mixtape maestro (2.0)

Brandy might have grasped her biggest heaping of critical acclaim with the Timbaland-helmed, state-of-the-art soul of 2004′s Afrodisiac, but it failed to make much noise commercially, becoming her first album not to at least reach the million mark. So it was quite understandable when, for the recently released follow-up Human, she opted on re-teaming with producer Rodney Jerkins since he WAS the man who helped push 1998′s Never Say Never, into becoming the biggest release of her career.

Human jump-off cut “Right Here (Departed)” seemed to be the right choice to plop her back into the R&B/ pop limelight. Radiating with a slick gloss and insistent thump, not to mention the overdubbed wonders of her signature smoky singing and an uplifting lyric that casts her as the bestest pal ever (“When your tears have dried from cryin’/ And the world has turned to silence/ When the clouds have all departed/ You’ll be right here with me”), the song provided a welcome break from R&B’s dominant themes of clubs, booty, sass and heartache.

Alas, probably because it lacked those aforementioned things, it didn’t quite become the monster comeback it was prepped to be, and fizzled out at a modest (at least, for her) peaking of #22 on the R&B chart. So enter Sean Kingston to the rescue, with the hopes that his proven radio-attracting abilities could get this track some tardy boost in interest.

Supplying a brief verse on the front-end, Kingston twists the song to be about chasing after an ex, dropping “Like Kanye/ You’re so ‘Heartless’” followed by the ego-massaging couplet “He can’t do it like me/ Is he from West Indies?”. Not much else about “Right Here” is altered so it makes Sean’s appearance seem a bit pointless (it would have been nice to hear Brandy directly respond to him), but it’ll still be interesting to see if all it took was his small addition to really get this tune scoring some bigger airplay points.

DL: “Right Here (Departed) Remix” (alt)