FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Summer Walker – Over It
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FOLLOWED by the remarkable…
Still Over It last year, Summer Walker’s amazing debut album, Over It, is one that everyone should play and investigate. Released on 4th October, 2019, it gained rave reviews and was placed in many publications’ best albums of the year polls. It is an exceptional release from the Atlanta-born artist. Whilst the singles got a lot of airplay in 2019 and 2020, I think a lot of the buzz wore off. That is only natural I guess. Then the immense Still Over It came along last year and reaffirmed Summer Walker as one of the most incredible and talented artists in the world. I love her debut album, as it follows the 2018 mixtape, Last Day of Summer. With every album and release, she grows stronger and without equals. Such is the strength of her lyrics and her delivery, I feel she is an artist who will be iconic and seen as a legend very soon. I have said this about quite a few new artist, though it is not an over-exaggeration with Summer Walker. Before coming to a couple of glowing reviews for the incredible Over It, there is an interview from 2019 where we hear from Walker about the album. The Times spoke with her in December 2019. Despite being grounded and modest, the success Over It has already accrued by that point showed she was a huge artist with an admiring and growing fanbase:
“Summer Walker has been singing seriously for only two years, but she has already broken one of Beyoncé’s records, become YouTube’s most viewed female artist for October, collaborated with Drake, Usher and Chris Brown — and nailed the art of pop-star eccentricity.
This is a woman whose former manager, also called Summer Walker, discovered the singer when she googled her own name. Who, at her bonkers and brilliant show in London the night before we meet, came on with a handbag on one arm, read her lyrics from sheets of A4 paper and spent much of the evening sitting on the stage ogling her two almost naked pole dancers.
Today, in her hotel room in Shoreditch, east London, the 23-year-old Atlantan seems to be in some kind of coma. Not once does she raise her voice above a whisper, and she spends the entire interview hidden beneath a bathrobe. And I mean hidden. She’s curled up in an armchair with the hood of the robe pulled up; all that are visible are two bare tattooed legs and a pair of turquoise Ugg boots. This is the kind of weirdness that took Prince a whole career to perfect.
Walker blames her state partly on jet lag. “I’m up till 8 in the morning every day and then they wake me up at 12, so . . . ” Yet I suspect she may be like this even when she’s in the right time zone. Her singing voice is beautifully languorous and her woozy R&B emphasises atmosphere over hooks. “I don’t just go for catchy things,” she says. “Better to make it about vibes.”
In that sense she is like Beyoncé, who long ago dispensed with the idea of making her songs radio-friendly. Walker’s debut album, Over It, was streamed more than 150 million times in its first week, beating the record for a female R&B artist held by Beyoncé for Lemonade. How does Walker feel about breaking a megastar’s record? “It’s nice,” she says as the robe drops to reveal a flash of rainbow hairband and a tattoo of a sweet above her eye. Was Beyoncé an icon for her growing up? Walker’s song Playing Games interpolates Say My Name by Beyoncé’s former band, Destiny’s Child. “Hmm. Not really.”
Well, at least she’s honest. It’s one of the things that saves Walker from being irredeemably frustrating. Once she warms up, her answers are straight, thoughtful and sometimes very funny. We get on to the subject of whether she wants to have children. “I do,” she says. “I actually wanna adopt. What am I? Twenty-three. I want to at 25, maybe sooner.” Why adopt? “I don’t wanna have no babies come out of my vagina! That’s gonna hurt.” She says the word with southern musicality: vag-aye-nah.
Honesty runs through her music: frank songs about anxiety, sexuality, abusive boyfriends. “I value honesty,” she says. “Sometimes I’m too honest.” Does it get her into trouble? “Yeah, all the time. I just always say how I feel. I’m very impulsive so I can say something one day and the next day say something completely different.”
Walker grew up in Atlanta in “a good home”. Her mother was “a top-end estate agent for celebrities and athletes and stuff, and my dad, he owns a construction company”. Which celebrities? “A bunch of people — I wouldn’t wanna name-drop, though.” She went to private school, where she was quite outgoing, until the age of 14, and then a state high school, where she “didn’t say nothing to nobody, used to eat my lunch in the library”.
There aren’t many privately educated R&B stars. Was she ever tempted to cover up her privilege when she went into music? “No. I did not come from the streets. I say that, my mum will get mad!” She laughs, aping her mother: “I worked this hard!” Her parents weren’t wild about her going into music, she says. “My dad’s kinda military and he’d be, like, ‘That’s not a real job.’”
Perhaps, but he can’t have been over the moon when she left college to dance in a strip club and work as a cleaner. Which did she prefer? “Hmm. Dancing made more money.” It must have been hard with her anxiety issues. “No, I just didn’t really talk to people.” I ask if she has seen Hustlers, the recent movie in which a group of strippers swindle bankers. “I did. I wasn’t a big fan.” Why? “I don’t like thieves.”
What ambitions does she have? “I would like to finish putting things in my home that I like and then I would like to quit,” she says. Retire from music — why? “So I can go home.” But what about the fans, all those millions of followers? “You’ll survive.” It’s not that the adulation scares her, she insists. “I think it’s wonderful and all. I just really want my money so I can get the hell home.” She recently moved to Las Vegas: “It’s hot, beautiful and there’s tax breaks”.
