Anniversaries: Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... by Liv.e
Liv.e’s confidence as a storyteller, her willingness to be imperfect, to embrace silence and entropy, and to express unfiltered feelings, makes the record feel as alive today as when it first dropped.
This color-distorted image of a young woman on the phone hints at the album’s surreal, intimate vibe, as if we’re eavesdropping on personal conversations mid-thought. In the summer of 2020, 19-year-old Hailee “Liv.e” Williams invited listeners into this kaleidoscopic world with a debut album that felt less like a conventional R&B record and more like a collection of private diary entries set to music. Hailed upon release for its lemon-fresh sense of carefree risk-taking, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... arrived to universal acclaim and a flurry of excited comparisons. The album likened its hypnotic, atmospheric flow to Solange’s meditative When I Get Home and Frank Ocean’s dreamy Endless, and noted a stylistic kinship with neo-soul icon Erykah Badu and experimental peers like KeiyaA. Few debut albums in recent memory were as sharply reflective of their creator’s inner life: CWTTY was a raw and boldly unconventional exploration of R&B, one rendered entirely in Liv.e’s own image. Now, several years later, with the initial buzz settled and Liv.e herself having evolved from a self-described naïve romantic into a more grounded artist, the time is ripe to ask: How do those fleeting thought bubbles and idle mind maps she laid down in real time hold up today?
A Dallas-raised musician with a decade-long foundation as a DJ, Liv.e (pronounced “Liv”) brought crate-digger instincts and underground hip-hop sensibilities into her songwriting. She got her start DJing at a local record store/label called Dolfin Records, where she steeped herself in offbeat sounds and deep cuts. Early mixtapes on her SoundCloud reveal a fascination with leftfield beatmakers like Knxwledge and Mndsgn, artists known for flipping soul samples into hazy, lo-fi hip-hop vignettes. That turntablist impulse to create something new from familiar components is all over CWTTY. The album draws from a broad spectrum of Black music, including classic soul, neo-soul, jazz, gospel, and down-tempo hip-hop, but splices and warps those elements into a mellow, psychedelic collage distinctly Liv.e’s own. The project was born mainly in her mother’s St. Louis basement, where Liv.e hunkered down for about a month, writing and recording at a rapid clip during a visit home. That immediacy gives the album its unvarnished charm. It also meant that what Liv.e delivered was far from a glossy R&B debut. Instead, she offered a bedroom-crafted song diary, one that sounded self-assured beyond her years even as it reveled in youthful spontaneity.
Neo-soul legend Erykah Badu (herself an innovator of genre-blurring R&B) became something of a mentor figure, hosting the album’s livestreamed debut and even appearing on it in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo Badu praised Liv.e’s work as “an extension of what I am creating,” effectively giving her stamp of cosmic approval to the young artist’s free-form approach. Rap experimentalist Earl Sweatshirt was another early supporter; he took Liv.e on tour after her album was finished, exposing her music to his audiences, and had previously tapped her for a feature on his Feet of Clay project. These co-signs were no coincidence: Liv.e’s stylistic wanderlust positioned her at the vanguard of a new wave of Black music creatives who weren’t afraid to be undefinable. In CWTTY, you can hear echoes of influences as disparate as DJ Screw’s syrupy Texas grooves and Sun Ra’s otherworldly jazz; you can sense the spirit of Badu’s Baduizm and D’Angelo’s neo-soul, but also the chopped beats of Dilla and Madlib’s school. Yet, even those quick to draw comparisons had to admit that Liv.e was operating on her own frequency. Revisiting the album now, it’s still hard to find a perfect point of reference.
A big part of that uniqueness lies in the album’s structure and flow. Rather than a collection of discrete songs, CWTTY feels like a continuous stream of consciousness. The 20 short tracks bleed into one another with a dream-logic fluidity. Liv.e wasn’t the first to experiment with this kind of mosaic album format, noted the similarity to Tierra Whack’s Whack World, another prismatic collection of bite-sized tracks, but Liv.e applied that approach to R&B in a way that still feels innovative. The songs are episodic, often ending abruptly or segueing mid-thought into the next idea. Many are under 90 seconds long; few have traditional hooks or bridges, and they settle until they dissolve. For example, the whimsical “Lessons From My Mistakes...but I Lost Your Number” drifts on a wobbly piece of elevator Muzak before unexpectedly morphing into a groovy upright bass riff, over which Liv.e muses about the concept of entropy and personal growth. A later track, “About Love at 21,” bleeds seamlessly into “She’s My Brand New Crush” without pause, a fleeting scene of romantic optimism melting into the giddy next chapter. The effect is a continuous soundscape of soul, like flipping through radio stations in Liv.e’s mind.
