The Truth About Love (fan edition)

With the release of <i>Greatest Hits…So Far!!!</i> in 2010, the first chapter of P!nk’s career had ended. Since debuting with the pumping “There You Go” in 2000, the Pennsylvania-born pop provocateur had forged her own path through the teen-pop boom and what came after, letting her raspy, formidable voice and irrepressible spirit lead her. In 2011 she had her first child, and that cracked open her thinking about love: “I’m putting my heart and soul into every song and there’s a lot of that these days,” she wrote on her website in March 2012. “This little girl has expanded me and what I am capable of feeling as a human.” On <i>The Truth About Love</i>, P!nk explores the highs and lows of those emotions alongside a cast of top-tier producers (Max Martin, Greg Kurstin, Billy Mann) and big-name guest stars (Lily Allen, Fun. leader Nate Ruess, Eminem). Her powerful alto is used to great effect on the uptempo tracks, stomping through the petulant ode to an absent lover “How Come You’re Not Here?” and bemusedly running down the peaks and valleys of a relationship on the gently peppy, slightly sardonic Allen collaboration “True Love”. The glitchy, party-minded “Here Comes the Weekend” adds a harder edge to the EDM-pop that was in vogue during the early 2010s, with Eminem’s knotty verse providing the sort of menace that crops up near last call. (It’s all good, though; as P!nk notes, “We don't look for trouble/Just enough to see in double.”) P!nk had established herself in the late 2000s as one of pop’s top balladeers with cuts like “Who Knew” and “Please Don’t Leave Me”, and <i>The Truth About Love</i> succeeds on that front as well. “Just Give Me a Reason”, a piano-led duet with Ruess, crushingly depicts those relationship moments that can break either way, with P!nk drowning in her insecurities and Ruess pleading that he can fix any problems; “Try” finds the singer wrestling with the idea of plunging into her psyche’s unknown depths as the music explodes into an anthemic chorus. <i>The Truth About Love</i> continued P!nk’s journey from teen-pop upstart to fully grown belter, showing that her passion and ability to wring every feeling out of a hook were only getting stronger as her career ticked along.