WHEN Jennifer Hudson began working on the film “Dreamgirls” in late 2005, she pulled aside Henry Krieger, who wrote the music, and asked for his patience.
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Tom Ackerman for The New York Times
Jennifer Hudson on her debut album: “No one has waited longer than me.”
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David James/DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures
Jennifer Hudson, right in “Dreamgirls”.
“She said, ‘Henry, I want to tell you I’m a slow learner, but I will get it,’ ” Mr. Krieger recalled. “I saw the look in her eye, and I believed her. And she did come through, exactly in her way — slowly.”
It’s been nearly five years since Ms. Hudson, 27, emerged as a sweet-natured, big-belting “American Idol” contestant from Chicago. She made it to seventh place, and when she won an Academy Award last year as best supporting actress in “Dreamgirls,” she became a symbol of second chances. On Tuesday she gets a chance at yet another kind of fame with her debut album, “Jennifer Hudson” (Arista), something she and her fans have had to be especially patient about.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve been waiting for this album forever,’ ” Ms. Hudson said in a Manhattan recording studio in July, where she was doing a photo shoot. “But no one has waited longer than me. I’ve been waiting since I was 7 years old.”
Despite her familiarity from the movies, television and prominent gigs like singing the national anthem last month at the Democratic National Convention in Denver (at the request of Senator Barack Obama) Ms. Hudson is still a risky proposition in the music industry. She’s on the brink of household-name status yet hasn’t scored a hit song of her own. She has a bold, powerful voice but not the centerfold physique of most of the women who top the pop charts. And that Oscar has created expectations difficult for any first-timer to meet.
Many in the industry, including even her admirers, wonder if she can pull it off.
“You can put all types of material in front of her and she’ll knock it out of the park,” said Stephen Hill, the interim president of BET. “But will all types of material sell? Matching her with material she could do well probably wasn’t the problem. Whittling it down to how we can categorize it is a problem in more than one way.”
To introduce her, Ms. Hudson’s record label has had to strike a balance between establishing a clearly identifiable, saleable persona and allowing her versatility to bloom. Overseen by the longtime record executive Clive Davis, “Jennifer Hudson” casts her as a queen of contemporary, pop-leaning R&B, with a bit of the hip-hop sass of Alicia Keys. Some of the top producers and songwriters in pop music contributed, including Timbaland, Stargate, Diane Warren and Missy Elliott. But the album didn’t come quickly, or easily.
Over 18 months of sessions, which had to fit around Ms. Hudson’s crowded filmmaking schedule — besides “Dreamgirls,” she appeared in “Sex and the City” and has two more films in the can, including “The Secret Life of Bees,” set for a Oct. 17 release — dozens of songs were recorded and rejected in search of the right material. While not unheard of for a major pop album, that delay is an eternity by the make-the-record-while-the-iron-is-hot standards of “American Idol.”
Just as important as her material, of course, is Ms. Hudson’s public image as a singer; in the video for “Spotlight,” the first single, she comes across as both a diva and a relatable gal next door. In it she acts out a fantasy of escaping a jealous lover’s scrutiny by slipping on her heels and heading to a club where the Campari flows freely. It’s a standard R&B and hip-hop scene with ecstatic dancers and lots of bling, and Ms. Hudson’s vocal flights and hands-on-hips attitude invite comparisons to Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera and Ms. Keys — women who match a strong voice to an even stronger personality.
But Ms. Hudson seems less herself strutting in her tightly squeezed top and leather jacket than in the video’s bookend scenes at home, chatting on the phone with a girlfriend. Like Effie White, her character from “Dreamgirls,” or Louise, her role as the personal assistant to Sarah Jessica Parker in “Sex and the City,” she is less the glamorous princess than the everyday woman, the underdog, the striver.
