![]() ![]() By the time Campbell gets to the fourth door, he sings, “I can only tell you what’s not inside/If you open this door, baby, your clothes won’t take the ride.” “They were going crazy with it.” “Halls of Desire,” for example, uses a closed-door motif to walk a prospective lover through a menu of sexual options, starting with an innocent kiss but escalating quickly. ![]() When it comes to the bawdy stuff, “my voice was sort of a muse for these grown men to write about their love situations,” Campbell says. The Prince cuts from I’m Ready fall cleanly into two thematic camps, sex and politics. While Prince had contributed one song to T.E.V.I.N., he now took on a much larger role, coaching Campbell, who he called “Little Al Green,” at the Record Plant in L.A. Campbell’s mother wanted to add Babyface, who was already owning the decade thanks to hits like Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.” Babyface would go on to contribute three cuts to I’m Ready, including “Can We Talk,” a remarkable hit with verses like a steep, hot climb and a hook like a cooling jump in a lake. Walden was the main holdover, responsible for four songs on both albums. Sure! and Arthur Baker, before I’m Ready. And that’s why we had to keep going back in and doing songs over.”Ĭampbell’s team ditched many of the producers on T.E.V.I.N., including Al B. I mean, one day it could be high and the next day it could be gone. In 1994, he called the experience of recording his debut, 1991’s T.E.V.I.N., “horrible.” “I didn’t have much of a relationship with the songs and my voice was changing,” the singer told Vibe. “When you’re 13 years old like that, and you get put on by Quincy, that’s the mark of a prodigy.”īut one downside of being signed so young was that Campbell’s voice hadn’t dropped when he was recording the songs that needed to be hits for him to maintain a career. “ Quincy puts you on his album after doing Michael Jackson, we all knew was a force to be reckoned with,” says Narada Michael Walden, who co-wrote and produced several songs for Campbell. Jackson’s go-to producer, Quincy Jones, also declared himself a Campbell fan, drafting him to sing “Tomorrow (A Better You, Better Me)” on his platinum-selling Back on the Block album. ![]() “There was a purity in his voice and an incredible coolness on stage.” “When I saw it, I thought of that famous tape of Michael Jackson auditioning for Berry Gordy,” Medina told Vibe in 1994. Impressed, Humphrey helped set up a showcase for Campbell and sent a video of him covering “Where Is the Love” to Benny Medina, then a senior executive at Warner. In 1989, he’d auditioned over the phone for Bobbi Humphrey, a jazz flute player and singer known for her work on Blue Note. When Campbell started working on I’m Ready late in 1992, he was still just 16, but was already feeling “a lot of pressure” to deliver a hit album. The two reconvened to work on four more songs that would end up on Campbell’s double-platinum second album, I’m Ready, including another hit, “Shhh.” It was a brief but successful partnership: Campbell appeared in the Graffiti Bridge film, a sequel to Purple Rain, and sang the Top 15 single “Round and Round,” a brittle track penned by Prince that split the difference between “Sign o’ the Times” and the New Jack Swing that was ascendant in 1990. To me, meeting Whitney would’ve been, ‘Aaaah!'”īut Campbell’s inability to to scrape the lower register didn’t stop him from working with Prince. “I knew who Prince was, of course, but at the time, I had a really, really, really high voice, so I didn’t pay attention to a lot of male artists - I couldn’t sing male artists’ songs. “I remember riding in the limo and talking to him over the phone,” Campbell says. At age 12, Tevin Campbell - freshly signed to Warner on the strength of a voice that was already drawing comparisons to Michael Jackson - hopped on a call with Prince. ![]()
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