Album: Keep The Faith (Bad Boy)
Songwriters: Babyface
Hit #1: September 11th, 1999 (1 Week)
It seems hard to believe, but with all the great disco-tinged party joints and urban-soul midtempos she unleashed in the '90's, Faith Evans, Bad Boy's First Lady, scored her first, and to this day only, solo R&B #1 with a lesser-known ballad penned by Babyface.
The third hit off her 1998 sophomore release, Keep The Faith, "Never Gonna Let You Go" balanced the upbeat potency of the album's first two singles ("Love Like This", "All Night Long") with some tenderly-written lovey-dovey poetics.
"If I had one wish boy/ I'd wish you next to me/ And it could be in summer, fall or spring boy/ Cause you make my heart sing," Evans spews, her spiraling vocal melodies attaching a fiery gospel element to 'Face's otherwise polished adult-pop production. Wedding-themed fodder, this arrived near the tail-end of seemingly every pop and R&B diva planting similar Diane Warren-like love epics on their albums to showcase their respective chops and earn some of those multi-platinum plaques.
Faith's performance shimmers with class, lifting the song to grandiose spiritual heights in it's climax, but her impressive efforts don't hide the fact that "Never Gonna Let You Go" is pure schmaltz. In her defense, though, Evans was still struggling to individualize herself (from her ubiquitous labelmates and camera-hogging CEO, and from Mary J Blige, an artist many accused Faith of being a knock-off of). By her next album, 2001's near-flawless Faithfully, the singer would accomplish just that; it's solid collection of trunk bangers, sultry slow jams and a more prominent jazzy vocal style winning rave reviews across the board.
DL: "Never Gonna Let You Go" (YFH)
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