|
When he first came at you he was The Bachelor. Then, he guaranteed you he was 100% Ginuwine. Now R&B crooner Ginuwine wants to let you into The Life. The third album from the Washington, D.C.-based soul singer born Elgin Lumpkin is a tour of his personal life and overheard snippets of conversation he's picked up along the way.
The result is another sultry, bouncing album of songs such as the simmering "2 Way," the hit single "There It Is" and the touching dedication to his recently deceased parents, "Two Reasons I Cry." Ginuwine got real with Shari Scorca and told her why you don't hear a lot of cameos on his records and his feelings about the impersonator who's been dogging him for the past year.
***
MTV: This album is called The Life. Do you feel that you've gone in a more personal direction on this album?
Ginuwine: [It's about] life in general, but it's about my life, too. There's nothing that you can go through in life that my album is not gonna tell you about. [I've] always been writing about relationships and what people go through. I'm moving a lot, so I hear a lot of things and I just make a mental note of a lot of the stuff that I hear. Somebody could just say a catchy phrase and I'll take the phrase and make a whole song about it.
MTV: We talked to Monica recently and she had taken a break from writing and recording because she had a tragedy in her life, and you had one between the recording of your last album and this album. How did you deal with the loss [of your parents]? Did you start writing again?
Ginuwine: I started writing when it was time for me to write, but in writing I actually saw how that made me look deeper. Stuff I'm saying on this album, I would have never said on the last album. With the stuff that happened to me, I think I was able to get my point across easier and have people understand where I'm coming from.
MTV: Is there a song dedicated to your parents?
Ginuwine: I did a song called "Two Reasons I Cry" and it's basically because my mom and my dad are gone and that was the last song I did on the album. I wanted to do it when I really felt it and one night I was in the studio and [producer] Cory Rooney's people played a song for me and I was like, "That's it right there." I wasn't gonna just do it so I could say I did something for my mom and dad. If the right song didn't come up, I might've done it [on] the next album, but the right song came up. That told me that it was the right time, so I went in there, I wrote and it took me all night to do it, because I was crying. I [would do] three lines, and then I cried. It was a real hard night for everybody, but everybody understood and we got through it and it came out a great song.
It was a little bit of relief because I was trying to keep it in and that's what drove me crazy for a minute, so I let it out in song, the best way that I know how and it helped me a lot.
MTV: I can imagine it would be difficult cause so much of the stuff on your previous albums is just very sexy and sexual. Is that just something that [naturally happens] when you're in the studio, you gravitate to the sexy tracks?
Ginuwine: The track will talk to you. The track won't say the words, but the track will give you the melody and once you get that, you think of a topic. If it's a fast song, you think of a funny topic or a catchy topic. I like to deal with sayings like, "two wrongs don't make a right," and "what comes around goes around" when it comes to fast songs. There's been plenty of times where someone would put on a song I'll look up and just say [something] real quick and it'll be the perfect words for it. If it's a slow track and it's got a lot of guitar in it, that's telling me to whine, basically cry about something.
The story behind "There It Is," rubbing elbows with Ludacris and avoiding cameo overload ... NEXT >>
|
