01 The Story

Faith Evans "Love Like This" (1998): From Tragedy to Top Ten

When Faith Evans released "Love Like This" in the autumn of 1998, she was doing something that few artists in her position could manage: converting an almost unimaginable personal loss into radio gold. The single arrived roughly a year after the September 1997 murder of her husband, the Notorious B.I.G., an event that had sent shockwaves through hip-hop culture and left Evans as one of the most publicly grieving figures in popular music. Yet "Love Like This" was not a dirge. It was a warm, strutting R&B track with a breakbeat pulse and a hook built for late-night radio, demonstrating the breadth of Evans's artistic range and her determination to move forward.

The song was produced by D-Dot Angelettie (Deric Angelettie), a Bad Boy Records affiliate and close collaborator of the Notorious B.I.G., who had been a fixture in the Bad Boy creative circle since the label's mid-1990s ascent. Angelettie's production leaned on a soulful sample and a propulsive drum track that owed as much to classic Philly soul as to the contemporary East Coast rap aesthetic that had defined Bad Boy's sound. The arrangement gave Evans room to stretch her gospel-trained voice across a dynamic range, from conversational verses to a sky-reaching chorus.

"Love Like This" appeared on Evans's second studio album, Keep the Faith, released on Bad Boy Records / Arista in October 1998. The album was her first full-length release since the death of her husband, and the music industry watched its reception with particular attention. Evans had already established herself as a serious vocal talent with her 1995 debut, Faith, which contained the R&B hit "Soon as I Get Home," but Keep the Faith was widely seen as a test of whether she could sustain a major-label career under the weight of personal tragedy.

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 14, 1998, entering at number 21. Its climb was swift and consistent. Within two weeks it had stabilized at number 15, and by the chart dated December 5, 1998, it had broken into the top ten, reaching number 10. The following week, on December 12, 1998, the song hit its peak of number 7, placing it among the most commercially successful records of the holiday season. The single ultimately spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100, a run that confirmed Evans as a bankable solo star independent of her association with the Notorious B.I.G.

The song performed especially strongly on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, where it became a regular fixture in the upper reaches over the course of its long chart life. Radio added the record broadly across urban contemporary formats, and the video received significant rotation on BET and MTV's TRL-adjacent programming. The visual presentation showed Evans both relaxed and powerful, a combination that helped cement her image as an artist who had processed grief without being defined by it.

Critically, "Love Like This" was noted for its tonal clarity. Where Evans's Bad Boy labelmates were frequently oriented toward harder production aesthetics in 1998, she carved out a lane that emphasized melodic songwriting and soulful performance. The track's bridge section, in particular, gave her a showcase moment that reviewers singled out as evidence of a vocalist in full command of her instrument.

The commercial success of "Love Like This" set the stage for Evans's continued presence on the charts. She would go on to release additional singles from Keep the Faith and remain a prominent figure in R&B through the early 2000s. The song endures as a period-defining document of late-1990s Bad Boy R&B: lush, rhythmically confident, and grounded in a vocal performance that carried genuine emotional stakes.

02 Song Meaning

Longing and Renewal: The Emotional Architecture of "Love Like This"

"Love Like This" operates on a deceptively simple premise: the narrator has encountered a form of love so complete that it has redefined what she thought the emotion could be. The song's lyrical strategy is cumulative rather than narrative. Evans does not trace the arc of a relationship from beginning to end; instead, she circles around a single, overwhelming recognition, returning to it from different angles across the verses and chorus, reinforcing the idea that some feelings resist linear description.

The title phrase functions as both declaration and question. To love like this implies that a specific, unprecedented quality of feeling has arrived, something that distinguishes this attachment from everything that came before. There is an implicit comparison at the heart of the lyric: previous love was something else, something lesser, and the current experience has raised the standard by which all emotional connection will be measured. This structure gives the song a subtle note of vulnerability, because to declare that one has never felt this way before is also to admit that one has been wrong about love before.

The verses carry a quality of grateful astonishment, the narrator cataloguing the specific sensations and reassurances that come with feeling genuinely valued. Evans's vocal delivery underscores this by treating the verses with a conversational intimacy, as though she is sharing something private before the chorus opens the feeling up to communal space. The transition from verse to chorus mimics the emotional movement the lyric describes: a private realization becoming a public proclamation.

Given the biographical context of the song's release in late 1998, just over a year after the death of the Notorious B.I.G., many listeners heard in "Love Like This" a song about finding one's footing after loss, about the capacity of the human heart to remain open even after devastating grief. The lyric never specifies grief or loss, but the emotional urgency with which Evans performs the song, particularly on the bridge, carries a weight that exceeds the conventions of a standard R&B love declaration.

The bridge is the lyric's most exposed moment. There, the armor of the confident narrator briefly drops, and what is audible is something closer to relief: the relief of being loved, of not being alone, of having found something worth protecting. It is the section that transforms the song from a celebration of romantic good fortune into a meditation on emotional resilience.

Thematically, "Love Like This" belongs to a tradition of gospel-inflected R&B love songs that understand devotion as a form of grace. The idea that extraordinary love is something that happens to you rather than something you manufacture places the narrator in a position of receptivity, which is itself a kind of strength. To allow oneself to be moved, to admit that something has changed you fundamentally, requires courage, and that courage is audible throughout Evans's performance.