The mystery & majesty of Anita Baker: why she stopped singing and why she's returning

Ebony, Nov, 2004 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

SHE'S back! After 10 years of topping the smooth jazz play lists in absentia, Anita Baker, Detroit's hometown diva, has returned to the top of the charts with a new recording and a new perspective on life, love and music.

As happy as her fans are at her return, no one is more excited than Anita Baker to be performing again.

"I'm crying a lot," she says, about the overwhelming reaction from audiences and the music-loving public to her return. Her first new single in 10 years, "My Everything," debuted at the top of the charts when it was released last summer. Baker's Blue Note Records debut, My Everything, was released in September to rave reviews. "It's unbelievable," the 8-time Grammy winner says. "I've never had a No. 1 single in my entire career. Never!"

The petite musical songwriter and producer co-wrote or wrote eight of the nine tunes on the collection. From the first note of the first song it is clear that her smooth alto has benefited from her long respite. And like the first sip of a warm cup of tea laced with lemon and honey, her music reminds the listener that it's "been so long" (one of her earlier hits) since we last heard her voice.

Why was she gone so long? "I needed to get away to rest, to take care of my family and to just spend some time with Anita, and my husband and my boys" she says. During the 10-year "break," Baker experienced a number of major personal crises. She lost a major record deal--dropped from the label reportedly because she could not deliver the recording that she promised.

Additionally, her parents died--her mother died in her arms--and her 15-year marriage nearly crumbled under the stress and pressure of their illnesses and deaths. At one point, she says, she and her husband, Walter Bridgeforth, were only six days from divorce. "I remember a time when my husband and I cried together," she says, looking back wistfully. "He said, 'I know you need to get back to your music, and I don't know how to help you get back there.'" Her mother was sick for six years and, she says, she tried to write music through the illnesses, working on one song for two years. "I was trying to write through all this pain, and I didn't understand for the life of me why the lyrics didn't come."

The fickle music industry had also moved on, she thought, changing in tone and texture. The singers were now young and unseasoned and the songs trite. Was there still a place for a mature singer with a mature song?

"I figured there was no market for me," she says now. "I wasn't hearing anything like what I do."

She doesn't fault the youth market, but she says that adults need to be served as well. She says the recent death of Ray Charles and the deaths in the last 15 years of major singers like Sarah Vaughn, Betty Carter and Ella Fitzgerald left a musical void that has not been filled. "Every demographic that wants to consume music should be serviced," she says. "Diversity is good for business, it's good for creativity. I think any business that is not ready to diversify will reap what it sows."

In the Biblical stages of sowing and reaping, Baker is definitely now in the reaping stage. She says she thought staying close to home base and caring for her parents through their final illnesses would permanently throw her career off-track. "All the sickness and death was hard on us and our marriage," she says now. She regained clarity, she says, when she began to focus simply on the challenges in front of her--her family, her children and her marriage. It also forced her to conquer another challenge and learn how to drive at age 45. Because she had to get to her parents' house and to the kids' school and soccer, she says she finally had to learn to drive. When she passed her test, she says she cried at the secretary of state's office.

When the tears stopped flowing (prompted by sadness and joy), she began to focus on her career again. "It took me a minute to wrap myself around it [the break], but it was a pause that had to be taken," she says. "And the beauty of it is that everything I thought had been sacrificed or lost was not only restored to me, it was restored to me a hundredfold."

And now that she's back, she's back with a vengeance. To catch her live, on-stage vibing with her band is a musical treat. "In my mind, I'm just a rhythm-section singer; that's who I am," she says. "I missed being in front of a band and experiencing that euphoria that comes when you're all on the same page at the same time. There's got to be some musicians around, there's got to be an exchange. That's what I'm in it for."

Baker was born in Detroit and lives there today in a family home outside the city with her husband and two sons. She started singing in church and later in groups throughout Detroit before landing a gig with the group Chapter 8, with whom she had the hit "I Just Wanna Be Your Girl" in the early 1980s. Baker later went solo and recorded the classic collection The Songstress ("Angel" and "No More Tears") before finding her way to Elektra Entertainment and a decade-long collaboration that produced "Rapture," "Giving You the Best That I Got" and Compositions.