Deep Album Cuts Vol. 216: Keyshia Cole





This Saturday, Keyshia Cole and Ashanti will face off in a Verzuz song battle -- they were supposed to do it last month, but then Ashanti got COVID-19, and I guess she's okay now. The matchup surprised me a little when it was announced, because they were never quite at their peaks at the same time -- Keyshia's debut was released a year after Ashanti's last platinum album -- and have different strengths. But the more I think about it, their catalogs are pretty well matched for this sort of thing, and they collaborated before on the title track to Keyshia's Woman To Woman album. But I'm definitely rooting for Keyshia, I think she's had better albums, better singles, and a longer peak period. 

Keyshia Cole deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Down And Dirty
2. Love, I Thought You Had My Back
3. Guess What featuring Jadakiss
4. Situations featuring Chink Santana
5. Just Like You
6. Give Me More
7. Losing You featuring Anthony Hamilton
8. Same Thing
9. Got To Get My Heart Back
10. No Other featuring Amina Harris
11. Make Me Over
12. Please Don't Stop
13. If I Fall In Love Again featuring Faith Evans
14. So Impossible
15. Woman To Woman featuring Ashanti
16. Missing Me
17. Next Move featuring Robin Thicke
18. N.L.U featuring 2 Chainz
19. Love Letter featuring Future
20. Cole World (Outro) featuring Too $hort
21. Vault

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from The Way It Is (2005)
Tracks 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 from Just Like You (2007)
Tracks 10, 11 and 12 from A Different Me (2008)
Tracks 13 and 14 from Calling All Hearts (2010)
Tracks 15, 15 and 17 from Woman To Woman (2012)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Point Of No Return (2014)
Tracks 20 and 21 from 11:11 Reset (2017)

Oddly, the only one of Keyshia Cole's first few albums that I hadn't heard in full before making this playlist was her big debut -- The Way It Is came out in 2005, well before streaming and at a time when my budget for buying CDs was really tight so I missed out on a lot of albums at the time, even though I liked all the singles from the record. It's pretty good, I particularly like "Situations" -- Chink Santana is from Washington, D.C. and was a member of the Junkyard Band before he signed with Murder Inc., and I think you can hear the Go-Go influence on his sound on there more than his work with Ashanti. But I think I'm still partial to Just Like You as her strongest album from front to back, Scott Storch's "Give Me More" is a great little knockoff of Amerie's "Why Don't We Fall In Love."

One thing I like about Keyshia Cole's first 4 albums is that her mentor Ron Fair really gave them all a cohesive sound -- even though she had a big range of producers and co-writers on those albums, some of them big hitmakers with their own signature sound, but Ron Fair would often add his distinctive harmonica and keyboards to their tracks in a way that I think became the Keyshia Cole sound. She made some good records after Ron Fair left Geffen and stopped working with her -- I think Woman To Woman is one of her best albums, and she got a great Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis song with "So Impossible." But as a whole the later albums are definitely missing a little of that flavor that defined her early work and made her stuff really lush and melodic even when it was in that hip hop soul mold. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 07, 2021 at 9:03 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

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