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Despite a 30 years-plus discography and a slew of undeniable classics (Sittin’ Up in My Room, The Boy Is Mine, modern R&B blueprint What About Us?) and deep cuts feted by the likes of Solange, Kehlani and Normani, there’s a sense that Brandy, the fan-anointed Vocal Bible, is still underrated. Her vividly told and occasionally harrowing memoir, Phases, co-written alongside Gerrick Kennedy and out on Tuesday, goes some way to explaining why that might be.
As well as detailing her formative years in Mississippi and later California, where she learned her trade singing in church choirs and at youth groups, and later her meteoric rise as a teenage superstar, Phases paints a picture of a young woman whose insecurities were often exposed and abused by others. It also spotlights issues around duty of care in the music industry; in 1999, while nursing an addiction to diet pills, and juggling her role on the hit teen sitcom Moesha with a relentless recording and touring schedule, Brandy suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of just 20.
“The earliest dream I can recall is me standing on a stage,” Brandy writes in the book’s intro. Throughout Phases, she battles to keep that dream alive as she navigates a rollercoaster life.
She figured out inspired ways to deal with bullies
Brandy’s father Willie, a gospel singer and choir director, first noticed her vocal talents. “You have a unique voice, Bran,” he tells her. “Let’s train it. Let’s get it to where God wants it to go.” While singing quickly became her happy place, she was constantly bullied at school; an easy target, she says, given her “too-skinny frame and quiet demeanor”. One bully, Shanice, made Brandy scared to go to school, to the point where she prayed to God asking for a solution. Shortly afterwards, Shanice was shot dead. Later, another bully is put in their place by Brandy herself when braided extension cords are transformed into a “heavy, flexible whip”.
A clue as to where Brandy might have got her early bravery from arrives in 1993 when she tells her mum, and manager, Sonja, that she’s having issues with her onscreen mother, the actor Thea Vidale, on the set of the sitcom Thea. “She grabbed a metal chair and pulled it up to the director and took a seat – all without breaking the gaze of my TV mother,” Brandy writes of Sonja. “‘OK, I’m going to just sit riiiiight here today,’ she said, drawing out her words nice and slow.” The constant barbs stopped.
She was a super fan prone to fainting around her musical idols
Perhaps the most relatable aspect of Phases is Brandy’s standom. Pre-fame, she finagles her way backstage from the cheap seats in the hope of meeting her ultimate idol Whitney Houston. When that fails, she harasses the gospel legends BeBe and CeCe Winans until they call Houston on the phone, only for Brandy to fall temporarily mute.
Later, in 1995, after the success of Brandy’s self-titled debut album, the pair finally meet backstage at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. “A scream erupted from somewhere deep in my chest,” Brandy writes of that meeting with Houston. “And then, inexplicably, I ran […] It was as if my brain short-circuited from the overwhelming voltage of emotion – anticipation, excitement, disbelief, joy – all colliding at once.”
Years later, she’s introduced to Michael Jackson in a recording studio: “I actually blacked out. Legs turned to Jell-O. Down I went.” While she didn’t faint when meeting Diana Ross on the set of the 1999 film Double Platinum, she did acquire some sage advice from the Muscles hitmaker: never chew gum (it’s distracting and unprofessional), always sit up straight; and always keep your knees together “because the cameras are always watching, even when you think they aren’t.”
She’s keen to tell her side of the story about a toxic relationship
By the time she was 13 Brandy was singing back-up vocals for the R&B boyband Immature. While hanging out at the band’s manager’s apartment, she says that a member named Half-Pint groped her. Brandy’s angry reaction was mocked by his fellow bandmates until she angrily hurled a book and accidentally seriously damaging the eye of another member, Jerome. “I learned a hard lesson that day about boundaries, about speaking up sooner, about the complex dynamics that can develop when children work in adult environments,” she writes.
Two years later, aged 15, Brandy met Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men. What started out as mutual admiration for each other’s work quickly morphed into a secret relationship. “My girlfriend is sixteen,” the then 23-year-old is quoted as saying when the pair are alone, perhaps, Brandy writes, as a way of “tethering himself to a boundary, even as he quietly edged past it”. A sexual relationship began before Morris confessed to multiple infidelities.
