Songstress trades stage for solo R&B debut

music

Wherever she was on the Broadway stage, Heather Headley would use the audience's energy to fuel her emotion-- packed vocals. But when it came time to record her first R&B album. This is Who I Am, she had to look within for inspiration.

"I was so used to seeing 1 .600 people every night, but it's tough when they put you in a little room," says the 28-year-- old star of The Lion King and Aida, "I used to turn off the lights and put one candle on, close my eyes and pretend I was back on stage, because they take away so many of your senses when you go into the studio."

Fortunately, they didn't drain away any of her soul, which seeped deeply into the songs on the album. Before they got started, Headley told her producers -- Jimmy "Jam" Harris and Terry Lewis, Shep Crawford, and Dallas Austin among them - that she wasn't interested in dwelling on such pop music staples as sex, money and conspicuous consumption. Instead, she wanted to focus on relationships. She wanted music that was self-reflective - which is how the album came to be titled - and she wanted lyrics that she might actually say.

Headley got what she asked for -- "songs that connect with my voice and my heart" - and the album is a warm, sophisticated set of mature, conversational songs that tell of a woman's joys and heartbreaks. She co-wrote three of the 12 songs, which allow for a broad range of moods, situations and emotions.

While she was a commanding presence on stage, Headley's singing on the album is more subtle and nuanced, but still brimming with passion. Though the songs are not necessarily directly connected, they do seem to tell a story when taken together. She starts off with the single "He Is," a simmering rumination on why she loves her man so much, and follows with the thoughtful "Nature of a Man," which acknowledges that men and women are different and the complementary nature of a relationship.

"Fallin' For You" is a somewhat standard R&B/pop up-tempo track, but "I Wish I Wasn't" is a six-minute emotional tour de force as she pours out her disappointment in a wayward lover, but confesses to not having the strength to let him go. "Fulltime" finds her recalling the advice of her mother and holding out for a committed man, while the old-school flavored "Like Ya Use To" finds her coming to grips with the fact that her man has lost interest in their love affair.

The next three songs - the torchy "Always Been Your Girl," the upbeat "Sunday" and the lamentful "Four Words From a Heartbreak," seem interconnected as she goes through love's final stages. First she confronts her long-time lover, who has taken on a new girl, then takes time out from the stress to get her head together before finally coming to a resolution.

She tries to share a little wisdom with a teenaged "Sista Girl," who is clearly careening down the wrong path, and she gathers strength from all she's been through on "Why Should I Cry." The last song is the gentle "If It Wasn't For Your Love," which aims to uplift the spirit.

"The song is deeper than just your relationship with a guy," Headley says. "I picked it for God. I picked it for my mom. If I could have had a song for the Tonys, if I could have sang something, that would have been it."

Headley won a Tony Award in 2000 for the title role as a Nubian princess caught up in a doomed love affair in the Elton John and Tim Rice musical Aida, which was based on the Verdi opera and opened in 1998. A year earlier, she received rave reviews in the original role of the feisty lioness Nala in The Lion King. Though happy with success, she's putting the stage aside for now as she concentrates on promoting her album. She calls the theater work "God's beautiful little detour for me," and says that she intends to return to it someday.

"It's always in my system," she says. "The beauty about Broadway is that when I am 60 years old, if they will accept me back, I can go back."

Still, making records is something that she's wanted to do since she was a little girl growing up in the West Indies.

"Sitting in the islands, I never knew anything about Broadway," laughs Headley, who now lives in Chicago. "I had not seen a Broadway show until I was on Broadway."

Being introduced to Broadway, however, was nowhere near as jarring as the culture shock she went through when her family uprooted from their tropical island home and settled in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Born in Trinidad, Headley, the daughter of pastors at the Barataria Church of God began competing in performing-arts contests at age two. By age four, she was playing concert piano and soaked up the calypso, soka and reggae of the islands, as well as American R&B, throughout her childhood.

When she was 15 the family moved to Fort Wayne, where her father became pastor of a local church. The changes in customs and climate took some getting used to, though she says she was happy that she made the transition in a small town.

If they had moved someplace like New York, she says, "I would have maybe swam back to Trinidad, because that would have been too much."

She soon adjusted to life in the Midwest, and after graduating from high school, went to Northwestern University in Illinois to study communications and musical theater. Entering her senior year, she opted to join the Broadway-bound cast of Ragtime as an understudy to Audra McDonald over an offer to do a Christmas show in Chicago. It actually took some convincing by family and friends to get her to go on the road. Six months into her run with Ragtime, Disney bought out her contract and gave her The Lion King role.

Ironically, Ragtime eventually moved into a Broadway theater across the street from Lion King, and the two would become major competitors.

After more than two years playing Nala, Disney plucked her for the lead role in Aida, a production that didn't always get great reviews - although Headley generally escaped criticism. The New York Times declared in one review: "Pretty much everything about Aida, the new Disney cartoon pretending to be a musical, can be summed up in two words: Heather Headley."

Still, she didn't know what to expect when the 2000 Tony Award nominations were announced, even though associates assured her she deserved one. So it was a pleasant surprise when a friend called to deliver the good news.

"I was scared to death that morning that I wouldn't get one," she remembers. "The show at the time was getting a lot of hardship from the press, so it could have gone either way."

"I can't read reviews," says Headley. "I didn't read my reviews of Aida until I had left the show, and I spent three years of my life on Aida [including a trial run in Atlanta]. I'm dealing with the album the same way."

She's hoping that her music, which was well received by listeners on a three-city promotional tour, will succeed enough for her to embark on a full-fledged concert tour. Singing live, she says, is a symbiotic thing, and she yearns for that sharing relationship with her audience. The concert tour will have to wait for now. First up is another promotional tour, which may include a few mini-performances and lots of press interviews.

Up until now, she's always been part of a team with other actors, props and costumes to deflect some of the attention. The album leaves her with the prospect of being the whole show herself and it is a little bit daunting.

"With Aida, I could hide behind her and Disney," she says. "And now it's just me and my name out there. It's scary. So scary."

Steve Jones is a music critic at USA Today.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Nov/Dec 2002
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