody worth knowing. “Until You” is the closing track and the disc’s most specific self-inventory. He was dodging his emotions, never showing hurt, running around, convinced he had it all figured out. “I didn’t know my right from my left,” he admits, and “I didn’t feel the heartbeat in my chest.” She became his corrective. He saw what he couldn’t see on his own. “You Give Me Life” makes the same claim at a higher volume. Before her, his heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing, he was just existing. Late in the track, he names her “the beat of my heart.” These are enormous declarations, and the difference between the two is that “Until You” earns its weight through the specifics of what he was doing wrong. “You Give Me Life” stays broader, carried more by conviction than by detail, and that’s fine.
“Roll Slide Roll” is the only track built to fill a room with people instead of two. The “Roll Tide Roll” wordplay is pure Tuscaloosa, flipped into a line-dance instruction. Step right, love slide, jump then we roll. The sports metaphors pile up cheerfully. No fumbling around, no dropping balls, ten toes down. Late in the number he dubs the relationship a winning team. It belongs at cookouts and family reunions and wedding receptions, and Garrett clearly built it for exactly that. “Constitutional” goes the other direction entirely, shrinking the world back down to two people and a permanent contract. Romance is described as law. Constitutional, unconditional, non-negotiable. The second verse looks at other men circling and dismisses them as impossible, and then the cut brings the seasons in (winter, spring, summer, fall) and makes its heaviest claim:
“Even after Heaven calls my name, it’ll never change”
That’s a vow spoken by someone who thinks about death and still won’t hedge. Garrett doesn’t try to be anyone other than a bass player from Alabama who learned to talk to women by watching his father do it. Ten songs in, and he’s run out of lessons and instructions and declarations, and all he wants is to stay next to someone with his fingers tracing feelings he can’t put into words, asking for nothing except to not be moved.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Every Little Thing,” “Talk to Her Like This,” “Can I Just Lay”