Album Review: Wide Eyed by Mack Keane
An R&B singer spends a whole album being the worst boyfriend in the room, and the songs are better for it.
Most of the blame on Wide Eyed lands on one person. Not shared, not split down the middle. Mack Keane is a singer from Los Angeles; his father played keys on sessions, his grandfather founded the label that signed Ritchie Valens. Every relationship on Wide Eyed went wrong and Keane takes the fall each time. On a track named after Candy Crush Saga he half-laughs through a chorus about candy eyes and puppy love and poured-out shots of affection that nobody’s drunk enough to believe. The half-laugh is ugly and a little bit funny.
Every song follows the same admission. Lies that didn’t fool anybody, including him. Yelling back when she yelled. Staying past the point where staying made sense, one more night becoming four seasons with every red flag visible the whole time. Most records would split the blame here. The boring version. Late in the album, one verse stacks the details tighter than anywhere else—the flags, the allegiance, the facts dodged, the feelings swallowed, and a lipstick stain on a cigarette that won’t leave his head. That stain does more than all the apologies around it.
His father is Tom Keane, a session keyboardist; his mother is the actress and singer Paula Mulcahy. His grandfather was Bob Keane, who founded Del-Fi Records in the late 1950s, signed Ritchie Valens at seventeen, released “La Bamba” and “Donna” before the plane crash turned both into monuments, then ran Keen Records and put out Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” Piano from elementary school. NYU’s Clive Davis Institute. “Model Behavior” came out in 2016 sounding like it had been pressed from his parents’ Donny Hathaway and Earth Wind & Fire records, and three EPs followed between 2019 and 2020 each named after a street from his childhood, then Entries in 2025, shaped partly by videos he posted of himself reading from his journal over beats. The journal entries sounded like the songs: same guy, same fault.
Something goes wrong inside “Honeymoon Dreaming” and you don’t catch it until the third verse is already running. Same melody. The cadence hasn’t shifted. Neither has the key. But “Bright idea” has turned into “Bad idea.” “Let’s get married right on site” is now “We should probably end it tonight.” “Walking down the aisle in white” is now “Packing up my bags, catch a flight.” The first two verses played it straight, long-distance love, staying awake, wedding plans, until the complication arrived: “My world’s getting larger while your time running out/Said you want a child right now/Guess I didn’t think it through.” After that, every word was quietly replaced. The melody kept going. How do you hum a song that rewrote itself?
Keane sings “The moment that you showed me love/Of course I went and fucked it up/And that’s on me” on “Mercy,” and that of course in the middle (something like honesty, or maybe just muscle memory, it’s hard to say) does more than any apology on the album. “Violence” has him wanting his cake and wanting to eat it, yelling right back when she yells, all of it laid over a guitar so gentle it sounds like someone left an instrument in the next room. The second verse of “Cherry Red” gets ugly. Flags seen and ignored. Allegiance pledged anyway. One night become four seasons, facts dodged, feelings swallowed, a lipstick stain on a cigarette that won’t leave his head. “Candycrush” puts it blunt, “Just ‘cause the sex good don’t make it healthy,” and on “Ordinary Feelings” the quiet version was already being written: “We got too caught up trying to fit inside a promise.”
The bass on “Bloodshot” crawls hazy and psychedelic, and Keane sings “Blood eyes and they shot like a gun/What am I running from?” while the tempo won’t pick up. “Shadows” rides a funk-forward bass guitar and handclaps that could’ve come off an Earth Wind & Fire session. Zack Sekoff and Sol Was co-produced most of it with Keane: on “Falling Short,” birdsong and a piano left in an empty room; on “Mercy,” gospel-tinged backing vocals stacked behind a walking bassline so thick it carries everything on top. “Violence” barely has a pulse.
Keane wrote every song on Wide Eyed and sang every one alone, just him and the producers. His grandfather built two labels and worked with Sam Cooke and Ritchie Valens before he died in 2009. His father still does sessions around Los Angeles, mostly from the house. The videos of Keane reading from his journal over beats are still up.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Violence,” “Honeymoon Dreaming,” “Cherry Red”
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