January in Chicago can test the toughest of dispositions, but the chill and the gloom had little to do with what Anita Baker was feeling as she swept into the Ritz Carlton hotel four years ago this month to prepare for a concert.
Her career was booming, as it had since the release of the landmark “Rapture” album in 1986, with sales of 10 million and seven Grammy awards. But privately, Baker was hurting. She and her husband, Walter Bridgeforth, had conceived a child in 1989, but she suffered a miscarriage. Yet even this did not slow the cycle of album-making and touring.
Finally, at the Ritz, she found herself crying uncontrollably. “I just lost it, totally,” she says. The rest of her tour was canceled, she went home with Bridgeforth and put her music on a back shelf.
Only now is the diminutive performer with the mahogany voice beginning to understand what happened to her and why. The introspection, coupled with three years off the road in which she gave birth to two sons, has resulted in Baker’s best album since “Rapture,” and certainly the most personal. Four months after its release, “Rhythm of Love” (Elektra) is pushing toward 2 million sales and has set the stage for a tour that brings Baker to the Arie Crown for four performances beginning Wednesday.
“In retrospect, you get 20-20 vision, and I’ve come to understand that I was changing my requirements for happiness and stability and for growth,” Baker, 37, says of her 1991 breakdown. “But I had people around me who were not changing with me and were basically trying to hold me in the place where I would be on the road for a year at a time. Trying to hold me in the place where I would work with the same producers all the time. Trying to hold me in the place where I was when they met me 10 years ago, which was no children, no husband. Even my marriage was met with opposition from managers, handlers, representatives. . . .
“I didn’t even realize it, but the room had gotten very small. There’s a saying that goes, `I wanna holler, but the joint’s too small.’ It was like I was crouched down in this little tiny room and I was trying to stand up, but in order to stand up I was going to have to take the roof off. And there were people all around me going, `No, no, no, don’t take the roof off.’ “
Baker’s distinctive, honeyed contralto led to a solo recording deal in the early ’80s, but it was ambition and willpower that kept her from becoming just another pop-music marionette with a pretty voice. She sued to get out of a contract with Beverly Glen Records, which, Baker claimed, had never given her a proper accounting of royalties for her debut album, “The Songstress.”
In moving to Elektra, Baker assumed total creative control as executive producer of her “Rapture” breakthrough and every album since. She wrote and arranged much of her music, designed her stage shows and planned the tour itinerary. A perfectionist, she would occasionally rail at her crew from the stage if everything wasn’t just right, an outspokenness that offended some in the music-industry boys club.
Baker isn’t proud of all her behavior, but there was always a sense that she held nothing back, that there was nothing false about her. Pictured barefoot on the cover of “Rapture,” the earthiness is more than just an image. Swaddled in an evening dress at a Chicago-area outdoor show in 1990 on a sweltering summer night, Baker remained unperturbed even as she waved off a swarm of insects, joking with the audience about the oppressive conditions. “Honey, I’m not cryin’,” she cracked during one ballad. “My whole body’s cryin’.”
The same lack of pretense comes through in conversation; Baker doesn’t dance around the probing personal questions, and she laughs easily and heartily, like someone in love with life. And indeed she is, for now she has a life outside of music.
Things turned around when she met Bridgeforth, a Detroit real estate developer, in 1986, and eventually married him.
“Even then I was being pulled in two different directions,” she says. “Your internal rhythms are telling you one thing, and people on the outside are pulling you in the other way.: `Well, what do you need to get married for? You’ve got enough money on your own.’ And I’m saying, `It’s not about money, it’s about love, and security and companionship and passion.’ But everything revolved around money with these people. And you know-we did it anyway!”
Baker lets out another robust laugh, but she follows it with an insight: “They knew when this man came into my life, that my life was going to get put into perspective. And sure enough it did. He said, `Anita, what’s your overhead on the road every week?’ And I’m like, `I don’t know.’ He said, `Well, you should find out. How are you going to know what your net is going to be if you don’t know your overhead? Anything could be happening.’ And sure enough, there was. . . . He started to show me a lot of things. He brought me back home, to Detroit, where my family was and his family was. He showed me just what was important, and that family aspect just became paramount more and more. Until we had these two big old boys.”