Within this collage-like framework, CWTTY offers up dozens of distinct little moods and micro-stories, each with its own texture. Despite their brevity, many tracks stand out vividly in memory. “What’s the Real” opens the album by dropping us into a half-heard conversation, multiple pitched-down voices (perhaps Liv.e debating with herself) ask, “Everybody’s got a love story, right?” only to answer with a skeptical whisper, “Well, not everybody… yours must be a secret.” It’s a beguiling introduction to Liv.e’s hazy sample-warped world, where internal dialogues and even “foreign species” chatter over one another as if in a crowded mind.
On “Stories with Aunt Liv,” Liv.e addresses herself with gentle affection—“Self… I know you’re learning, you’re growing”—like an older mentor offering guidance. Many songs take the form of mantras or affirmations. The double-track “Lessons…” finds Liv.e repeating commitments to herself over shuffling percussion, breezily flipping through lyrical journal pages as she resolves to do better. By contrast, “Cut to the Chase” does away with singing entirely, Liv.e delivers frank, spoken-word observations over tribalistic percussion and futuristic synth harmonies, in what feels like a moment of clarity cutting through the album’s fog. Musically, she covers astonishing ground. The sultry “I Been Livin” rides on luscious, crate-dug keys that ooze the warm familiarity of a Nujabes or Ras G hip-hop instrumental, its lo-fi piano chords cloaked in vinyl crackle and reverb. At the other extreme, the playful single “SirLadyMakemFall” struts in with a bold, abrasive funk energy, Liv.e growls and rasps her vocals in a way that channels the glam bravado of 1970s icon Betty Davis, equal parts alluring and intimidating.
Central to the album’s sonic identity is its lo-fi beatmaker aesthetic and a reverence for throwback grooves. Many of the tracks were co-produced by Liv.e’s close collaborators, notably the experimental jazz looper Mejiwahn and multi-instrumentalist Daoud Anthony, whose fingerprints are all over the record’s warm, blunted sound. Mejiwahn (who initially sparked the project by sending Liv.e a batch of inspiring beats) contributes woozy basslines, nostalgic jazz loops, and crackling textures, while Daoud (fresh off crafting soulful instrumentals for rapper Saba and even scoring the NYT’s 1619 Project) adds lush chords and synth-funk flourishes.
Together, they helped Liv.e shape a sonic palette that sits comfortably alongside psychedelic soul visionaries like Nick Hakim, or the revolutionary synth-funk of UK collective SAULT, or the spiritual R&B of contemporaries like KeiyaA. Yet, even with such reference points, Liv.e’s sound remains very much her own, defined by an adherence to DIY, low-fidelity beat collage and a loving reimagining of vintage soul vibes. The album is filled with crackling samples, muffled drum loops, and airy Rhodes piano chords that evoke the ambiance of an old jazz lounge filtered through a bedroom boombox. This analog, slightly imperfect quality lends CWTTY a timeless charm; it doesn’t feel dated in 2025 any more than Dilla’s Donuts or Badu’s New Amerykah records do. If anything, the lo-fi soul aesthetic has only grown more influential in recent years, and Liv.e was right there at its forefront, adding her own idiosyncratic twist.
Liv.e’s artistry has continued to evolve, but the essence of this debut remains potent. Her follow-up projects (including 2023’s acclaimed Girl in the Half Pearl) ventured into darker, bolder territory, noise experiments, visceral depictions of heartbreak, and a newfound vocal ferocity from an artist no longer “whispering” at the edges of R&B. With that growth in mind, revisiting Couldn’t Wait to Tell You... is almost like opening a time capsule. The album captures Liv.e at a particular moment, where a young Black woman on the cusp of adulthood, brimming with creativity and emotions she can barely contain, uses lo-fi music as her canvas to sketch out dreams and doubts. Its episodic structure and prismatic vision feel just as innovative today – arguably more so, now that we can see how sincerely it mirrored Liv.e’s stream-of-consciousness process, free from industry expectations. Suppose the project seemed like an anthology of “in-between” moments back then; it now stands as a cohesive portrait of an artist in transition, embracing the in-between as a place of possibility. And if some of its vignettes felt unresolved, that was by design; Liv.e was documenting becoming in real time, rather than tying things up with neat bows.