It’s a relationship that would be framed, often by Morris himself in various media interviews, as a naive super fan having her heart broken. In Phases, Brandy outlines her truth with clear-eyed anger and frustration. “At the time, it felt like a fairy tale,” she writes. “Now I see it as the beginning of a calculated courtship of a teenage girl by a grown man who knew exactly the effect his attention would have.” Later, after detailing the reasons behind why she hasn’t shared her side of the story until now (to protect her family, and his), she writes: “The shame ends here. The silence ends here. I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. I was a child. He was an adult. And it’s time the world understood the difference.”
The Boy Is Mine was her idea
Released in 1998, The Boy Is Mine, a playfully combative duet with fellow teenage R&B singer Monica, would go on to become Brandy’s biggest hit, spending 13 weeks at number one in the US. Originally conceived by Brandy and producer Rodney Jerkins as a slower, sadder song, it was Brandy’s idea to switch it into a duet. In her mind, asking Monica, a woman who the press had decided was her arch-rival – the street savvy opposite to Brandy’s sweet-natured girl nextdoor – to be her fictional adversary would quash rumours they didn’t get on. For context, at the time, one LA radio station ran a regular segment called Brandy vs Monica, featuring skits that displayed the teenage Brandy as “fake, obnoxious, a saccharine-sweet facade hiding something sinister underneath”. Needless to say, the song, complete with a video of the pair as feuding neighbours, only fuelled the fire.
In Phases, Brandy says there was no real beef. She describes the pair, on a rare day off, riding rollercoasters together – a particular favourite pastime of Brandy’s – and the initial recording session for The Boy Is Mine ran smoothly. Later, however, cracks appeared and tension seeped in; Monica re-recorded her vocals with her own producer, Dallas Austin, while Monica’s label boss, Clive Davis, renamed her album The Boy Is Mine as a way of trying to claim ownership of the duet. Brandy didn’t help matters when she performed the song solo on a US talkshow.
Unsurprisingly, by the time the pair perform The Boy Is Mine together for the first time at the VMAs, they are barely speaking. During the performance, however, the clouds part: “Even in a space where we’d been pitted against each other – where we’d allowed ourselves to become adversaries – we couldn’t help but recognize our shared experience, our parallel journeys, our combined power.”
Her involvement in a 2006 car accident nearly broke her
Two years after the release of her then-underrated and now rightly celebrated fourth album, 2004’s Timbaland-produced Afrodisiac, Brandy was involved in a fatal car accident. The death of a young woman haunted her: “I no longer felt I had the right to continue living my life, or even to experience fleeting glimmers of joy […] Who was I to smile? To sing? To exist in a world where she no longer could?”
The guilt led to Brandy not leaving the house for months, and fantasising about an escape. “In my dreams, I floated free, unburdened by the tragedy that had swallowed my waking hours […] I sometimes fantasized about remaining in that twilight place forever. If I could just slip away and escape. Just vanish like morning mist.” She writes that it was her young daughter Sy’Rai who brought her back from the brink.
Singing was like scaling a mountain
While Phases is full of shocking moments – an abusive boyfriend; the father of her daughter selling her out on the Wendy Williams show after the pair lied about being married; her then-label forcing her to work with an uncooperative Kanye West as part of an elaborate ploy to get him to sign with them – there’s also real joy in how Brandy writes about music. Obsessed with recording her voice and layering vocals from a young age after being given an old four-track recorder by her father, she sets about nailing her signature sound – the one that earned her the Vocal Bible honour – in the studio with Rodney Jerkins.
After fastidiously working on stacking her backing vocals on the 16m-selling Never Say Never, when it came to its follow-up, another if-you-know-you-know classic 2002’s Full Moon, Jerkins laid down a challenge to Brandy. “Do you want to be the greatest?” he asked. After flitting between studios while working simultaneously on Michael Jackson’s Invincible, Jerkins broke down Jackson’s approach to recording vocals; essentially more is more. Brandy got to work. “Sometimes we’d stack sixteen separate takes of me singing the exact same note for just a tiny section of a song,” Brandy says of working on the album. “I attacked every single note like I was scaling Mount Everest, pushing past where comfort ended – then pushing even further.”
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