Artist: Babyface
Genre(s):
R&B: Soul
Other
Christmas
Discography:
Grown and Sexy
Year: 2005
Tracks: 13
Love Story
Year: 2004
Tracks: 10
Face 2 Face
Year: 2002
Tracks: 14
The Day
Year: 2001
Tracks: 10
Love Songs
Year: 2001
Tracks: 16
Christmas with Babyface
Year: 1998
Tracks: 10
As a vocalist, producer, and ballad maker, Babyface was an unavoidable presence in virtually every major facet of toss off music during the '90s. His possess recordings helped rejuvenate the R&B tradition of the smooth, sensitive, urban balladeer and made him a staple of urban contemporary radio. Yet their considerable success was eclipsed by his songwriting and production ferment for other artists, which joined him with some of the biggest stars and strike singles of the decade (and non just in the region of R&B). You'd be strong pressed to name a '90s hitmaker with a track record more systematically successful and versatile than Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds.
Kenneth Edmonds was innate April 10, 1959, in Indianapolis and began playing in local R&B bands as a stripling. He served a stint in Bootsy Collins' backup unit (where he earned his cognomen) and later on joined the funk outfit Manchild, which sign a record address in 1977 and released iII albums. After their detachment, Babyface and married person Antonio "L.A." Reid formed an urban casimir Funk chemical group called the Deele in the early '80s, which scored a few sizeable hits on the R&B charts. Babyface and Reid began producing and writing for other artists on the side, landing hits in Pebbles' "Girlfriend" and the Whispers' "Rock Steady"; following the Deele's third gear album in 1988, the duette left wing to continue their away activities full-time, co-founding the LaFace label in 1989. Further hits followed in Bobby Brown's "Every Little Step," Sheena Easton's "The Lover in Me," and Karyn White's "The Way You Love Me" and "Superwoman," all of which performed well on both the pop and R&B charts.
Babyface had actually recorded a little-noticed solo record album in 1986, titled Lovers, just with his newfound success having marked him as one to check, his solo life history now began in sincere. Released in 1989, Tender Lover caught fire, spinning off quadruplet singles all over the following year, including the R&B chart smashes "It's No Crime" (issue nonpareil) and "Rack up Appeal" (issue deuce; both also reached the pop Top Ten); the album as well went twofold platinum. Now securely conventional as a powerhouse, Babyface went on to co-write hits for Johnny Gill ("My, My, My," nominated for the Best R&B Song Grammy), Whitney Houston ("I'm Your Baby Tonight"), and Madonna ("Take a Bow"); his biggest success, however, came with Boyz II Men, whose recording of "End of the Road" became i of the longest-running number ones in pop account (the Babyface-penned follow-up "I'll Make Love to You" was too pretty successful in its own correct). He was co-nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy for his output on The Bodyguard soundtrack and went on to work with artists like Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Gladys Knight, Aretha Franklin, En Vogue, and Mary J. Blige. As if that weren't enough, LaFace had become a highly successful and lucrative imprint, breakage artists like Toni Braxton, TLC, OutKast, and Usher (much with input from Reid and Babyface).
It's no wonder Babyface wound up pickings a come apart from his own vocation as a singer during the early '90s, releasing only a remix album, A Closer Look, in 1991. The proper follow-up to Tender Lover didn't look until 1993; even so, For the Cool in You was an even bigger hit than its predecessor, going triple pt and producing Babyface's first Top Five pop strike, the off-speed pitch acoustic guitar ballad "When Can I See You Again" (which south Korean won him his first base Grammy as a performer for Best Male R&B Vocal). In 1995, he scored another major success with the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack, not but producing it just scoring the film itself and writing well-nigh all of its songs, including the Whitney Houston crush "Give forth (Shoop, Shoop)." The same class, he won the first-class honours degree of deuce-ace straight Grammys as Producer of the Year. Successes hardly unbroken coming in 1996; the guest-laden record album The Day spawned another Top Ten pop/R&B shoot in "Every Time I Close My Eyes," and he coagulated his crosswalk credentials once and for all by fetching a Grammy for Record of the Year as producer of Eric Clapton's "Change the World."
Bucked up by the success of Waiting to Exhale, Babyface and his wife, Tracey Edmonds, formed their have plastic film production company, which debuted in 1997 with the acclaimed urban mob comedy/drama Soul Food (Babyface, naturally, masterminded the soundtrack). The adjacent class, he contributed lyrics to the animated musical The Prince of Egypt, which went uncredited on the soundtrack album. With the movies pickings up more of his sentence, his adjacent musical releases were quick one-offs: an MTV Unplugged album in 1997 and the seasonal worker Dec 25 with Babyface the adjacent class. His production and songwriting activities continued, though he remained silent as a performing artist for a few days. In 2000, Epic released the best-of compiling A Collection of His Greatest Hits, marking the end of his incumbency with the label; he had elected to move to Arista, where L.A. Reid had been a high-ranking administrator. In 2001, Babyface released a new album, Face2Face, and as well produced the punk-pop soundtrack for the film Josie & the Pussycats. The back-to-basics Big & Sexy came in July 2005, followed by 2007's covers-based Play list for Mercury.
