la Reid - Sing to Me: My Story of Making Music, Finding Magic, and Searching for Whos Next

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE

LOVING MEMORY OF MY DEAR MOTHER,

EMMA B. REID.

1. PROLOGUE
   The Audition
2. EPILOGUE
   Showdown at Coachella

I d never auditioned a child before. My partner Kenny Babyface Edmonds and I had written and produced records with a couple of boy groups, but working with kids wasnt something Id envisioned doing when we started our own record company. I vaguely figured I would listen to a song or two and tell the kid to come back in a few years, but the minute this fourteen-year-old boy walked into my office that afternoon in 1993, I could tell that there was nothing that felt remotely childlike about Usher Raymond IV.

These were high times at LaFace Records, the label I had started with Babyface in Atlanta four years earlier. The company was beginning to make a name for itself. We had an album about to be released by an unknown singer named Toni Braxton that would become a multiplatinum smash. The label had its first multimillion-seller, the soundtrack to the Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang, and we had sold millions of records with another previously unknown group called TLC. Babyface had become a star in his own right after releasing two stellar solo albums and writing dozens of big hit songs with me as his regular producing partner.

On the heels of all this, we had recently relocated the LaFace office from Norcross to a bright, beautiful space wed built out on the fifteenth floor of the Capital City Plaza building in Buckhead. We built the conference room in the ten-thousand-square-foot office to be shaped like a piano, which made a curved wall in the lobby. Nobody ever mentioned that particular design feature, so we probably spent a lot of money for something that went largely unnoticed. The staff was growing, as our operation expanded behind our two multimillion-sellers. The sleek, modern office lent the label an air of prosperity that I hoped would define us in the years to come.

But with all the success had come some serious adversity. Our top-selling group, TLC, was unhappy about money, and that was causing problems between me and my wife, Pebbles, who also happened to be the manager of the group. And, after scaling the heights of the music business together, from late nights at chitlin circuit dives in the Midwest to the top of the charts, my partner Babyface and I were inexplicably drifting apart.

What made the growing distance between me and Kenny even more difficult was that when LaFace started, it was a small operation, just a handful of close friends who moved out from Los Angeles together. In the early days, LaFace was a family affairme, Kenny, our office manager, Sharliss, my wife, Pebbles, Kennys brother-in-law Derek Ladd, Kennys childhood friend Daryl Simmons, my childhood friend Kayo. My younger brother, Bryant, moved from Cincinnati, where we grew up, to Atlanta and came to work for us. Bryant and I always had similar tastes in clothes and stylewe shared music a lot when we were growing up. His world revolved around music, fashion, and sports. He was funny and charming and knew what he was about. Once we signed Toni Braxton, we assigned her to him, and he became the keeper of all things Toni.

Bryant also scouted talent, and it was through him that I first heard the name Usher. My brother brought several writers and producers to the label. He caught Usher at a local talent showhed gone to check out another act on the programand called me from the show to tell me about him. I wasnt especially enthusiastic, but Bryant insisted that the kid was something I needed to see.

Though I hadnt been running a label for long, finding talent had become a specialty of mine. Our hit records so far had come from artists who had never made a record before I auditioned them. You never know what to look for at an audition; everyone is different, special in their own ways. You have to remain receptive, open, but without losing your critical and analytical side. It is a tricky combination of balancing intelligence and intuition and being able to tell the difference between having a vision and a hallucination.

I auditioned talent in my office three or four times a week, part of my regular workday. There was a corridor that led to the side-by-side twin offices occupied by Kenny and me. My office was a big, fluffy, all-white space with furniture from Kreiss and huge speakers powered by my McIntosh amplifier. Posters of our artists hung on the walls. People would come in and out to ask questions, to show me artwork, to get a moment of my attention. I always had an open-door policy and people knew they could walk in anytime.

It was around two in the afternoon, and I had been listening to some new songs by Toni Braxton, when this fourteen-year-old kid dressed in blue came to my office with his mother, Jonetta, and my brother, Bryant. His appearance looked a little small-town, but his surprising swagger was all big-city. Usher had grown up in Chattanooga and learned he could sing at an early age. Thinking a bigger city would be a better place for him to be discovered, his mother had moved the family to Atlanta, where she worked as a medical technician. She acted as his manager. He had never auditioned for a record label before.

My routine at auditions rarely varied and was much the same that day. After a quick introduction and handshake with Usher and his mother, I sat back down and asked, What are you going to sing for us?

I always know in a few seconds. There are very few people who can pass an audition. I usually know when they walk in the room before they open their moutheven if they open their mouth only to speak and not sing. Ive already made up my mind. The last few minutes is just me being kind to them. Ive been told Im rude in auditions, but Im not. I might not look up from my computer, but I pay attention. I never tell anybody what I think, unless Im blown away. I like the theater of leaving it hanging, so that when you do deliver the news, you create a life-changing moment.

He handed me a tape of an instrumental track. I put it in the cassette player and pressed Play. He stood in front of my desk and started to sing a song Kenny and I wrote that had been a record-breaking number one hit for Boyz II Men on the Boomerang soundtrack called End of the Road. He was killing it. He didnt get through sixteen bars before I interrupted him.

Stop, whoa, I said. I need to get some girls. I want everybody to hear you.

Our bustling office was filled with employees and interns from local colleges. We rounded up all the pretty girls. They filled the chairs in my office, perched on desks, leaned in the doorway. About fifteen people crowded in. Usher took it from the top.

He zeroed in on Phyllis Parker, who worked for us, probably the most beautiful woman in the room, and dropped to his knee in front of her, singing, placing his hand on her thigh and looking dead in her eyes. He was seducing her with the confidence of someone who had done it before.

This kid wasnt afraid, he wasnt intimidated, he wasnt overwhelmed by the surroundings or the fact that he was singing for a record company president. He didnt have any apprehension at all. He jumped in like a pro. It turned out he had some stage experience in a group he sang with and had done a Star Search audition, but he was still raw and green. He came by his self-confidence naturally.

When he opened his mouth to sing, he didnt sing it like Boyz II Men, he sang it like it was his own song. His tone was perfect for the way he sang the song; he gave it his own, original sound, which is what I always look for with peoplethat special voice stamp that is only yours, that will not be mistaken for anyone else. The voice there was all his own. He was his own person. He was already Usher.