Image via SoundcloudIt's been a while since we've heard new music since Brandy, whose last album was 2012's wildly overlooked Two Eleven. Considering that her dramatic new song "Beggin & Pleadin" comes with the caption "Based on a true story!" perhaps we can go ahead and venture a guess that that absence has something to do with distractions in her personal life. The good news is that heartbreak makes for damn good music, and this is damn good music in a very traditional sense.At a time when the ship of R&B is pointing its proverbial Tiller toward wishy-washy underwater sonics, "Beggin & Pleadin" is a twangy, country-inflected reminder that the distance between Motown and Nashville lies mostly in the marketing and the production. Country and R&B have always been two sides of the same coin, rooted in solid storytelling and beguiled by the torments of love, and any artist in either worth their salt knows that. Brandy, of course, is very much worth her salt. "Told you walk out that door and you can keep your last name / now I'm down on my knees it's a shame" Brandy sings, in a howl of instant regret that could bring an entire whiskey-soaked bar of grizzled old men to tears. If this is where the Brandy revival begins and a hint of where it is headed, we should all be incredibly down.
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