Ddespite a 30-year-plus discography and a series of undeniable classics (Sittin’ Up in My Room, The Boy Is Mine, the modern R&B plan What About Us?) and deep tricks passed by people like Solange, Kehlani and Normani, there is a feeling that Brandy, anointed by fans under the Vocal Bible, is still there. His vivid and sometimes disturbing memoir, Steps, co-written with Gerrick Kennedy and out Tuesday, goes some way to explaining why.
Detailing her formative years in Mississippi and later California, where she learned her craft in church choirs and youth groups, and later her meteoric rise as a gangster, Phases paints a picture of a young woman whose insecurities were often exposed and exploited by others. It also highlights issues related to the role of care in the music industry; in 1999, while addicted to diet pills, and still playing her part in Moesha’s recording and touring schedule, Brandy suffered a stroke at just 20 years old.
“The first dream I remember was standing on stage,” Brandy writes in the book’s introduction. Through all the stages, he fights to keep that dream alive while living a rollercoaster life.
He found inspired ways to deal with bullies
Brandy’s father, Willie, a gospel singer and choir director, first noticed her vocal talents. “You have a special voice, Bran,” she tells him. “Let’s train it, let’s take it to where God wants it to go.” While singing quickly became his happy place, he was constantly bullied at school – an easy target, he says, given his “very thin frame and quiet demeanor”. Another bully, Shanice, made Brandy afraid to go to school, so she prayed to God for a solution. Shortly thereafter, Shanice was shot and killed. Later, another champion is put in his place by Brandy herself when the extended braided cords are turned into a “heavy, flexible whip”.
A clue to where Brandy first found her courage came in 1993 when she told her mother and manager, Sonja, that she was having problems with her on-screen mother, actress Thea Vidale, on the set of the sitcom Thea. “She picked up a metal chair and pulled it over to the director and sat in the chair — all without damaging the TV Mom’s eyes,” Brandy writes of Sonja. “‘Okay, I’m going to stay right here today,’ he said, his voice soft and smooth. The constant barbs stopped.
He was an ardent fan who used to faint near his musical idols
Perhaps the most relevant part of Steps is Brandy’s situation. Before fame, he completes his way back from cheap seats in the hope of meeting his ultimate idol Whitney Houston. When that fails, he harasses gospel legends BeBe and CeCe Winans until they call Houston on the phone, only to temporarily silence Brandy.
Later, in 1995, after the success of Brandy’s self-titled album, the couple finally met backstage at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. “There was a scream from somewhere in my chest,” Brandy writes of the meeting with Houston. “And then, inexplicably, I ran… It was as if my brain was short-circuited by a huge force of emotions – anticipation, excitement, disbelief, joy – all colliding at once.”
Years later, he was introduced to Michael Jackson at a recording studio: “I basically blacked out. My legs turned to Jell-O. I went down.” Although he did not faint when he met Diana Ross in the 1999 film Double Platinum, he received some wise advice from the Muscles actor: never chew gum (it’s distracting and ineffective), stay straight and keep your knees bent “because the cameras are always on you, even if you think they’re not”.
He is eager to tell her side of the story about the toxic relationship
By the time she was 13, Brandy was singing for the R&B group Immature. While he was busy in the apartment of the manager of that group, he says that another member called Half-Pint groped him. Brandy’s angry behavior was mocked by her co-workers until she threw a book and accidentally damaged the eye of another member, Jerome. “I learned a hard lesson that day about boundaries, about talking too quickly, about the complexities that can arise when children work in adult environments,” she writes.
Two years later, when she was 15, Brandy met Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men. What started as an admiration for each other’s work quickly turned into a secret relationship. “My girlfriend is sixteen,” the then 23-year-old was quoted as saying during one of the couple’s parties, perhaps, Brandy writes, as a way of “setting a boundary, even if she passed it quietly”. The sexual relationship began before Morris confessed to multiple infidelities.
