Posted by | Ray Cornelius
Grammy-winning songstress Toni Braxton opens up about her recent bout with depression and frustration over the music industry in the Dec/Jan issue of UPTOWN magazine. The doe-eyed beauty, who announced at the beginning of this year that she was retiring from recording music, says she was on the brink of giving up everything.
“[I was] not suicidal, but it was a close relative. I’ve got my kids to live for, but I was in a hopeless stage in my life.”
Thanks to the help of close industry friends like Missy Elliott, Fantasia and Michael McDonald, the singer was able to find her way back to music—her first love.
“It’s like when you’re going through things and you think you’re the only one. They told me, ‘We’ve all felt that, and we’ve been there but it’s not time.’ It helped me a bit. But Babyface was the most influential of all those people in getting me back to it,” she reveals.
Things are definitely looking up for Braxton now. As previously reported, the singer has been making media rounds with Babyface, promoting their new duets album Love, Marriage and Divorce. The hit maker and his protégé have reunited for the new project that has already spawned the hit single, “Hurt You.” In addition to the album, the two will appear on the Great White Way in March 2014 as the newest members of the Harlem Renaissance-inspired musical After Midnight, which currently features Fantasia and Dule Hill. Lastly, Braxton is releasing her first tell-all-book titled, Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir, which also debuts in February.
Check out Toni and Babyface’s photos below as well as highlights from the rest of their interview:
“He saw the vision at ‘Hello.’ He’s the one who said, ‘Let’s put her on the Boomerang ‘soundtrack’. So he introduced me to the world!”
“I’m an artist like he is: established. I have my own opinions. I know how I want my music to be, so I had to remind him: ‘Kenny, I’m your baby sister, but I have breasts and I have boyfriends. You have to accept that I’m grown up now.’ That was the one big adjustment for him. It was nothing negative, nothing negative at all…”
“Working with Toni was a little bit different than working with her years ago, because now, we’re dealing with a grown-up Toni who certainly has her own opinion in how she thinks things should be. So we went through a lot of compromises putting this record together…”
“For me, the songs are what they are. And there are really some great songs there,” he says of their album, Love Marriage & Divorce. “I’m really excited about Toni and hearing her voice,” he gushes. “I realized how much I missed Toni Braxton. It’s so nice to hear her again…”
Photo Credit: Marc Baptiste