A Gospel Voice Dressed for the Club

Cee Lo Green’s "Anyway" arrived in late 2011 when he was still riding the impossible momentum of "Fuck You"—a song that managed to be radio-clean and genuinely filthy at the same time, a trick almost nobody pulls off twice. "Anyway" is the quieter register of what he can do: that enormous, churchy, slightly unhinged voice doing something tender, turning a throwaway word into something that sounds like the last line of a sermon. He’s always been more interesting when the production steps back and just lets him exist in a room. The man sounds like he grew up believing music was literally sacred, which is apparently close to the truth, and it bleeds through even when the song itself is slight.