C’batch is a composer, producer, guitarist, keyboardist, and sampler programmer from White Plains, New York, with roots reaching back to New York’s early-1980s dance scene and published work including “I Need You Now,” “Let Me Do You,” “Playgirls,” and “Geisha Love.” Part of his 2026 output is a self-styled “Year of the Vault,” an ongoing dig through songs and ideas left unfinished in his archive. His new six-track EP, I Guess You Want It This Way, released September 8th through Stevette Music, Inc., the independent label he co-founded with his wife Yvette in 1984, completes a song that first started taking shape roughly 26 years ago.
I Guess You Want It This Way
The song’s origins go back to Yvette, who is Jamaican-born, encouraging C’batch to write a reggae track. That original version never fully came together, but its hook and verse melody stuck with him for more than two decades, even outlasting an attempt to pair the recording with photos from an early-2000s trip to Jamaica. It wasn’t until 2026 that he finally returned to the piece, wrote proper lyrics, and completed it, spreading the finished idea across six separate interpretations rather than settling on one single version.
Opener “I Guess You Want It This Way (Cinematic Reggae 1)” sets the tone with a sweeping blend of roots reggae and cinematic scale, traditional offbeat guitar patterns anchoring the track while lush strings, synth textures, and ambient pads widen it into something closer to widescreen film music. A steady bassline and crisp drums keep it grounded underneath the orchestration, and C’batch’s warm, conversational, mid-register vocal carries the song’s themes of relationship friction and reluctant acceptance with restraint rather than big dramatic peaks.
“I Guess You Want It This Way 1” pulls back from that orchestral scale toward a warmer R&B and reggae fusion, driving bass, tight percussion, and clean guitar bringing ska and roots influence into sharper focus while organ chords add harmonic warmth. The vocal here feels more intimate and rhythm-forward, clear phrasing and small melodic shifts between verse and hook giving the track real flow as it works through the same emotional territory of love meeting resignation.
The EP closes on “I Guess You Want It This Way Reggae Dub (1),” which moves fully into spacious, traditional dub territory, heavy bass and syncopated drums anchoring a mix where guitar fragments, synth notes, and vocal snippets drift through the stereo field, reshaped by tape delay and reverb into something closer to meditative than melodic. Vocals become more textural here, brief phrases surfacing and dissolving rather than carrying a full narrative, functioning as echoes of the songs before it. Between these three anchor points, three additional versions continue exploring the same central melody from different angles, electronic depth, orchestral synthesis, and further R&B-leaning production all folded in around the reggae core. Rather than feeling redundant, the six-version structure makes the EP feel like a genuine exploration of one musical idea, its emotional continuity coming from the melody itself even as the arrangements shift around it.
The project is also a tribute to Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin, whose playing helped shape early ska and became part of reggae’s musical vocabulary. C’batch, a guitarist himself, met Ranglin at Heathrow Airport in February 2001, a brief encounter that clearly stayed with him, and he approaches the tribute through acknowledgment rather than imitation, placing his own long-gestating song inside a lineage much bigger than itself.
Final Thoughts
I Guess You Want It This Way is a warm, inventive project that turns 26 years of waiting into six distinct takes on the same idea, closing what amounts to a very old loop. It’s available now on Spotify. For more, visit stevettemusic.org, or follow C’batch on YouTube.
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