Toni Braxton and Babyface have struck a cord with their passionate collaborative project ‘Love, Marriage & Divorce.’ The new album from the long-time friends has spawned the No. 1 single “Hurt You,” and received critical acclaim from critics and fans alike. While an official tour is in the works, fans can currently catch Toni and Kenny on stage in the thriving Broadway show ‘After Midnight.’
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Year: 1993
Label: Arista
Toni Braxton, among many others, owes Anita Baker a major debt of gratitude. And not for the reasons you may think. While performing in a group with her four sisters, the eldest Braxton caught the attention of L.A. Reid and Babyface, who were working to build their new label LaFace Records. They recruited the young Maryland singer to sing 'Love Should Have Brought You Home,' a song Babyface wrote for Baker to sing for the Boomerang soundtrack. Baker had declined due to her pregnancy, so Babyface was on the hunt for someone who could match the legend's powerfully elegant vocals. Braxton fit the bill perfectly.
A year later, she released her highly anticipated solo debut. Primarily written and produced by L.A. Reid and Babyface, the album was stacked with hits. In addition to the aforementioned 'Love Should Have Brought You Home,' there was 'Breathe Again,' 'Another Sad Love Song,' 'Seven Whole Days,' 'You Mean the World to Me,' and 'I Belong to You.' That's literally half of the album. People like to note that the album drops off a cliff after the run of singles end. While 'Best Friend' is a bit too adult contemporary and feels overwrought and out of place, as if it should be on a Celine Dion album, it's a fallacy to claim it's a bad song. Other non-singles like the new jack swing-ish 'Spending All My Time With You' would have been standouts on any other album in the same way Pippen would have been a star on any other team.
She may have gotten her start filling in for Anita Baker, but when it came to her excellent debut, Toni Braxton did all that on her own. --Damien Scott
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Popular this week
Hurt You
11 listeners
Latest release
Where Did We Go Wrong
1 track
Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia, United States (1967 – present)
Toni Braxton and Babyface is a collaboration between two R&B powerhouses that previously worked together back in 1992 on 'Give U My Heart' that was released on the soundtrack of the movie Boomerang. In 2013 they released their first single titled 'Hurt You' from the upcoming collaboration album 'Love, Marriage & Divorce'. The album was originally due November 25, but will now arrive just in time for Valentine’s Day on February 4, it was announced by Motown Records. In… read more
Top Tracks
Rank | Play | Loved | Track name | Buy | Options | Listeners |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Hurt You | 11 listeners | ||||
2 | Where Did We Go Wrong? | 10 listeners | ||||
3 | Roller Coaster | 8 listeners | ||||
4 | The D Word | 6 listeners | ||||
5 | Sweat | 5 listeners | ||||
6 | Take It Back | 5 listeners | ||||
7 | Reunited | 4 listeners | ||||
8 | Heart Attack | 2 listeners | ||||
9 | Let's Do It | 1 listener | ||||
10 | One | 1 listener |
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BROKEN BELLS
“After the Disco”
(Columbia)
Broken Bells straighten out their priorities on their second album, “After the Disco.” James Mercer, the Shins’ singer and songwriter, and Danger Mouse, the producer whose real name is Brian Burton, staked out a concept on their first album as Broken Bells, the 2010 “Broken Bells”: They delivered downhearted lyrics using a very particular palette. Broken Bells determinedly reconstructed an analog era steeped in wistful memories, using sliding synthesizer lines, Kraut-rock bass tones and primitive drum machines. Unfortunately, they got so busy showing off their allusions that the solid songs were buried in gimmicks.
“After the Disco” keeps the concept and fixes the mix. The album is still an exercise in style. Mr. Mercer and Danger Mouse, who between them play nearly all the instruments, flaunt their vintage equipment (or convincing counterfeits) and echoes of 1970s and ‘80s hitmakers like E.L.O., the Bee Gees, a-ha and the Eagles. It’s more or less the same sonic terrain as the first album; nearly every instrumental timbre, from the rhythm section to simulated horn arrangements, is rounded off. But this time Broken Bells focus on the songs, not the sounds. The change is the sum of a lot of tweaks, the most important of which is that Danger Mouse’s production constantly keeps Mr. Mercer’s voice in the foreground.
He sings about varieties of desperation and loneliness, about withdrawals and breakups, about longing and resignation. The songs are full of characters — some in the first person — who are lost, aimless and uncertain; the singer offers reassurance if he can. “I saw that look on your face/ You don’t need me now,” Mr. Mercer sings in “The Changing Lights.” “And sometimes you wonder if it’s all/ Just another mistake.”
