Quote:
Originally posted by CrimsonTide4
Now Donnie Simpson is sitting on the couch giggling and trying to get his old school mack on with Adina "Freak Like Me" Howard.
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It's been almost 10 years but Adina is on her way back to the record store. . .
ADINA HOWARD: Goes Back to the Grind
by Kenya Yarbrough
Adina Howard
(Mar. 15, 2004) The last thing many of us remember about singer Adina Howard is her coy pose, leaning on a luxury car in some hot short shorts. She hit the scene in 1995 with her debut CD “Do You Wanna Ride?” which featured her biggest hit “Freak Like Me.”
She prepared her sophomore set, “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” in 1997, but the disc was abruptly shelved and never saw the light of day. Storing the album away in a vault didn’t silence her talent, though. One single from the disc was already granted to the soundtrack for the movie “Woo.” Without a label and without a single, Howard’s track “T-Shirt and Panties” made it’s way to the airwaves and became an underground hit.
Seven years later, and though her biggest hits linger in the background and appear on ‘90s compilations, Adina Howard is making her return with the album “The 2nd Coming,” with the hot first single “Nasty Grind.” As you can tell from the titles, the Michigan native may be older and wiser, but she’s still not afraid of the risqué.
“We’re sexual beings and people have sex everyday,” Howard said in defense of her subject matter. “Sometimes they need a little music to go along with it.”
And as far as those who find it controversial, Howard says she really doesn’t pay the criticism any mind.
“I don’t deal with it. I just let people go through their changes. I have a life to live and I don’t have time to deal with people not agreeing with what I do for a living. I may not agree with what they do for a living, but I’m not going to jump on their back and ride them about it because that’s how they make their money, that’s what they do. I don’t have time to deal with it. I have other things that I have to deal with that are much more important,” she said.
Howard explained that the criticism of her openness to sexuality will hardly stop her from doing her thing, and neither did the career disruption she had in 1997. She explained that she was merely a victim of the politics of the business, and told us that although her sophomore offering never was, she was not bitter or discouraged. After all, one track from the disc kept her name on the lips of DJs throughout the country.
Interestingly, “T-Shirt and Panties” was written by actor/comedian /singer Jamie Foxx. **This was my jaaam.**
“He played the track for me and I fell in love with the production,” Howard said. She asked Foxx to do the song as a demo. He did, played it for her over the phone and she says then, she really wanted the track. “I first fell in love with the track, but once it was all put together, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is my song. I gotta have it.’” The track became an underground hit.
“I guess people heard it on the movie and went and bought the soundtrack. It never became a single – radio and clubs just picked it up and started playing it. Now I perform it everywhere I go,” she said. With the audiences warmed up with their old favorites,
Adina Howard is preparing to introduce her second album appropriately titled “The 2nd Coming.” She’s found a new musical home and says that she’s glad she took the break away, but very happy to be back.
“I walked away from the business for a moment and it took me awhile to say, ‘OK, let’s do it again,’” she said of her return. “I didn’t like [the business then]. I didn’t like the people I was doing business with. I didn’t like the business of music, the way that it was handled. People really didn’t want to help and educate me and help me learn the business. They wanted to keep me in the dark so that they could keep taking from me. I was in a business of takers, so I had to get away from that.”
Fortunately for fans, it was them who really brought her back. Howard said that her supporters and played a major role in her return to the industry.
“They would approach me and ask when I was going to do another album, another song, and they would say that they missed me. I felt like I owed it to them to give it another shot and give them something that they could enjoy. So my manager and I set out on a path to find a label that would help me with my vision in putting a project together.”
Whatever fans take from or read into the title of the album is fine by Howard. The play on words is pretty much the theme of the new album.
Howard described that while she isn’t straying from the style that made her famous, the new disc, due in stores April 6, is a lot more sexually subtle.
“To come back out into the industry, it’s about keeping it familiar to a certain degree,” Howard said. People are comfortable with being able to identify me with that sexual music, which is fine. But this go ‘round it’s a little more subtle. It’s not so blatantly in your face. This time it’s about candlelight and wine instead of Boone’s Farm and weed.”
Hybrid Mode