It is clear Summer Walker will not be returning to a career of cleaning anytime soon! She is an artist with a lot more to say. Following the success of Over It and Still Over It, you wonder what will come next and how much better she can get. Over It did get some wonderful reviews, though the songs and singles from it are not played that much now. I will finish off with a couple of reviews for the stunning Over It. This is what CLASH had to say in their review:
“Having made waves with tracks like ‘Girls Need Love’ and ‘Playing Games’, Atlanta’s Summer Walker follows in the footsteps of her label mate 6LACK and delivers her own taste of authentic contemporary R&B with her debut album ‘Over It’.
The project includes a host of features from some of the biggest names in the genre, who provide welcome (but somewhat unnecessary) co-signs as she herself manoeuvres with a standout level of artistry that leaves you in no doubt that she is indeed here to stay.
This last 12 months or so - in musical terms - could be considered to be a year for the women of the music industry with a swathe of artists coming to prominence such as Meg The Stallion, Saweetie, City Girls and Kash Doll to name a few, while in the realm of R&B, Ella Mai and Dani Leigh are just two names that have been making waves.
But among them has been Summer Walker, who capitalised on the success of her single ‘Girls Need Love’ with a Drake remix (which has gone platinum), as well as a stellar debut commercial mixtape ‘Last Day Of Summer’.
Continuing on the themes of confidence, love and womanhood, Walker is transparent and honest in her lyricism throughout the 18 tracks, conveying different perspectives matched by the varying styles of production, predominantly handled by London on da Track, who serves as executive producer (and happens to be her current boyfriend).
Whether exploring her feelings about a failed relationship such as on the PARTYNEXTDOOR duet ‘Just Might’ or the more overwhelming emotions that come when you’re infatuated as depicted on ‘Like It’ featuring 6LACK, it’s this relatability and willingness to go deeper than the surface level that elevates the project above those of a lot of her contemporaries.
Tracks like the Destiny’s Child-sampling ‘Playing Games’ (featuring Bryson Tiller) and the Jhene Aiko-assisted ‘I’ll Kill You’ stand out as early fan favourites, while a special mention has to go out for ‘Come Thru’ featuring Usher which sees her sample and interpolate a classic track from the elder statesmen and sees him remix his own verse in a classy rework of his 1997 hit, ‘You Make Me Wanna…’.
What makes Summer Walker stand out from her peers is the unwavering honesty and in-depth layers perpetuating through her catalogue. On ‘Over It’ she captures the nuances and intricacies of the ‘90s and 2000s R&B she grew up on, in a time when they’re often lost. But the nostalgia is kept in check by smart production choices - ‘Body’, for example, flips 702’s ‘Get It Together’ - keeping her art fresh and provides something different. This, coupled with her narrative voice and lyrics, make her debut album a statement and suggests that the 23-year-old could soon become a staple of the R&B genre”.
Without doubt one of the best albums of 2019 and a debut album of huge originality, Over It deserves more play and focus now. Playing Games and Come Thru are great singles where Summer Walker collaborates with Bryson Tyler and Usher respectively, but I think the strongest tracks are ones where she is solo and unaccompanied – such as Body, Over It and Tonight. NME had this to offer in their review:
“R&B hasn’t, in recent years, always reflected relationships as honestly as ’90s and noughties R&B stars did. Yet on her stunning debut album, ‘Over It’, Atlanta star Summer Walker subverts the genre with a collection of subdued love songs that continues her winning streak. Her brilliant breakthrough track, ‘Girls Need Love’, released last year, set the template – emotionally raw lyrics, sultry sounds – and became a platinum smash when Drake lent a guest verse to the remix. The question is: could the 23-year-old keep up the pace across an 18-track album?
Spoiler alert: she can. There’s ’90s nostalgia on ‘Come Thru’, which samples Usher‘s 1997 UK Number One ‘You Make Me Wanna’, though Walker flips the narrative – about a man who’s in love with two women – to relay the tale from a woman’s perspective: “Got my feelings runnin’ on a loop / This ain’t what I’m really used to”. With added hip-hop percussion, the classic song is revamped with the current sounds populating R&B.
And on ‘Just Might’, Walker is bracingly frank about the promiscuous life she just can’t resist; by laying her raspy vocals over sensual beats, she lets us not only hear the thoughts, but feel them too. When she says with a shrug that she “just might be a ho”, you can almost hear her smiling. R&B crooner PARTYNEXTDOOR takes the role of an anguished, cheated-on boyfriend; blending in a male voice, Walker gives us a 360-degree perspective on the sorry situation.
American singer-songwriter Jhené Aiko assists Walker on the aggressively named ‘I’ll Kill You’, on which the musicians sing atop spacey keys to relay their possessiveness – and sense of agency – in a relationship. If there’s one thing you learn from this stunning track, it’s that you should never test Walker and Aiko when it comes to their men. From the get-go, Summer Walker warns, “If them bitches ’round you, better be blood / If it ain’t me or your mama, shouldn’t be showin’ you no love”.
R&B fans have been waiting for a sucker-punch like ‘Over It’. There’s been a lot of insipid, cutesy output across the genre – broad brush strokes either depicting crushing over some guy, or being in gut-wrenching heartache, with little in between – but Summer Walker paints in subtler shades. This is an album of relatable, mixed emotions, the narrator promiscuous one minute and faithful the next. This is record of complex emotions, treated with a lightness of touch that ensures it’s fun as fuck. We’re far from ‘Over It’”.
I would strongly advise everyone to listen to Summer Walker’s phenomenal debut album, Over It. If 2021’s Still Over It is a slightly stronger album, one cannot ignore what came before. One of the music world’s rarest and greatest artists, Summer Walker is someone we need to treasure! Over It is, without a shadow of doubt, a…
MESMERISING album to behold.