The pop structures, meanwhile, are comfortingly crisp verse-chorus-verse and the settings are, at best, subliminally familiar without being too blatant about their sources. At times, Broken Bells stray over that line; the chorus of “Holding on for Life” is a little too Bee Gees for its own good, and “Control” doesn’t steer clear enough of “Hotel California.” Yet the album is full of lovely little touches, like the fluttering flutelike sound that agitates the plaintive “Leave It Alone,” or the gauzy sway of “Lazy Wonderland.” Broken Bells are still as openly self-conscious as they were on their debut album; “We prefer good love to gold/ And the remains of rock and roll,” Mr. Mercer sings in the album’s closing song. But this time they don’t flaunt their cleverness; they let a listener discover it after the songs sink in. JON PARELES
TONI BRAXTON AND BABYFACE
Love, Marriage & Divorce
(Motown)
Toni Braxton and Kenneth Edmonds (know as Babyface) were never married to each other; he worked with her intensely on her first few albums in the 1990s — and sporadically thereafter — as a songwriter and producer. Together they made studies in medium darkness and patient, put-together brooding and obsession: “Breathe Again,” “Another Sad Love Song,” “You’re Makin’ Me High.” They each had divorces. His last album of original music as a singer was nine years ago. Her last album was in 2010, but last year she announced that she would retire from music; Babyface lured her back with the promise of making a record called “Love, Marriage & Divorce.”
So the album is a reuniter, a reanimator, if not purely autobiographical. There are few great marriage records, other than those by Ashford and Simpson. To sing about marriage is often to sing about something else, some idealized measure of peace or stability. There are a few more great divorce records. Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear,” from 1978, is one. It both describes anguish and is anguished. (What does actual anguish sound like, rather than the representation of it? It sounds like a mess. Gaye’s record was rambling, looping, petty, vain, like a man talking to himself. He sang things like “you have scandalized my name.” And “anger will make you sick.” And “why do I have to pay attorney fees?”)
Subtle perfectionism doesn’t apply very easily to marriage or divorce, but there is a place in the world for an album representing the best Toni Braxton and Babyface can do with the subjects. The title promises something with its bluntness — R&B could use more of that — but it is also strangely categorical and nondescript, like a heading on a legal-size file. And the album is, in fact, mostly business.
They alternate verses over gauzy medium-tempo, light-funk tracks, Babyface in his light tenor, Ms. Braxton in her emotive, petulant voice. They both own up to mistakes and confessing fantasies; unlike Gaye, they depict anguish in a supremely organized, deeply clichéd way. There are very few details of a real person’s daily life. They are singing from a great height.
“I’m sick and tired of going through changes,” sings Ms. Braxton. “I love you, I hate you, I don’t want, but want to, back and forth and back — what should we do?” That song is called “Roller Coaster,” and that pale cliché serves as the song’s main metaphor. The next song, “Sweat,” is about make-up sex; it contains, if you can believe it, a merry-go-round metaphor. In the smooth, retrograde R&B ballad “Reunited”— thanks for the title, Peaches & Herb — she sings “when you walked out of my life, everything fell apart.” But she wants her man back. And so she demands: “Tell me we’ll fall in love again.” Is it that simple — the reuniting, or the falling apart?
There are sure musical touches in all this lofty mistiness: the minor-to-major shifts in “The D Word,” and the featherweight intensity of “Where Did We Go Wrong,” which is Babyface songwriting at its near-best, the union of early ‘70s post-folk adult-contemporary and R&B. Rather than stake out different positions in these narratives, they’re singing one song. They’re showing, in effect, that two halves of a divorced couple basically feel the same, which is often a variation on can’t-live-with-you/can’t-live-without-you. The approach, always, is neatly formatted; it leaves no trace. Divorce and marriage — and even love — deserve more. BEN RATLIFF
THE HADEN TRIPLETS
“The Haden Triplets”
(Third Man)
The Haden Triplets — Petra, Tanya and Rachel Haden — are 43, and have been blending their voices, in a family tradition traceable to the Ozarks, since roughly the age of 3. The overlap in their artistic lives since then suggests an ongoing conversation, but not necessarily one with much purposeful forward motion. So if their self-titled debut album seems like an overdue, common-sense inevitability, it also has the spark of an unexpected grace, something you knew better than to expect.
Toni Braxton And Babyface Album Take It Back
As in other conservation-minded projects, the chief catalyst here was Ry Cooder, whose son, the drummer Joachim Cooder, happened to be performing a show with the Haden Triplets, and asked him to join. They all played “Voice From on High,” a devotional Bill Monroe tune, and in short order the elder Mr. Cooder was offering to produce an album.
