Before her big performance at the Billboard Music Awards earlier this month, Brandy was nervous. Like "very very very nervous." The kind of nervous that sent the Grammy winner to a quiet corner backstage where the only sound was her pencil etching the pages of the journal she takes everywhere.
"I started to ask God to come forth and take over my personality, take over my voice, you know, just basically become me for me. Make it look like it's me, but it's all you. Express that thing that's better than you, that higher energy. I asked for that to come forth," said the singer. "It humbles me. And it makes me feel like I'm just a vessel. I'm just the messenger, you know?"
The message that night was unmistakable: Brandy Rayana Norwood, the genre-defining R&B artist who's ridden the highest highs and the lowest lows the entertainment business has to offer, is back. After an eight-year stretch between albums, the 41-year-old is a household name again.
In the span of a month, the "Borderline" singer went from "Where is she?" to "Where isn't she?" She released her seventh studio album, "B7," on July 31. The very next day, Netflix (finally) began streaming all six seasons of "Moesha," the '90s sitcom that diversified the Girl Next Door trope forever and made Brandy a teenage star. In August, the "Verzuz" battle between Brandy and Monica, another trademark '90s R&B artist, broke records in viewership and touted a cameo by Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala D. Harris. Then Billboard called.
It had been years since Brandy performed on a stage that big. Sure, the coronavirus pandemic nixed the live audience, but the nerves were still there. Her only goal was to walk away feeling good about what she'd done, to empty out everything and leave it behind her.
"I try to do everything like it's the last thing that I'm going to do," Norwood said in an interview with The Washington Post. And there have been moments when she actually thought her time had come and gone — that she'd never sing again, never stand in front of an audience who cared, never get to share what she considers her God-given gift.
"There have been times where other people have intentionally tried to make me feel like I'm a has-been, and a part of me — the weaker parts of me — bought into that," said Norwood. "I really believed that. I really took time off. I was lost. I didn't know what my sound was. I didn't even know if I was important enough in music to put together a body of work."
Record scratch. Brandy, the singer whose vast cohort of fans call her "the Vocal Bible" because of the depth of her sound, didn't think she mattered?
"It's those feelings that you get when you're not all the way sure. I doubted what I thought was good," explained Norwood. "Those were my lowest of lows — to not know who I was as an artist, to not understand what people are saying about me. Why are you calling me 'the Vocal Bible'? What do you mean, my tone? To not understand myself, that's hell."
For fans, one of Brandy's biggest highs as an artist was her third album, "Full Moon," a magnum opus and master class. It dropped the summer of 2002, a year after "Moesha" was canceled and three months before she became a mother with the birth of her daughter, Sy'rai. It cemented the singer's transition from "Cinderella" to someone who could sang. Produced by Rodney Jerkins, "Full Moon" introduced Brandy's now trademark vocal stacking, gospel-inspired runs and buttery tone.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/10/29/brandy-interview/
