WATCH HERE
FINAL VIGNETTE IN SERIES
LISTEN TO P.O.V HERE
[October 12, 2023] Today, RCA Records-signed rising R&B singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Tone Stith shares his brand-new vignette for his track “Lonely.” The vignette is the final offering in a series of vignettes from Tone’s latest EP P.O.V. Watch HERE. Listen to Tone’s EP P.O.V HERE.
The vignette mirrors the intimate and sultry mood of the track and serves as the perfect final encapsulation of Tone’s lustrous EP.
Last month, Tone released his highly anticipated EP P.O.V featuring the hit singles “Girls Like You” and “I Need You.” P.O.V has amassed nearly three million streams on Spotify alone since its release. Stay tuned for more news from Tone Stith.
Keep Up With Tone Stith:
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/ToneStith
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tonestithofficial/
About Tone Stith:
Live long enough, love long enough, and you’re going to experience the pain of betrayal. For Tone Stith, that first heartbreak changed everything. It’s the driving force behind his new EP P.O.V, a love story that offers clarity through heartache, the kind of growth that can only come from being vulnerable enough to be hurt deeply, and strong enough to open back up again.
Tone Stith may be a romantic, but the lens through which he views love is anything but rose-colored. As a child, he watched his parents split, raise him separately, then slowly work to rebuild their trust, to spend day after day deciding to be in love again. “That’s very rare,” he admits. I got to experience that love first-hand, like, OK, this is what love really is. Not just this coloring book, like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to be in love forever.’ Nah, it’s the whole process. It’s real.” His parents channeled that renewed love through their son, supporting his talent and ambition as a musician and singer. But the greatest gift they gave was the embodiment of “real love,” one endures and continues to grow.
The ambition Tone Stith’s parents fostered helped birth one of the most exciting talents in R&B today, a velvet voiced crooner with an empathetic streak that can write hits in his sleep. His first break came writing Chris Brown’s hit single “Liquor,” but he quickly established himself as a rising artist in his own right. Since his 2017 debut Can We Talk, he’s drawn co-signs and collaborations with the likes of H.E.R., Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee, Quavo of the Migos, and Ty Dolla $ign, and finds himself poised to make his mark on an R&B landscape that seems more concerned with multiplicity than monogamy.
“It’s all right to go after that one person that you love, you know what I’m saying? It’s all right to be in a committed relationship,” he says. “My purpose is to shine light on love. The good parts and the bad parts. Like, let me run y’all through what love is really about. I got to experience it on all types of levels.”
With P.O.V, he tells a story of a love deferred. On the dreamy “Smoking in the Park,” we find him at his most relaxed, spending a day in the clouds with his homegirl, someone with whom he can be himself, sharing intimate secrets free from judgment. But when he experiences the betrayal of infidelity with his actual girlfriend, he’s unmoored, unsure of who to trust, what to think, or what to do. The single “Girls Like You” is a flex from a wounded heart, a sultry bop with a swagged out facade that belies the pain that fuels it. The one who always said she’d leave him before stepping out on him? She did him dirty, and didn’t even bother to cover her tracks. She’s ruined him for the girls that will immediately follow her.
“‘Girls Like You’ is the beginning of my first real heartbreak,” he says. “Somebody like me, I love hard. I’m loyal. So when she cheated on me, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t think it was going to happen to me. I thought I was doing everything right, man.’”
But by “I Need You,” Tone has had his revelation. The homegirl he smokes in the park with, the one who shares his secrets, she’s been the one the whole time. He’s been wasting his time with these other girls; she’s been in front of his eyes this whole time. If it’s a little reminiscent of Usher’s “U Make Me Wanna,” that’s no accident—the close analogue to P.O.V is Mr. Raymond’s raw and diaristic style, a direct, emotional realness delivered with a croon destined to melt hearts.
A big part of Tone Stith’s P.O.V is embracing love, whether it’s popular or not. That version of himself on “Girls Like You”—the one fueled by pain, embracing the toxicity of commodifying women…that’s not who he is, it’s merely another stage of grief. Being true to himself means being true to his own idea of love, a deep commitment that demands strength. “In this journey, everybody makes some type of mistakes,” he says. “But if you really love someone, you gotta really fight the odds and stick to it. You gotta choose to love that person every day.”
