I Look to You

1	Million Dollar Bill 3:24
2	Nothin' But Love 3:36
3	Call You Tonight 4:10
4	I Look to You 4:27
5	Like I Never Left / Akon 3:51
6	A Song for You 4:12
7	I Didn't Know My Own Strength 3:41
8	Worth It 4:40
9	For the Lovers 4:14
10	I Got You 4:13
11	Salute 4:10

All Music Guide

It's only been seven years between Just Whitney and 2009's I Look to You, not even Houston's longest time between albums, but it feels much, much longer, her glory days obscured in hazy memories of lost luster chiefly deriving from a bad marriage with Bobby Brown, chronicled in an embarrassing reality show for Bravo in 2004. I Look to You attempts to wash this all away with something of a return to roots -- a celebration of Houston's deep disco beginnings, tempered with a few skyscraping ballads designed to showcase her soaring voice. Houston's rocky decade isn't ignored, but it isn't explored, either: songs allude to Whitney's strength, her willpower as a survivor struggling through some unnamed struggle -- enough for listeners to fill in the blanks, either with their own experience or their imaginings of Houston's life. More than the songs, Whitney's voice tells the tale of her lost decade. The highs are diminished, the sweetness sanded away, leaving her a thick, powerful growl that has an emotional pull not quite like a ravaged latter-day Billie Holiday, but not all that far removed, either; at the very least, Whitney can still sing, knowing when to wring emotion out of a phrase, knowing when not to push for the glory notes that she can no longer hit. This diminished skill set actually serves the showboating showstoppers well, turning them into something that operates on a human scale, injecting them with something approximating warmth, something that the songs quite deliberately avoid. Also, there just aren't that many of them on I Look to You, either. Most of the album splits the difference between burnished neo-disco and modern soul, aware of fashion but not pandering to it. Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Rolling Stone

I Look to You spends little time looking back. It is a modern soul record, a collection of sleek, often spunky love songs that aim at something more immediate and tangible than nostalgia or catharsis: Houston wants back in the diva stakes. 1/2 Jody Rosen

Los Angeles Times

The best giant ballad is the Warren-penned, David Foster-produced "I Didn't Know My Own Strength," an exhibition of battle scars that's richer for the weary, injury-protecting quality of Houston's vocal. If she does earn the Grammy she's virtually been promised for a song from this set, it should be for this one. Ann Powers