Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

Sevyn Streeter VibeZ

Sevyn Streeter has written hits for other people that you already know by heart. Twelve tracks here make the case that she should have been keeping more of them.

The writer's room's best-kept secret

Amber Streeter, from Haines City, Florida, came up the hard way — first in the girl groups TG4 and RichGirl, then, when those didn't break, as a songwriter. That second career went extremely well. She has credits on Chris Brown's "Yeah 3x," Ariana Grande's "The Way," Alexandra Burke's "Let It Go" and material for Chrístina Milian and Kelly Rowland, among others. She was, for a stretch in the early 2010s, one of the reliable hands behind mainstream R&B's biggest choruses.

Her own records carry that craft but point it somewhere more particular. Streeter writes about relationships with an unusual amount of legal precision — the terms, the conditions, the things not said. Her melodies tend to move in short, clipped phrases rather than long arcs, which gives even her ballads a conversational, slightly guarded quality.

What to listen for

"It Won't Stop" with Chris Brown is the entry point — her breakout, and still the most efficient demonstration of what her voice does over a slow beat. "Anything U Want" stacks Ty Dolla $ign, Jeremih and Wiz Khalifa on top of her and she comfortably holds the center.

The more interesting material is quieter. "Before I Do" and "Assumptions" are the writerly ones, where the specificity of the lyric does the work. "'97" and "Taboo" lean into a warmer, more retro palette. "It's A Man's World" flips the James Brown premise with more wit than outrage.

"Stuck In My Ways" with Elijah Blake is the duet worth queueing twice — two singers who both understand that R&B duets are more compelling when neither party is entirely sympathetic.

Twelve tracks is a tight edit. It plays like an argument for a fuller reappraisal.

Go deeper

Her albums are worth the time: Girl Disrupted (2017) and Drunken Wordz Sober Thoughtz are where the writing is least compromised by radio considerations.

Then go look up the credits. Hearing Ariana Grande's "The Way" and Chris Brown's "Yeah 3x" knowing Streeter co-wrote them changes how both records sound — you start hearing her phrasing in someone else's mouth.

For artists working the same ground, Kiana Ledé (her duet partner here), Ari Lennox and Summer Walker all write with the same unsentimental specificity about relationships. Elijah Blake — another singer with a substantial writing career behind other people's hits — is the closest male analogue.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more