Ne-Yo's debut was good enough to juice my anticipation for his next one. His namby-pamby voice often detracted from his (slightly overrated) lyrics and his (quite underrated) melodies and hooks. Really, I wished In My Own Words matched the effortlessness of "When You're Mad" and "Sexy Love," the latter of which is the best R&B ballad of the last several years, even in a period replete with them (Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" and Ciara's "Promise" and "Like a Boy" are just three).

Rich's thoughts on Ne-Yo's "Because of You" have made me reconsider the voice/music dichotomy:

But then, like "I Want Your Sex" or the moany breakdown of Jade's "Don't Walk Away," * you might not want to listen to it with your mom, after all, for backing up the sonic discord is a lyrical one. Ne-Yo has the voice of a goody-two shoes, sweetly competent and never aggressive, which means he can get away with a lot.

"Because of You" is about what Borat calls vagine, according to Rich. I'm embarrassed I had nothing memorable to say the first time I wrote about it; Ne-Yo even wrote a song for the first album called "Mirror" about benign sexual narcissism. I should known that Ne-Yo is Example #657 of perversion-through-banality.

* I really need to hear Jade again.