You Again?: The Stylistics, "Falling in Love with My Girl"

My You Again? posts have served as a conduit for a fair bit of mockery over the years, largely because there's a very fine line between the incredulity expressed in the series title and the disappointment that often comes from listening to the records in question. Because the artists are years past their prime, it's pretty tough to talk about the music in an honest way without punching down, but that's never the intent going in — it's really about the simple surprise of hearing something you never expected to exist.

The Stylistics' Falling in Love with My Girl is, to put it politely, rife with surprises. As Bill Hader's Stefon would say, this one has everything: A Shania Twain cameo, slide guitar from Ronnie Wood, the Tower of Power horn section, a visit from Steve Lukather, vocals from Gene Simmons, a Billy Gibbons guest spot, an intro recorded by Pat Boone, and — oh yeah — a whole bunch of contributions from a guy who got his start in music by selling pants to longtime Elton John drummer Nigel Olsson.

I will explain. (To the best of my ability, anyway.)

Falling in Love with My Girl, the Stylistics' 24th studio album and first since 2008's That Same Way, got its start after the group toured the U.K. with an opening act named Tom Cridland, who's one of those aggressively larger-than-life figures who's always flourished in the music business. You can read his whole story at his frankly insane website, but the gist of it is that he started out in fashion before turning to music as a means of treating his alcoholism, taught himself how to play keyboards during the COVID lockdown period, and emerged as the frontman for an Elton John tribute band. From there, he started a solo career and put together a band he dubbed the Tomicks. Somewhere in the midst of all this, he opened for the Stylistics, got chummy enough with the group to ask them to perform at his wedding, and eventually got himself hired as the guiding hand behind Falling in Love with My Girl.

When I say "guiding hand," I'm actually being sort of polite. For starters, Tom's wife Deborah is listed as the project's executive producer, which is rarely a good sign. Also, this album contains an astonishingly unnecessary 21 tracks, 16 of which bear a Cridland co-writing credit; of those, six feature Cridland on lead vocals, and most of the rest include his backing vocals.

Here is where we encounter our first problem. While I strenuously doubt many people were clamoring for a new Stylistics album in 2025, anyone who has ever sought out their music has done so because of the group's vocal blend; even if you're demented enough to believe these guys are the perfect puppets for your own middling material, you should still have enough good sense to, you know, let them sing it. Far be it from me to try and line up work for the habitually prone Rick Rubin, but his hackneyed approach would have made a lot of sense for this project. Two of the three current Stylistics are original members; putting the trio around a mic and letting them do their thing with a minimum of fuss and bother might have been something approaching an act of musical public service.

Our man Tom had other ideas. Grand ideas. In addition to selling pants and covering Elton John songs, he marked his early foray into the musical life by launching a podcast, which he bashfully titled The Greatest Music of All Time; as the host of the show, he interviewed a long list of extremely talented people, which helped load up his list of contacts with lots of folks who look good on a press release. Most producers would be content with a small handful of starry cameos, but Cridland unleashed the kraken — that absurd list of guests up top doesn't even cover everyone. Elton John's band played the basic tracks for pretty much the whole thing. We also have Bill Champlin stopping by for a couple of songs, Ray Parker Jr. playing acoustic guitar on one track, a guitar solo from Jay Graydon, another one from Justin Hawkins of the Darkness, a bunch of studio cats (including Nathan East and Tom Scott), and various contributions from Barrington "Bo" Henderson, a former member of the group. (He was also a Temptation for a while. This stuff gets complicated.)

What you're left with, then, is a double-disc set that is not only too wildly overstuffed to hold together as a listening experience, but also fatally dismissive of the Stylistics' core appeal. It's true that there are a lot of soft love songs on Falling in Love with My Girl, but the group's vocal blend is frequently shoved into the distant margins. The tone is set by the first three songs, all of which showcase lead tenor Jason Sharp, who joined the lineup in 2011 and is done no favors by the material at hand. More than anything, those cuts sound like demos Philip Bailey recorded in the late '80s and then frantically buried in a landfill. I realize how unkind that is, but Cridland is a deeply undistinguished songwriter, the type of artist who sees no problem with rhyming "dance" with "chance" and "romance." (It's probably telling that a lot of Cridland's contributions were co-written by Anthony King and Fiona Shaw, a husband-and-wife duo who sent him a pile of demos that were, in his words, "rewritten" without their input. Change a word, get a third? Perhaps.) The first song on the album that's worth a soggy damn is "Sad Tomorrows," a pleasantly retro number penned by original Stylistic Airrion Edwards:

(While grabbing the link to embed that track here, I discovered that "Sad Tomorrows" was originally recorded for the previous Stylistics album. Jesus Christ.)

"Sad Tomorrows" isn't exactly a classic in waiting, and it definitely represents a steep tumble down from the group's glory days with Thom Bell, but it's at least cut from the same basic cloth as their best recordings. If someone had put the Stylistics in the studio to record ten songs that sounded kind of like "Sad Tomorrows," I think it would have been hard to argue much with the results. You might question the necessity or true purpose of the project, but it would have been absolutely harmless and probably pretty charming in spots. Unfortunately, that song is a total outlier — a brief, sensible interlude between bursts of Cridland throwing absolutely everything at the wall in the hopes that something will stick. Witness "Yes, I Will," which features Shania Twain, who starts off sounding like a bad Mavis Staples impersonator:

"Don't Leave Me Here," featuring Gene Simmons and the Tower of Power horns, is a substantial improvement. On the other hand, who wanted to hear Gene Simmons trading lead vocals with the Stylistics? Vamping, even?

Far more representative of the album's overall quality is "Lost and Alone," one of the deadly Cridland-sung tunes. I picked this one to feature not just because of the plodding beat, which one imagines Olsson played while napping, but because of the bizarre way Cridland enunciates "girl" so it sounds like "gu-hull." You've never heard anyone rhyme "apart" and "heart" with such screaming passion.

I haven't even mentioned "Sonnet 18," which grants Cridland the Shakespeare co-write that was always his destiny — or the closing track, an "operatic version" of "Take Me Back to Rainbows" featuring Pope Francis-anointed singer Carly Paoli — but I think you get the idea. I certainly wouldn't recommend listening to Falling in Love with My Girl, but I also can't deny that there's a certain amount of queasy fascination that goes along with listening to a vanity project that's this colossally misguided. How far that gets you will largely depend, I think, on your ability to stomach acts of musical elder abuse; all things being equal, you'll doubtless derive a lot more enjoyment from revisiting the band's earliest releases. That's how I'm palate-cleansing, anyway.