Everybody loves a good comeback story, and all signs are pointing towards Whitney “the Voice” Houston doing exactly that when her new album I Look To You drops August 31.
Until very recently, her label was behaving cautiously by only giving select journalists sneak peaks at private listening parties and sending out no advance copies or downloads.
Over the past week though, the positive reaction to the first two leaked tracks (I Look To You and Million Dollar Bill) appears to have given them the confidence to stream the entire album on her website, and are letting her do a tell-all interview on Oprah Winfrey.
We were lucky enough to hear it in its entirety last week, and listening to it several times we’re going to place our bet on Whitney kicking ass on the charts this fall. Sure, there’s not much of the vocal pyrotechnics she was once known for, but was that really all we loved her for? Good soul music should be about soul, not how many octaves a singer can jump through.
There doesn’t seem to be much of an attempt to modernize her sound, but it doesn’t sound dated either. Her core fans are always going to be the girls and the gays, and this collection of tear jerking ballads and uptempo dance tracks is clearly aimed at them, pretty much skipping any references to hip-hop. If anything, the vocal restraint that years of drug abuse has forced on her makes this more listenable for folks who aren’t impressed by acrobatic singing displays.
If she pulls this off as we predict, this will be even more of an unexpected and drastic turnaround than the one Britney Spears enjoyed not long ago. After all, Britney may have fallen hard and very publicly, but even shaving her head and getting carted off to a mental hospital doesn’t quite measure up the depressing depths that Whitney fell.
Flashing your privates to the paparazzi barely compares to this list of embarrassments:
- She had photos of her crack den printed in the National Enquirer
- She had to auction off her pants
- She got fired from the Oscars by Burt Baccharach
- She smoked crack on her way to rehab sessions, regularly lost her teeth (and occasionally frightened children by appearing toothless in public), would smoke an 1/8th of an ounce of crack at a time, and had crack dealers calling Bobby Brown demanding that he remove her from their crack house. When people are complaining to Bobby Brown that you’re out of control, you know things are serious.
- After losing control of her bladder, she would simply solve the problem by wearing diapers
- Became an Internet meme for addiction denial
- Had to turn to Courtney Love for help. We’re still not sure if Courtney hallucinated that though.
Regardless of all that, welcome back Whitney.
