Absorbing a number of hip-hop’s sonic innovations without mirroring its attitude, and attracting an enormous adult contemporary audience while still providing makeout music for millions of middle-schoolers the world over, the Babyface brand helped to create a truly distinctive strain of aspirational black middle-class entertainment. His songwriting and production for Whitney Houston, Braxton, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men, Eric Clapton, Paula Abdul, Beyonce and Celine Dion saw him notch hit after hit, and when taken in concert with his film work - he helped soundtrack “The Bodyguard,” soundtracked and scored “Waiting to Exhale,” and soundtracked and produced “Soul Food,” all of which were enormous smashes at the box office and in record stores - Edmonds had created a lane all his own by the middle of the decade. It’s extremely unusual for a person that laid back and that kind to make it like this.”Ī key figure in R&B’s New Jack Swing era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Edmonds graduated to even higher plateaus as the ’90s progressed, becoming something like the patron saint of the slow-jam.
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He’s obviously driven like a madman, but you just never see it when you’re with him. “It’s very unusual to have a non-Type A personality and experience that kind of success in this business,” says songwriter-producer David Foster, a longtime friend and occasional collaborator. SEE ALSO: Production 101 With Babyface: Hitmaker Offers Recording Studio Wisdom (He confesses it took years of persuasion before he finally agreed to accept a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.) Even when interviewed from inside the home theater of his palatial Bel-Air home - a basement hideaway replete with overstuffed leather chairs and a massage table in the center of the room - the setting manages to be impossibly luxurious and impeccably arranged without ever feeling ostentatious or fussed-over, much like Edmonds’ collected oeuvre. Unfailingly polite, humble, and at times almost inaudibly soft-spoken, the 54-year-old Edmonds casts such an unassuming figure in conversation that it’s difficult to remember that this is the same man who once rearranged the 1990s R&B charts, and the pop charts in general, in his own image. … If I hadn’t become a producer, I don’t know that I would still be relevant.” It was me producing people that had the biggest impact, and being a writer and producer is just as important to my artistry as being Babyface the solo artist. I had records and I did well, but I was never that big. I was never the Bobby Brown or the Johnny Gill, the Boyz II Men. “I’ve always been mostly behind the scenes,” Edmonds says, reflecting on his varied career trajectory. And unlike so many music industry titans of his level, who cast the ups and downs of their careers as a sort of grand hero’s journey, Edmonds is just about the least likely person on earth to take stock of his personal narrative through a “Behind the Music”-style lens. Yet Edmonds was never expelled from the ranks of superstar hitmakers so much as he decided to opt out for a while. And his producer dance card is filled up with projects for Keri Hilson, Ledisi and Barbra Streisand in the months to come. He’s knee-deep readying a duets record with longtime muse Toni Braxton, titled “Love, Marriage, Divorce,” for a December release on Motown. His production and songwriting work for Nickelodeon star Ariana Grande saw the 20-year-old notch her first No. It may be true that Kenneth “ Babyface” Edmonds has experienced a dramatic upswing in productivity over the past year or so, after nearly a decade of relative, atypical quiet.
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He served a stint in Bootsy Collins' backing unit (where he earned his nickname) and. Kenneth Edmonds was born April 10, 1959, in Indianapolis and began playing in local R&B bands as a teenager.
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You'd be hard-pressed to name a '90s hitmaker with a track record more consistently successful and versatile than Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds. Yet their considerable success was eclipsed by his songwriting and production work for other artists, which linked him with some of the biggest stars and hit singles of the decade (and not just in the realm of R&B). His own recordings helped rejuvenate the R&B tradition of the smooth, sensitive, urban crooner and made him a staple of urban contemporary radio. As a singer, producer, and songwriter, Babyface was an inescapable presence in virtually every major facet of pop music during the '90s.