With her private home in order, Baker cleaned house in her musical life, as well. She hired new management, and after years of working with Michael Powell, used different producers on “Rhythm of Love.”
“All of these internal changes that were trying to take place four or five years ago, they have visually taken place, and the changes are obvious,” Baker says. “Being here with new management, new children, basically a new life that has expanded, I’m breathing easier. Change is painful, but I think I’m on the other side of those changes.”
The transition into a new confidence can be heard on “Rhythm of Love.” The record is warmer-sounding and more personal, beginning with a monologue to usher in the title track. It’s Baker talking to the listener, and also to herself: “Sometimes . . . you not only lose your balance but you lose your rhythm. And it’s times like these that you just need to stop and . . . find your way again.”
The sense of healing is most audible on the beautiful “Plenty of Room,” which finds Baker addressing her children and her birth mother, who gave her up for adoption when the singer was an infant and with whom she has had little contact.
“I had this dream shortly after Walter (her first son) was born, in which I was sitting in a church pew and these Marines in their dress whites were forming a wedding line with their sabers, drawn and arched. And there was this gentleman coming down the aisle under the swords in his dress whites, to await his bride’s arrival. And they kissed, and he kissed me, and then he picked her up and carried her out.
“I go home after the wedding, this old woman looking at my children’s pictures on the mantle. And I’m looking at the door, and the door doesn’t open and everything comes to mind of, `They never write. They never come home. Why don’t they come home?’ I wake up and I realize this dream is about my son, who is only 10 days old, but I’m dreaming of him growing up and leaving me. And the song started to come. After it was written, after I sang it, after I heard it on the album repeatedly, it occurred to me that everything that is said in the verses and chorus is what I want my mother to say to me.”
For Baker, singing some of the new songs in concert is a departure from the torch ballads for which she is known. Singing them again brings full circle her ordeals and triumphs, and Baker says she never has any problem rekindling the emotion that underpins them.
“It’s difficult to stop myself from getting into that emotional frame of mind,” she says. “Sometimes you just have to not do the song in that emotional place night after night, because you hurt yourself.”
Anita Baker lets out that hearty laugh, tinged not with mirth this time, but with something like hard-won wisdom.
GIVING YOU THE BEST THAT SHE’S GOT: BAKER’S 5-CD DISCOGRAPHY
Those who dismiss Anita Baker as mere “adult-contemporary” radio fodder, just another creamy voice dispensing aural wallpaper, aren’t really listening. She is the exception to the vast array of R&B smoothies who predate the new-jack swing era and its more urgent hip-hop rhythms.
Soul, pretty much dead since disco dawned in the mid-’70s, returned in a more sophisticated and mature guise a decade later, in the music of Luther Vandross and Baker.
In mining passion with her strikingly deep voice (a radical departure from the sopranos who had dominated R&B’s past), Baker blended jazz-inflected phrasing that invoked one of her main influences-Sarah Vaughan-with a keen pop sense.
All the elements are in place on her solo debut, “The Songstress” (1983 (STAR)(STAR) 1/2), but the pedestrian arrangements are not nearly as inspiring as the vocalist. On “Rapture” (1986 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)), Baker was handed the creative control she lacked on the debut, and the difference is immediate and striking, especially in the lush swoon of “Sweet Love.” The album consists of eight ballads steeped in feeling and swept along by a singer who believes in every word, and it is one of the signal albums of the decade.
“Giving You the Best That I Got” (1988 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)) turns “Rapture” into an agreeable formula, and “Compositions” (1990 (STAR)(STAR) 1/2) is pretty, but formless. With “Rhythm of Love” (1994 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2) Baker stretches herself like never before, mixing standards with her most personal set of lyrics.
And, of course, the voice is heaven-sent.
