Alexis Keegan “What Am I Supposed to Do”

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There aren’t many artists that possess the personality and emotive depth that Alexis Keegan does, which we learn in her latest single “What Am I Supposed to Do,” a track that is coming out this April and has already received plenty of buzz from critics and industry insiders. Keegan sings of an insatiable sorrow in “What Am I Supposed to Do;” in spirit, it’s a song about feeling alone and living with the pain of knowing that the one person who can fix your problem is the one person who doesn’t want to stick around any longer. It’s a bruiser of a ballad, but it’s more than worth your time this season.

Right from the get-go, the piano is a massive tour de force that grabs as much of our attention as Keegan does, but it never intrudes upon the immaculate design of her vocal track. Nothing, and I really mean nothing can put out the fire that her voice starts in the opening verses, and when we get into the chorus, it’s an out of control blaze of apocalyptic proportions. Not even the bass, in all of its thick, bubbling tonality, is strong enough to impede her flow, and that alone haunted me after my virgin spin of “What Am I Supposed to Do.”

The percussion, while modestly muted in the big picture, has an acrylic varnish over its finer points that adds some texture in the rhythm where there would otherwise be none, and though I would have probably preferred for it to have a bigger part in the cultivation of the grooves next to the bassline, I don’t know that I would change a thing about this arrangement. You can tell that Keegan put a lot of time into ironing out all of the individual details in this track, and though it’s different than what a lot of her contemporaries would do, that’s exactly what makes it such a fetching selection this spring.

Surrealism is everywhere we look and listen in pop music nowadays, and it’s not absent from the fold in “What Am I Supposed to Do.” The bass cushions the words as Keegan evenly distributes the melody across the intro to the song, and colorizes the groove that the drums will eventually pick up in a cerebral spaciness that never quite goes away. There’s a bluesy churn in the tempo that meshes well with the jazz overtones, and while I’d still quantify this as an R&B song structurally, it’s definitely got an experimental/alternative energy to it that no one can deny.

“What Am I Supposed to Do” is a game-changing single for Alexis Keegan in terms of its artistic ambitiousness, but I don’t think that it symbolizes the best of what we can expect to hear in her career. This track raises too many questions and too many points of interest that have yet to be fully explored for me to think that this is her reaching a professional plateau, and my gut tells me that her most fervent of supporters won’t disagree with me. She keeps on bringing that special soulful heat, and this single is one of her hottest numbers to date.

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/58U2dw8DQDSvmEJjvwToN6?si=iq0LX8LVQO6cMAK51chQYw

Mindy McCall