Yes, there's still more to cover. This is another late 90's R&B collaboration, along the lines of his projects with Teez, Kym Rae and Bishop. Once again, it's on NJ's own Echo International that actually seems more directly tied to his time in Florida when he was working on his unreleased Men With Millions album. Specifically, this is "Waiting - Anticipating," the only record by a female singing group called Presteege, released in 1997.
Like, all of these slightly low energy R&B joints, it's a little on the bland side. The singers are pretty good, but they won't shock you awake with unbelievable notes, and the instrumental's boring. I suspect this is somewhat inspired by Heavy D's "Got Me Waiting," but it's certainly different enough that you couldn't call it a knock-off or anything. And if you really pay attention, things get a bit interesting.
First of all, it doesn't really fall into your traditional chorus/ verse/ chorus/ verse format. It starts out with Father's rap, which is a little longer and deeper than your standard MC guest spot on an R&B joint. And lyrically, it kicks off intriguingly outside of Father's wheelhouse. He's rapping about being some kind of drug kingpin and, well, I'll let Father tell it, "'Ey yo, my spot was hot; 5-0 rides up on my block. My soldiers dropped rocks as they load up their glocks." This sounds like a Children Of the Corn joint, except he's still rhyming slow and calm over a twangy R&B groove with Presteege crooning "I need your love" in the background.
Anyway, his point is that he's older and wiser now, and he only lead his life of crime for love. "I'm nasty and my attitude smells like Hell. Oh, you're missin' the realness, society fell. I guess I'll take you back, 'cause you're my baby blue true. Deep down inside, everything I did was done for you." So it comes around to eventually being the sort of love song you'd expect, but some of these bars might be the most street declarations Father's ever made. And so anyway, that's like the first two minutes, and the rest of the song is handed over to one member of Presteege to sing all the lead vocals, with the other members singing back-up. But again, there's no chorus or anything really. She just sings her bars about how "my love is you'll ever need" until the end of the song. Some weird keyboards kick in just as the lead vocalist reaches for her highest notes, which kind of obscures and undercuts her biggest moment, but oh well. It's a pleasant enough song once you get past the part about society falling to a criminal underworld.
There's also a B-side called "Do You Recall?" Interestingly - unless this is a label error, which really wouldn't surprise me - it's this B-side that doesn't feature Father that he has a writing credit on. Yeah, this is just a solo Presteege song. They're asking "do you recall the days of yesterday when you wanted me," which is kinda what they were singing about on their last song. The group comes together a little better on this one, but they're still pretty low-key, and the instrumental is basically just one repeating loop for the whole five and a half minutes. And this one does have a chorus, that they repeat a little too often. In short, Presteege are trying, but this is super boring. I'm not sure another appearance by Father could've helped much either. Both songs are produced by somebody named Almighty, and they're pretty limp. Put these ladies in a booth with somebody a little more enthusiastic and they might've gone somewhere. Too bad they never got that chance, but hopefully the members were able to go on to record more in some other context.
There are no instrumentals or anything, just the one song on each side. Pretty much for completists (read: me) only.
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