It’s a relationship that would be established, often by Morris himself in various media interviews, as a heartbroken naive fan. In the episodes, Brandy expresses her reality with obvious anger and confusion. He writes: “At the time, it sounded like a fairy tale. Now I see this as the beginning of a balanced courtship of a teenage girl by an older man who knew full well the effect his attention would have.” Later, after explaining the reasons why she has not shared her side of the story until now (to protect her and her family), she writes: “The shame ends here. The silence ends here. I wasn’t a fast girl with depression. I wasn’t a weird teenager who couldn’t handle rejection.
The boy is mine was his thought
Released in 1998, The Boy Is Mine, a song featuring fellow teenage R&B singer Monica, would go on to become Brandy’s biggest hit, spending 13 weeks at No 1 in the US. Originally composed by Brandy and producer Rodney Jerkins as a slow, very sad song, it was Brandy’s idea to turn it into a duet. In his mind, asking Monica, the woman the media decided was his arch-nemesis – streetwise versus Brandy’s sweet-natured girl-next-door – to be his fictional rival would dispel the rumors they didn’t say. For context, at the time, an LA radio station ran a regular segment called Brandy vs Monica, which featured games that portrayed the teenage Brandy as “a fake, unpleasant, saccharine sweet face hiding something sinister underneath”. There is no doubt that the song, which has a video of the couple as neighbors fighting each other, only ignited the fire.
In the episodes, Brandy says there was no beef. He describes the couple, on a rare day off, riding rollercoasters together – Brandy’s favorite pastime – and the first recording of The Boy Is Mine went well. Later, however, cracks appeared and tensions erupted; Monica re-recorded her vocals with her producer, Dallas Austin, while Monica’s label boss, Clive Davis, titled her album The Boy Is Mine as a way of trying to claim ownership of the song. Brandy didn’t help matters when she sang the song solo on a US talk show.
Unsurprisingly, when the two performed The Boy Is Mine together for the first time at the VMAs, they didn’t say much. However, during the game, the clouds parted: “Even in the place where we were fighting against each other – where we allowed ourselves to be enemies – we could not realize our shared experience, our common journeys, our combined strength.”
His involvement in a car accident in 2006 nearly broke him
Two years after releasing her then underrated and now rightly celebrated fourth album, Timbaland’s 2004 Afrodisiac, Brandy was involved in a serious car accident. The death of a young woman troubled him: “I no longer felt I had the right to continue living my life, nor to have a momentary spark of happiness … who was I to smile? To sing?
The guilt kept Brandy from leaving the house for months, even thinking about running away. “In my dreams, I floated free, unencumbered by the calamity that swallowed up my sleeping hours… sometimes I thought I’d stay in that twilight zone forever. If only I could turn and run away. Vanish like the morning mist.” He writes that it was his young daughter Sy’Rai who brought him back from the brink.
Singing was like lifting a mountain
While the Stages are full of horrible moments – an abusive boyfriend; the father of her daughter who sells her on the Wendy Williams show after the couple lied about being married; After that, he forced her to work with the uncooperative Kanye West as part of an obvious ploy to get her to sign with them – there’s also a real joy in the way Brandy writes about music. Obsessed with recording his voice and vocals from a young age after his father gave him an old four-track recorder, he began hammering out his signature sound – which earned him the accolade of the Vocal Bible – in the studio with Rodney Jerkins.
After working diligently to secure his backing vocals to his 16m-selling Never Say Never, when it came to its follow-up, 2002’s Full Moon, Jerkins put the challenge to Brandy. “Do you want to be big?” he asked. After flying between studios while simultaneously working on Michael Jackson’s Invincible, Jerkins downplayed Jackson’s approach to recording vocals: literally, more. Brandy started working. “Sometimes we’d wrap sixteen parts of me singing the exact same song for a little part of the song,” Brandy says of working on the album. “I attacked each message like I’m climbing Mount Everest, moving forward where comfort stopped – and then moving forward.”
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