R&B songbird Monica and gospel singer James Fortune teamed up on a new single, titled “Trusting God.”
“I gotta be honest, I don’t know. This time I don’t have the answers, I’m just out here trusting God,” Fortune says in the song’s intro. “Sing Monica.”
“Why would I think that I can’t handle this alone / When so many things in my life were going wrong,” sings Monica.
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“People I loved made promises they didn’t keep
I should’ve known better
I tried to do better
There was no one to blame but me.”
The single comes more than a decade after Monica and Fred Hammond teamed up with Fortune and FIYA for the song “Hold On” which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Christian Songs chart.
“10 years after the release of our Grammy-nominated song ‘Hold On,’ Monica and myself began talking about doing another song together,” Fortune tells VIBE, exclusively.
“I told her I would start working on some ideas and send them to her. At the time, I had no idea what I would write about but with everything that had been going on the last few years around me and within me I said to myself ‘I’m just out here trusting God.’ Once I heard that phrase the lyrics just started to flow.”
He continued:
“I wasn’t necessarily writing it as a song for others I was writing from my own experience. I didn’t have the answers and my faith was really being tested. So all I kept saying is ‘I’m just out here trusting God.’ I got with my producer D Lo to produce the track and called one of my lead singers Minon Bolton to demo the vocals for me. I sent Monica the demo and she said, ‘This the one; the world needs this song right now.'”
Fortune said he was “blown away” by the passion and emotion in Monica’s voice. Life has not been easy for the single, 42-year-old mom-of-three.
Monica’s career took a downturn in 2000 when she witnessed her ex-boyfriend Jarvis Weems commit suicide at his brother’s graveside.
“Afterward, I felt, ‘What else could I have done?’ You replay that situation over and over and you switch it around: Maybe if I had said this, or if I would have done that,'” Monica told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2001. “It’s just something that it’s never possible for me to go back and change.”
Monica is currently in a long-distance relationship with incarcerated former rapper C-Murder, who was convicted in 2003 of killing a fan.
James Fortune X Monica – Trusting God
SR rated: 2/5 roses
