Rotimi Tells Us What It Means To “Love Somebody”

Cynicism is a growing phenomenon in music. True love songs are hard to come by these days. Deriving its name from Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” Yellow Diamonds is a series of lyric breakdowns in which VIBE Senior Music Editor Austin Williams celebrates songs that sound like love found in a hopeless mainstream.

I had two back-to-back nights of R&B planned this past weekend, but things took a more diasporic turn. On Sunday (April 24), I attended a party that was billed as an R&B-themed brunch. But true to New York City club culture, there was far more Dancehall, Soca, and Afrobeats played (which my waistline appreciated). The night before that, my girlfriend and I saw singer and actor Rotimi perform live at Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan. With the Power star having built the bulk of his catalog with R&B music, I was surprised to learn just how much of his live show caters to fans, like me, who prefer his Afrobeats work. Sitting next to the woman I know I’ll spend the rest of my life with, hearing Rotimi sing his sun-soaked ballad, “Love Somebody,” felt just as romantic as any R&B experience I could have imagined.

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A consistent theme in this column is my insistence that there’s a difference between love songs and bedroom music. That difference was reflected in how I responded to Rotimi’s setlist Saturday night. Even as my body grooved to bops like “In My Bed” and “Love Riddim”—as well as an unreleased Afrobeats jam called “Diana,” a track he previewed for the crowd about a woman getting “dirty” for him—what stirred my soul was “Love Somebody.” A single from the Nigerian-American’s 2021 album, All Or Nothing, the song details the simplicity of a life lived beside one’s soulmate, capturing what it means to feel someone’s love better than any amount of bumping and grinding ever could.

A heartthrob known as much for his sex appeal as he is for his music, Rotimi understands “Love Somebody” is one of his least sexual songs. After the show, when I ask whether that distinction was intentional, the 33-year-old tells me, “[‘Love Somebody’] was the first time I made a song in my relationship… That was the first one that I made [while] feeling love.”

With the depth of that feeling, there seems to have been either no need or no desire on the part of Rotimi to spice the song’s writing up with sexually suggestive lyrics. It works well enough as a softly written love letter. This is likely due to its inspiration, which he tells me is his fiancé Vanessa Mdee, a Tanzanian singer with whom he recently had his first child.

As I interviewed Rotimi, my girlfriend stood to my left and his soon-to-be wife mirrored the same position standing next to him. Knowing how much my partner inspires this column and how protective I am of her privacy, I understood exactly why the Afro-R&B hybrid would strip his first autobiographical love song down to its purest form. The greatest challenge in writing about love, whether in song or on a website, is expressing the most evergreen aspects of the feeling itself, rather than exposing intimate moments that the world might not treat with as much care as you do. The writing of “Love Somebody” rises to this challenge with grace.

With “Love Somebody” being about a real-life relationship, the song’s first verse would seem to be about the trepidation that often comes with new a new partner. As Rotimi cleverly sings, “I’m your bridge over trouble/ The road you’re takin’ only leads you to pain, oh,” the verse presents a clear choice: Either we venture to live life with love, or we march towards misery. The pre-chorus that follows states just how simple that choice is once you finally make it, and how transformative it can be.

Describing the experience of falling in love with his fiancé, and ultimately choosing to spend the rest of his life with her, Rotimi tells me, “I never really felt love like this before. When you love somebody, it’s a different energy. You become somebody different—your full self.”

As he sings in the song, “You haven’t lived until you love somebody,” his writing suggests that evolution is as crucial to life as the air we breathe. In this context, it’s easy to understand why the song lacks the sexuality of some of his others—no act of physical affection could ever be that important.

The song’s second verse questions romantic hesitancy as gently as its first. And it offers just as clear a solution: “Your happiness is right in your face.” As “Love Somebody” details the beginning of a new relationship, it seems to be written with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Though in these lyrics Rotimi recounts a partnership that can at times feel “difficult,” the romantic experience he describes to me at Gramercy Theatre sounds a lot more seamless.

“It was natural, it felt right,” he says of falling in love with his fiancé. “So, a song like [‘Love Somebody’], God ordained it. Because I was living it. That’s why people felt it. Either you have [love] or you want it.”

Before the second verse ends, it offers a piece of poetry that in the context of the song seems like a wise premonition and in the context of Rotimi’s real life comes from learned experience: “You never know how things unfold/ Could be good for your soul.” Leading to its pre-chorus and eventually its main chorus, the idea in that line—that true love extends beyond the body and penetrates the soul—is yet another example of “Love Somebody” depicting romantic partnership in a way that a song about sex just wouldn’t be able to accomplish.

The difference between “Love Somebody” and Rotimi’s more bedroom-centric music isn’t just in the song’s lyrics. It’s also evident in the way he performs the record live. Throughout the rest of his set, both before and after he plays “Love Somebody,” he stalks the stage with his knees slightly bent and his shoulders hunched, spiraling his hips as though he’s making love to the music just as much as he’s performing it.

But during “Love Somebody,” his body language is subdued, and his vocals take precedence over his pelvis. For the first and only time in the show, he sits atop a stool instead of seductively pacing the stage. Seated to his right is a guitarist, as this rendition of the song emphasizes its melody over its drums.

As Rotimi sings, “Keep going until you love somebody,” I glance over at my girlfriend and see she’s thoroughly enjoying a ballad I knew she had previously never heard before. Then I take stock of the couples closest to us in the crowd and notice, perhaps for the first time that night, that the singer attracts a slightly older audience than most of his peers. With a song as mature yet tastefully written as “Love Somebody” in his catalog, this shouldn’t have been surprising.

An evening Rotimi may not have kicked off my R&B weekend the way I thought it would. But just as love itself knows no race, gender, or sexual preference, I was reminded Saturday night that true love songs can’t be bound to any one genre.

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