Breathe Again

The second single from her Babyface-and-L.A.-Reid-shaped debut, this is the sound of LaFace Records inventing a lane: adult, hushed, unhurried R&B for people past their first heartbreak. The production is remarkably restrained — a soft brushed drum program, a bed of synth pads, a guitar that comments rather than leads — leaving enormous empty space around the voice. Braxton fills it by doing almost nothing: her delivery is close-miked and conversational, phrases trailing off, the vibrato barely applied, so the drama emerges from restraint rather than volume. The lyric is written in the strange suspended tense of someone who has already lost the argument and is narrating the aftermath in real time, breath by breath, unsure whether she'll ever inhale normally again. That the metaphor is respiratory rather than cardiac is the song's quiet cleverness — this is heartbreak as a physical inability to function. It arrived when Whitney-style belting dominated the charts, and its refusal to shout made it distinctive; it also announced that a woman with a genuinely low voice could be a pop star. Made for driving alone at night on a highway you know too well, or for the long silence after a phone call ends badly.