Anyone familiar with “Rambling Boy” (Decca), a 2008 release by Charlie Haden, the eminent jazz bassist and patriarch, will have some idea of the prevailing spirit here. “Single Girl, Married Girl,” a Carter Family song, opened Mr. Haden’s album with his daughters’ sweet harmonies; the same song appears as the second track on “The Haden Triplets,” in a more relaxed tempo and key. (“Voice From on High” is the other repeat tune.)
But this album stands on its own, as a study in sisterly rapport and a slice of rustic Americana that has nothing to do with any vogue in the style. (This is true even through it’s being released on Jack White’s Third Man Records.) A collection of heirloom songs that the girls grew up singing, it was recorded in Tanya’s house, with Ry Cooder on guitars and mandolin, Joachim Cooder on drums, and Rene Camacho on acoustic bass. A f
There’s a beauty in plainness here, one that suits the lyrical thrust of a tune like “Memories of Mother and Dad” or “Tiny Broken Heart.” Still, this isn’t an album of brittle austerities: “Slowly” involves a lilting two-step up until the coda, a wink and a nod to the Byrds. “Raining Raining” opens with a delicate patter of pizzicato on violin (Petra) and cello (Tanya), before moving on to a mournful melody both played and sung by Tanya.
The album’s center of gravity, always, is the Hadens’ vocal blend, which isn’t seamless or airless but rather a series of alert, intuitive micro-negotiations in the realm of intonation and timbre. At times you notice how much is actually happening, moment to moment, in that blend. Those moments provide the best argument for hearing the Haden Triplets in real time; try this Tuesday night, when they play a free concert in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. NATE CHINEN
On Love, Marriage & Divorce, Toni Braxton and Babyface, creative partners going back to the early '90s, rekindle their musical relationship. Both endured broken marriages, and presumably it's those experiences that inform the material here -- a succinct collection of 11 songs, eight of which are duets. The emphasis is on divorce, indicated from the very beginning on 'Roller Coaster,' where Babyface enters with 'Today I got so mad at you, it's like I couldn't control myself.' The set finishes with the bittersweet 'The D Word,' seemingly a Sade homage, in which Babyface confesses 'You still own my heart, forever and ever and ever.' Moments that deviate from issues of romantic strife are few. The duo don't seem nearly as connected to them. 'Sweat,' a slinking groove, is like the 'Love During War' to Robin Thicke's 'Love After War,' while 'Heart Attack,' near the album's end, is a retro-disco move that seems more like a throw-in than a crucial part of the album. The sequence of songs plays out like scenes on shuffle. Either that, or the relationship is extremely up and down; the singers sometimes sound as if they are addressing ex-lovers from other relationships. 'Reunited' is a blissful ballad, but it's followed by the embittered 'I'd Rather Be Broke,' where Braxton asserts, 'Just because your money's strong don't mean you can do the things that you do.' Babyface is civil and clear-headed on 'I Hope That You're Okay,' claiming he 'can't go through the motions anymore,' but Braxton follows with a solo spotlight, 'I Wish,' that seems drawn from a different situation: 'I hope she creeps on you with somebody who is 22/I swear to God, I'm gonna be laughing at you every day.' As a narrative, the album can be hard to follow, but it's not as if breakups have a simple arc with a steady, unwavering decline. While most of these songs are ballads, Babyface rarely pulls out his acoustic guitar -- a saving grace for those who tired of hearing it throughout the '90s. This is a solid addition to both artists' discographies. The romantically content won't want to go anywhere near it.
Sample | Title/Composer | Performer | Time |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Babyface / Toni Braxton | 4:23 | |
2 | Antonio Dixon / Kenneth Edmonds / Daryl Simmons | 4:27 | |
3 | Toni Braxton / Antonio Dixon / Kenneth Edmonds / Daryl Simmons | 4:10 | |
4 | Babyface / Toni Braxton | 3:36 | |
5 | Kenneth Edmonds / Daryl Simmons | 3:53 | |
6 | Babyface / Toni Braxton | 3:04 | |
7 | Toni Braxton / Antonio Dixon / Kenneth Edmonds / Daryl Simmons | 4:05 | |
8 | Toni Braxton / Antonio Dixon / Kenneth Edmonds / Daryl Simmons | 3:17 | |
9 | Toni Braxton / Antonio Dixon / Kenneth Edmonds / Kameron Glasper / Khristopher Riddick-Tynes / Leon Thomas | 3:37 | |
10 | Babyface / Toni Braxton | 3:51 | |
11 | Toni Braxton / Kenneth Edmonds | 5:13 |