The musicianship is spiritually maximalist. Avenue-wide choruses and whiplash chord changes flood the senses, essentially demanding these songs be performed live. It’s the ideal accompaniment for a singer who already sounded like a veteran, and whose concerns were less about how she was received by the world and more about the state of her soul. Gray told several interviewers at the time of On How Life Is’ release that if she did succeed as big as Epic hoped she would, she’d record the four albums she was contracted for and then move to France with her children—a remarkable stance for a marquee act in the twilight of the top-down major label era.
That casual indifference flows through the album, but so do love and sex. Outside of “I Try,” it’s a distinctly grown approach. “Caligula,” easily the horniest song here, is pure sex, a shuffling, drunken groove of hand-claps and languid electronic organ. It’s not so much love at first sight—Gray had already had that—as it is a match finally met. “I could not believe it/Hey, what’s your name!” she calls on the chorus, cymbals and snares alternately crashing and retreating in a barely contained storm. “Never lovin’, we’re always fuckin’,” Gray groans later, squeezing the juice out of the vowels. There’s no pursuit, just the sweaty, drunken desire of real lust, a feeling echoed on the summer-of-love-dripping “Sex-o-matic Venus Freak,” a celebration of a partner who brings out Gray’s best, porn-star self in bed, whipped cream included.
And then there’s “I Try,” which has defined Gray’s career since the moment it was pushed as the album’s second single. It’s an eternal last-call anthem, a gather-around-the-piano torch song for the ages, a once and future classic that continues to work. And for that reason it’s also far and away the album’s most calculated attempt at reaching for something easily identifiable and contemporary: in Epic’s eyes, probably the palatable earnestness of late-’90s hits like Everlast’s “What It’s Like” or Deborah Cox’s “Nobody’s Supposed to be Here.” Trading in On How Life Is’ rich musicality for a stripped-down bass, drum, and piano trio (with some strings sprinkled in), “I Try” also dilutes Gray’s lyrical zaniness, those small details and big lessons, the sex and loss and eccentricity, into a story of unreciprocated crushing and universal longing. As it often goes with The Big Song, “I Try” is in many ways the least Gray song here, the closest thing to a concession. Nothing else on On How Life Is is as rudimentary as its chorus, and nowhere else does Gray’s emotional state feel so two-dimensional. Yet its great irony is that for all of its familiarity, “I Try” is also the closest the album comes to an origin story, a true reflection of Gray’s innermost self: This is a song, literally, about wanting to talk and not knowing how, of keeping the most powerful fantasies only for yourself, despite wanting to share them with the world. And when she finally gets those words out, she lands on nothing short of how life really is: a choice and commitment, a series of mistakes and redemptions, something, above all, worth living for.
