Davion Farris’ Alchemy Album Review: Love, Lies, and the Window Seat

Davion Farris turns the Alchemy album into a set of flirtations, confessions, and quiet self-snitching—sometimes gorgeous, sometimes a little too polite.

Courtesy of I Write Life Music.

He’s been in the room—now he’s standing in the light

Some albums sound like an artist introducing themselves. The Alchemy album sounds like Davion Farris finally admitting he’s been hiding in plain sight on purpose.

You can hear the household he came from in the way the songs are built: music as a daily trade, not a hobby. The Gouché-Farris family doesn’t treat singing like a personality trait—they treat it like a job you clock into. Jackie Gouché-Farris (backup singer, minister of music) raised her kids inside that kind of discipline, and it shows in how controlled Davion is as a lead. His brothers SiR and D Smoke stepped out front under their own names; Davion took the long hallway route—songwriting, sessions, years of being useful to other people’s spotlights—until he ended up with a Grammy for co-writing “Falling in Love” for Lucky Daye and a deal through Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad via Def Jam.

And Alchemy feels like the moment he decided: I’m not giving away the best stuff anymore. I’m singing the material I kept.

The album’s main trick: real conversations, split down the middle

Here’s what Davion Farris is actually doing on Alchemy: he’s staging romantic scenes where the guest vocalists don’t “feature,” they respond. And that’s a power move. A lot of R&B features are just decorative. These ones are structured like two people texting back—except everybody’s voice is mixed like they’re standing in the same room pretending they’re fine.

On “Flirting in the Hallway,” Kenyon Dixon opens with that soft promise—he’ll love a woman until she falls asleep. Farris doesn’t compete with it; he slides in from a different angle, like he’s reclined in a window seat with the mood already set, watching her put on a striptease while he calmly maps the next move: apartment 16B. Marcus Paul’s horns and Edi Callier’s guitar keep it feeling like a live band is playing behind the flirtation, which makes the song feel less like bedroom fantasy and more like two grown men embarrassing themselves with confidence.

The arguable part: Kenyon and Davion are saying the same thing—just with different levels of guilt. That repeated secrecy line (“If I let this go, you can’t tell nobody”) doesn’t sound romantic to me. It sounds like they already know they’re going to regret it.

“Feel” does a similar split-screen. Jai’Len Josey starts it with that physical heat—temperature rising, ice down the spine—and when Farris meets her halfway, the track turns into a handshake. The bridge gets a guitar solo, and I took that as Davion trying to say the quiet part without lyrics: this is chemistry, but it’s also control.

Then “All My Love” comes in, produced by Iman Omari, and he doesn’t just build the track—he literally takes the second half vocally too. The promise is bold in the way only a man can promise: he’ll read her mind, make her dreams come true, all that. Meanwhile, “Love You Forever” answers back with S!MONE delivering a verse about a woman who used to not see and now sees everything. That’s not just a lyrical pivot—it’s the album telling on itself. Farris writes both halves of these exchanges, and you can feel him arranging the dialogue so nobody gets the last word for too long.

If you’re waiting for a “main character” record where Davion dominates every song, you’re going to miss the point. This album wants the friction.

“Fire” is where he stops being slick and starts being honest

After all the polished conversation starters, “Fire” is the first time the album shows its teeth.

The woman in “Fire” doesn’t even answer his “what’s your favorite color?” question on the first night. That tiny detail matters because it’s the first moment where the love interest isn’t written like a fantasy object—she’s written like someone who doesn’t care if the vibe is convenient. She’d rather stay home balancing her chakras than sit through an opera, which is funny in that quietly specific way: Davion is basically admitting he tried to impress her with “culture” and she swatted it away.

And then he gives her the credit that most love songs avoid because it makes the singer sound weak:

“She baptized me in fire / She made me bare my soul”

“She turned my lead to gold”

That chorus is the clearest statement he makes about what love did to him. Not “love saved me,” not “love healed me,” but love changed the material. That’s what the Alchemy album title is doing right there, plain as day.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure at first if “Fire” was going to drift into self-help poster language. On second listen, it lands because the details are too specific to be motivational fluff. He’s not preaching romance. He’s describing a woman who didn’t let him stay the same.

The 28-second doorway that leads to the album’s best writing

Right when the album could’ve kept coasting on flirtation, it pulls a short film move.

“Something About Mary” is 28 seconds. A rideshare drops off in the rain. The passenger gives his umbrella to a stranger. She introduces herself as Mary. That’s it. It’s basically a doorway you walk through.

And then you hit “L.A. Mary,” and the room changes.

This is the track where Davion Farris writes like he’s watching real life instead of trying to win someone back. It runs five minutes and doesn’t rush, produced by Ant Bell with a patient pace that lets the details accumulate like bruises. Mary is a dancer, a painter “like Mona Lisa,” and she’s making more money stripping on camera than she can anywhere else. Davion even starts to soften a man’s role in her life, then corrects himself mid-sentence like he hates his own politeness:

“They no longer call him pimp / That’s really what he is.”

Noah Ehler’s guitar and Marcus Paul’s horn solos aren’t there to decorate; they act like pauses in the story where you’re forced to sit with what you just heard. By the second verse the picture gets uglier in small, believable ways: she calls customers names to squeeze out extra cash, she kills her days with Adderall, she keeps her mouth shut because her family wants to see her “win” and she doesn’t want them to know what winning looks like right now.

And Davion keeps returning to the refrain like it’s the only truth left:

“Peace of mind is so hard to find / All she does is cry.”

I’ll say it bluntly: this is the finest lyricism he’s put under his own name here. A reasonable listener could argue it’s too bleak or too observational for an R&B album that’s supposed to feel sensual—but that’s exactly why it hits. It refuses to seduce you out of reality.

