Gotta Be

Certainty in romantic feeling has its own particular urgency, and "Gotta Be" channels that urgency into something propulsive and direct. The production has more forward momentum than Apollo's more ruminative work—a groove that implies movement, a sense that the emotional conclusion has already been reached and everything now is acting on it. His voice is assured in a way that sounds less like performance than conviction, the difference between claiming something you hope is true and stating something you know. Lyrically the song returns to the territory of romantic certainty, the point past wondering and theorizing to simply knowing. The "gotta be" of the title is irrevocable—not tentative like "I think," not patient like "I got time," but arrived-at. There's a gospel inflection in the arrangement that suits the sense of personal revelation, the idea that something true has been recognized rather than decided. Apollo's Mexican-American identity and the syncretism of Latin American musical culture with African-American musical traditions that his work embodies both feel present, the song emerging from multiple inheritance simultaneously. It's confident music for a moment of emotional clarity.