If I Had

The Take

Track 12 of *Love Sick* and one of the album's more understated highlights, 'If I Had' is a DJ Dahi solo production — the only track on the record where Dahi takes the entire beat alone — and features a vocal contribution from Charlie Wilson, the Gap Band frontman whose decades-long career as both lead singer and rap-feature MVP makes him one of soul music's most consequential elder statesmen. Dahi's beat is patient and slightly off-kilter: snares with extended decay, a bassline that walks rather than thumps, chord voicings drawn from 70s quiet-storm soul, a tempo that drifts. Don's vocal stays mostly in his middle register, conversational and exposed; Wilson arrives in the back half with the kind of weathered-but-still-velvet falsetto that has defined his late-career features for everyone from Snoop Dogg to Kanye to Travis Scott. The lyric paraphrase: a counterfactual song built on the title's hypothetical phrase, Don walking through versions of himself that might have existed if specific circumstances had broken differently — a different father, a different city, a different relationship, a different career trajectory — and Wilson's verse functions as the older voice answering from the other side of those counterfactuals. Among *Love Sick*'s 16 standard tracks, 'If I Had' is the one most frequently cited by fans and critics as a sleeper deep cut, the kind of song that doesn't anchor singles campaigns but rewards repeat listens. It's also a deliberate generational handoff. Charlie Wilson would return on *Hardstone Psycho* (2024)'s 'Attitude' alongside Cash Cobain, and that two-album Wilson sequence is the clearest signal Don has sent that he sees himself as continuous with classic R&B rather than apart from it.