He tries to play innocent on “Fiendin’,” then admits he’s not

After “L.A. Mary,” the album turns inward again, and that’s where it gets messy in a way that feels intentional.

“Fiendin’” doesn’t allow casual encounters. Davion insists he wasn’t just trying to sleep with her—he claims he wanted to “make love.” But the song doesn’t even let him keep that mask on. A few lines later he’s begging for a lie she can remember, and he’s describing withdrawals every time she’s gone.

The last verse is the one that flips the whole thing from romance to self-snitching:

“I can’t get caught fallin’ too deep / ’Cause if I do then I won’t leave.”

That’s not a love confession. That’s someone admitting they need the option to escape more than they need the person. If you’ve ever dated someone who sounded sweet but kept one shoe on, you know exactly what that line is.

And then “Down Bad” takes the addiction metaphor and makes it literal. He sings her as both the drug and the plug, asks himself why he can’t sober up, and even frames an overdose like an exit plan if he can’t quit. It’s dramatic, sure—but it’s also the kind of drama people use when they’re trying to make obsession sound inevitable instead of chosen.

Ray Vaughn shows up with the only rap verse on the song, and the humor is a needed pressure valve: “Since you blocked me, I can’t get over the counter like medicine.” He blames a voodoo doll, or whatever she put in his spaghetti. The punchlines yank the track away from Davion’s dead-serious tone just long enough to remind you: yes, this is ridiculous. People do become this ridiculous.

Davion ends it sadder than the joke, though, conceding: “A castle don’t hold up in sand.” It’s the album quietly walking away from the beach—no more fantasy of stability when the foundation is literally slipping.

Arguable claim: Ray Vaughn saves “Down Bad” from collapsing under its own seriousness. Without him, it might’ve tipped into melodrama.

When the slow jams give him room, he writes better—mostly

After the emotional hangover, Alchemy leans into slow-jam space, and Davion generally thrives there.

“Good Girl” works because Seige Monstracity gives him air. Davion gets to paint a scene instead of cramming punchlines: moonlight “dripping” over her skin tone, that half-past-midnight text asking her to slide through. It’s not reinventing the genre, but it sounds like he’s relaxed enough to mean it, which is rarer than it should be.

Then there’s “On Your Mind,” and here’s the part that lost me a bit.

He promises to spin the block if she steps into the whip. He tells his ex the bedroom walls need painting because of what they saw. He asks her to admit he’s still in her mind. Adrian Forbes and Joshua Coleman produce it clean and hovering, like fog with good taste, and Michael John Morgan’s live bass is the one thing that sticks in my memory after the song ends.

Everything else? The pleading feels interchangeable. Not bad—just not his. On an album that’s strongest when it sounds like real dialogue and real scenes, “On Your Mind” sounds like it could’ve been handed to almost anyone in the session.

Arguable claim: “On Your Mind” is the album’s one moment where craft shows up without personality, like the song got finished because it had to.

Defeat as a creative choice: “It’s Done” and “Reality”

The back end of the record gets quieter, and not in a candlelit way—in a “welp, that happened” way.

On “It’s Done,” Davion calls himself both victim and suspect. He accepts blame for playing a dangerous game, and he describes hating the view from the skies of his lies. D.K. The Punisher’s production keeps it steady, restrained, almost numb. It’s not a grand apology; it’s someone sitting still because moving would mean admitting more.

“Reality” shares that defeated calmness, and the emotional center is painfully plain: “I gave it all, all that I had, and it wasn’t enough.” SiR comes in for the second verse, and he sounds like someone still bargaining with the air—still trying to believe he won’t become the man she never believed in. It’s a last Hail Mary thrown up just to see if anything comes back down.

Both voices land on the same concession: “After all, I still love you.” And here’s the weirdly adult part—nobody makes a move to force the reunion. The song doesn’t chase closure. It accepts the bruise.

I thought at first Davion didn’t need his brother on this album because the writing was already doing so much heavy lifting. But “Reality” changed my mind. That two-voice structure isn’t a gimmick here—it’s the whole point. Davion writes these exchanges to flirt, to negotiate, to confess, and this one needs SiR because the emotion is too exposed to carry alone.

Arguable claim: “Reality” is less a duet than a split personality—hope arguing with resignation in real time.

Conclusion: Alchemy is romance with fingerprints, not perfume

Davion Farris uses the Alchemy album to prove he’s not just stepping into the spotlight—he’s dragging his whole private logic into it: flirt like it’s a conversation, confess like it’s a crime scene, and let the guests speak like they actually live there. When it works (“L.A. Mary,” “Fire,” “Reality”), it feels uncomfortably real. When it doesn’t (“On Your Mind”), you can hear the old session habits trying to sand down the edges.

Our verdict: People who like R&B when it tells the truth a little too clearly will actually love this—especially if you’re into songs that sound like they’re answering each other. If you want nothing but glossy seduction and clean happy endings, this album will annoy you the way a mirror does when you’re trying to take a flattering picture.

FAQ

• What is the main idea behind the Alchemy album?
  It treats love like transformation—turning “lead to gold”—but it also shows the ugly chemical reactions: obsession, secrecy, and regret.
• Which track feels like Davion Farris at his sharpest?
  “L.A. Mary.” The writing stacks specific details without rushing, and the refrain hits like a real admission, not a slogan.
• Does the album rely heavily on features?
  Yes, but in a good way. The guests aren’t decoration; they get real halves of conversations, which is rarer than it should be.
• Is there a weak spot on the record?
  “On Your Mind” is the one moment where the begging feels generic, even though the production is sleek and the bass work stands out.
• What kind of mood does the album end on?
  Resigned. “Reality” lands on love that remains even when nobody’s getting back together, which is both mature and slightly brutal.

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