MARY J. BLIGE was in black and bling when she stepped into Legacy Recording Studios on the West Side of Manhattan to videotape a Yahoo Webcast. Her black knee-high Yves Saint Laurent boots had five-inch heels, leading up to black pants, a ribbed black Michael Kors top and a black cap; her Hermès belt had gleaming metal studs and her hoop earrings glittered with diamonds. After the band’s equipment was set up, she started to run through “Just Fine,” the first single from her new album, “Growing Pains” (Geffen). Ms. Blige looked into the camera as she delivered its spoken intro and about 20 seconds of a verse, then waved the band to a stop. “I’m ready,” she said. “Rehearsal over. No more rehearsing. Now we’re ready to do it for real.”
Multimedia
She has continually evolved over the years. Here she performs in 2007.
Realness has been her essence since Ms. Blige, 36, signed her first recording contract in 1989. She was a big-voiced, eager teenager from Yonkers who got her break by recording a song in a booth at a shopping mall. Her 1992 debut album, “What’s the 411?,” presented her not with standard rhythm-and-blues glamour but as a neighborhood girl, with guest rappers, sampled beats and rough notes, adding up to “hip-hop soul.” She took over more of the songwriting on her next album, “My Life,” for an autobiographical streak that she has continued and deepened ever since.
“She’s an open book and always has been,” said Bryan-Michael Cox, who produced and collaborated on writing her 2006 hit “Be Without You” and produced two songs for “Growing Pains.” “You know exactly what she’s been through in her life with her music.”
“Growing Pains” represents an upturn in her life. “The Breakthrough,” released at the end of 2005, became a rare blockbuster in a music business desperate for them. It brought her eight Grammy nominations and three awards.
She has been married since 2003 to Kendu Isaacs, a producer who is also her most dedicated advocate; at the Yahoo Webcast he strode into the control room to ask detailed technical questions about reverb.
“Just Fine” is the rare Mary J. Blige song to proclaim confidence rather than tension or distress. The album starts with its victory laps: a self-esteem booster called “Work That,” a proud proclamation that she’s a “Grown Woman” and “Just Fine.” But then it moves into Ms. Blige’s emotional and musical stronghold: the turbulence of trying to hold together a relationship that matters.
In an interview at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Ms. Blige made herself comfortable with a hotel bathrobe over her clothes, she said: “It was years of painfulness to get to this point. But once you’ve been going through so much self-hatred and stuff for so long, you get to that point and you say, ‘Gosh, am I good enough?’
“And then something says — and this is the growth — yes, you are. And that’s why I named the album ‘Growing Pains’ because it was that moment that I realized, you know what, it’s going to take a lot more growing and a lot more pain to sustain this breakthrough.”
Ms. Blige, a hit maker early on, regularly sells millions of albums. But she sings less often about success than about pain: heartless men, a tough childhood, an unshakable self-doubt. “When I look back at that Mary,” she said, “I wish I could just take her, and I wish I could raise her. Me, this Mary. Because she just wanted to sing, and she didn’t know anything about the music business. And she always cared about people more than she cared about herself. And she would give so much away to people. And no one would give her anything back. And it would hurt her really badly.”
That comes through on the albums, she said. “I was crying out for help. On the ‘My Life’ album I was saying: ‘Somebody help me. I’m about to end it all.’ Not with slitting my wrists or taking pills, but whatever drug, whatever alcohol, whatever I could do. I’m about to slowly start the process of ending it all.”
- 1
- 2
