Like I Want You

Like I Want You: How Giveon Established His Voice With a Song About Quiet Devotion

Giveon Dezmann Evans, performing under his first name Giveon, arrived as one of the most distinctive new voices in R&B with a sound that seemed to belong to a different era entirely, deep, unhurried, and built for emotional weight rather than radio immediacy. "Like I Want You" served as a crucial early showcase for those qualities, introducing the Long Beach, California native to audiences who had first encountered him through his feature appearances on Drake's 2020 project Dark Lane Demo Tapes. "Like I Want You" was released in 2020 as part of Giveon's debut EP Take Time, released through Epic Records, a project that announced the arrival of an artist with an unusually fully-formed aesthetic sensibility for someone so new to major-label recording.

The production on the track is spare, built around piano, subtle percussion, and carefully deployed orchestral touches that allow Giveon's bass-baritone voice to occupy the center of the mix without competition. The arrangement was designed to feel intimate, almost confessional, while also carrying a grandeur appropriate to the emotional scale of what the song addresses. This balance, between the private and the ceremonial, between restraint and depth, became a hallmark of Giveon's approach across the Take Time project and beyond.

On the Billboard Hot 100, "Like I Want You" charted in 2020 and demonstrated that Giveon's appeal extended well beyond the niche of classic soul enthusiasts, connecting with a broader streaming audience that had been drawn into his work through his collaboration with Drake on "Chicago Freestyle." The success of that collaboration had created a wave of curiosity about who this baritone voice belonged to, and "Like I Want You" answered that question in the most compelling way possible: with a song that sounded like nothing else on radio at the time and justified the heightened interest entirely on its own terms.

Giveon has spoken in interviews about the influence of classic soul singers on his vocal approach, citing artists from the Motown era and beyond who understood how to use a large voice with precision rather than simply volume. The influence is apparent in "Like I Want You," where every note is placed with care and the emotional content is conveyed through subtle variation in tone and dynamics rather than through the kind of acrobatic runs that dominated contemporary R&B. This approach recalled singers like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye in its economy, though Giveon's specific timbre and delivery were entirely his own.

The Take Time EP, of which "Like I Want You" was a centerpiece, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best R&B Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards in 2021, an extraordinary recognition for a debut project. This nomination placed Giveon in the company of established veterans of the genre and signaled that the Recording Academy's voters heard in his work something that transcended the category of promising newcomer. The nomination drew additional attention to "Like I Want You" and the other tracks on the EP, expanding the audience that had already been building through streaming platforms.

The music video for "Like I Want You" reinforced the song's emotional themes through visual restraint and intimacy. Rather than elaborate sets or high-concept imagery, the video focused on close performance footage and quiet, warm-toned scenes of connection between people. This visual approach suited the song's content and communicated to viewers that Giveon's artistic identity was one of sincerity and directness rather than spectacle. In an era when many music videos competed for attention through scale and novelty, the video's quietness was itself a statement.

Giveon's vocal range, particularly the depth of his baritone, was unusual enough in contemporary pop and R&B to be commented upon extensively by critics and audiences alike. Comparisons to Barry White were inevitable given the register, but they undersold the sophistication of Giveon's phrasing and his ability to convey vulnerability through a voice that might, in less skilled hands, communicate only authority. Part of what made "Like I Want You" such an effective introduction was that it deployed his voice in the service of tender devotion rather than dominant confidence, creating a productive tension between the weight of the instrument and the emotional openness of the performance.

The song found particular traction on social media platforms, where clips of Giveon's voice prompted widespread sharing among users who described encountering it as an almost physical experience. This organic viral quality was characteristic of the way streaming-era artists could build audiences through genuine emotional resonance rather than traditional radio promotion, and Giveon became one of the clearer success stories of that model in the early 2020s. "Like I Want You" was among the tracks most frequently shared, used in short-form video content, and cited by new listeners as the song that made them seek out his full catalog.

Following the success of Take Time and the visibility afforded by his Drake collaboration, Giveon released his second EP When It's All Said and Done in 2020, and his full-length debut album Give or Take in 2022, which debuted at number two on the Billboard 200. This rapid ascent confirmed that the promise of "Like I Want You" had not been a flash of early attention but the beginning of a sustained career built on genuine artistic distinctiveness. The song remains a reference point in discussions of his work, understood as the track that first made clear what kind of artist he intended to be and why that intention was worth taking seriously.