Speak Me
The Tony Rich Project
****
Old habits die hard.
It is about two decades since R&B crooner Tony Rich gave us his Grammy winning gem, Nobody Knows. And nobody knows what’s happened to him since. Well, that’s if you are not a fan of the genre and decided to be swept up by the current noise that dominates our TV screens.
Rich has been there since his first CD, but only the music industry has changed over the years and he remained a relic with his traditional R&B sound. Speak Me is R&B for dummies. Out of the 12 tracks, Rich only had help in writing four songs.
Every song is a slow jam, something Eddie Zondi and Babyface will find enticing.
The title track Speak Me is poetic Rich at his best. The subject to whom the song is directed is someone Rich considers the best ever.
Delete is a song of regret where his past mistakes are catching up with him. Again he uses clever wordplay where he personifies the bad events in his past as “deletable” content on a screen.
The Light narrates a story of a beautiful woman whose beauty is paralleled to light. She unsur-prisingly illuminates his life and he sees things differently.
Admit it, you want to hear this one. – Munyaradzi Vomo