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In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Mary, we had the privilege to speak more with Burrowes and a handful of collaborators about a few records off the Grammy-nominated album.Ĭredits: Stevie Wonder (Writers) Babyface (Producer)Īt the time Blige was readying the release of her first live album The Tour, she already had buzz surrounding her then-untitled fourth album. She also reunited with past studio associates and worked with budding music wonders, including Chucky Thompson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Cecil Ward, K-Ci Hailey, and Tara Geter. The material here found Blige producing simply soulful tunes with industry elites, from Aretha Franklin and Elton John to Lauryn Hill and Diane Warren. Turning her attention away from her celebrated collaborations with street poets, Mary granted the singer acclaim and recognition that transcended the rap world. Instead of keeping a similar pace for her fourth set, Blige returned to the studio to record Mary and delivered one of the most unexpected and substantial albums of the decade. So, we wanted to recast her without losing momentum in the areas that she had already more than achieved.” She’s very soulful and I needed for all the critics to understand that it wasn’t just hip-hop driven. “She had knocked down so many doors with the hip-hop and R&B beats, we wanted to do something different with her because she has an amazing voice.
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“I turned myself inside out to try and achieve that,” he says. Although he had been a part of a cultural movement at Bad Boy with Diddy (then known as Puff Daddy) with hits for artists like Faith Evans, Craig Mack, and The Notorious B.I.G., it was his first time overseeing a studio album.īurrowes remembers being under tremendous pressure from her then-label MCA Records to make an equally successful project to her blockbuster third album. Four of the five singles from that album ranked in the top five on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay list her highest chart moves since her breakout hits from 1992’s What’s the 411?.Īdding to the risks was choosing Burrowes to executive produce the Mary album. It was a bold move, though, considering the commercial success of 1997’s Share My World – which was her first number one album on the Billboard 200.
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Never afraid to reshape the direction of her sound, the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul latched herself onto the strict R&B movement and released an aesthetic collection of 14 songs that adhered to the adult contemporary soul framework. Singers like Maxwell, Erykah Badu, Eric Benét, Angie Stone, and Donell Jones, were blazing the trail for this revitalized wave of R&B. The request for more soulful and meaningful songs was at an all-time high. R&B had evolved, and artists were moving away from the New Jack Swing and urban soul arrangement palette and fusion of catchy melodies and hooks. They loved it for what it was, so it kept her in a box.”īlige’s decision to liberate herself from her hip-hop reference point came at the right time. “The people in hip-hop loved what they were hearing, but they couldn’t discern it was the greatness that could be R&B, jazz, and everything else. “The reason why we were dealing with those criticisms were people who loved R&B saw her ushered in as a hip-hop vehicle,” says Burrowes. She wasn’t trying to prove her singing style to herself, but to critics who consistently put her distinctive voice under scrutiny. “The Mary album was supposed to break her out, establish that she could straddle any genre, still be herself and reach her audience,” Kirk Burrowes, executive producer of Blige’s fourth album, exclusively tells Rated R&B.īlige made a point on Mary to challenge herself to inhabit the songs and render them with more vocal depth. Mary was intended to introduce Blige as a supreme presence in the music realm that could shift her artistic thinking and deliver another quintessential album. Much deeper, Mary also served as an aspirational plane for Blige to position herself as more than a hip-hop entity who had built her career on street-styled R&B with legacy soul samples.