Plenty of actresses have made albums before, but Ms. Hudson is different. In an era of wispy, media-trained celebutantes she has an easy populist appeal, like the quiet girl in high school who suddenly comes alive in the school play, making everybody proud. And her early education in the music of pop queendom seems less a step in world domination than a simple girlish enjoyment. Besides performing in a church choir she learned the ropes singing along to Whitney Houston songs. “She would sing on the record,” Ms. Hudson said, “and I would throw another note on it and it sounded like a Whitney Houston-Jennifer Hudson duet.”
Even with an Academy Award under her belt Ms. Hudson has not given up her childhood dream of making it as a singer, which in her pre-“Idol” days motivated her through dues-paying jobs like performing on a Disney cruise ship.
And hallelujah, can she sing. However unusual her path to stardom Ms. Hudson is a bona fide vocal athlete, proving herself in “Dreamgirls” with one of the all-time great diva workouts, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” which Jennifer Holliday had melismatized into Broadway history in 1981, the year Ms. Hudson was born.
“It’s like I came in through the back door,” said Ms. Hudson at the recording studio, dressed in a plain purple shirt, black skirt and black leggings — the same comfort clothes she had worn when arriving at ABC’s “Good Morning America” the previous day. “Even I don’t understand it. I have to laugh at myself, like, I won an Academy Award? I’m an actress, almost before being a singer, when that’s almost all I’ve ever known?”
And She Is Telling You She Is Just Getting Started
Published: September 26, 2008
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In conversation too Ms. Hudson is decidedly nonsuperstar. She fidgets when she talks, idly lining up the computer and mouse of a studio console, confessing her love of gadgets and loathing of heels. “I’m just this normal person,” she said. “I don’t like wearing a lot of makeup or being overdressed all the time. I want to be comfortable, wear no makeup, have my hair all over my head.”
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Singing the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention last month.
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Ray Mickshaw/Fox
Competing in “American Idol” in 2004.
Her exposure has created a large but heterogeneous potential audience: imagine the range of radio stations listened to by everyone who liked “Dreamgirls” or “Sex and the City.” Mr. Davis, chief creative officer for Sony BMG Worldwide, who signed Ms. Hudson to the company’s Arista label after she had been cast in “Dreamgirls,” said that part of the long process of making the album involved choosing a sound and a style that would establish a distinct persona for her as a recording artist.
“This is not a movie star making a record album,” he said. “The approach here is that this is an artist with an incredible natural voice, that brings the house down in every performance that she gives. The real challenge is to come up with material thatis radio-friendly, so that she can have a recording career, as compared to just doing songs that showcase her voice.”
To hear Ms. Hudson tell it, it goes beyond the material selected: she comes with all kinds of demographic baggage.
“I can’t just put out an R&B song and expect that to go over for everyone,” she said. “I can’t do that with a pop song either. On the album there’s a hip-hop song, a gospel-inspirational song for my church base, and then we have to have the big ballads for fans through ‘Dreamgirls’ or ‘Idol.’ And of course I’m black, so we have to have music for African-American people, which is more on the R&B end. It’s a huge fan base, and that was the scariest part, which is where the pressure came in.”
Perhaps as a result of this awareness, “Jennifer Hudson” covers a number of stylistic bases. The team of Stargate and Ne-Yo, who have worked with Beyoncé and Rihanna, wrote and produced two tracks in their signature rhythmic yet candied style, “Spotlight” and “Can’t Stop the Rain” (the latter written just days before Ms. Hudson won her Oscar). Timbaland’s “Pocketbook” has a beat-box rhythm and a guest rap by Ludacris. “You Pulled Me Through,” “Giving Myself” and “Invisible” are the kind of slow-burn torch songs that Ms. Hudson calls “power ballads” and claims as her specialty.
Add to those songs “And I Am Telling You” and “Jesus Promised Me a Home” and you have an album that can be marketed to hip-hop-loving teenagers, fans of Ms. Houston or Ms. Carey, adult contemporary radio and even Broadway and gospel listeners. That’s a broad range, but what makes her most appealing to fans may have nothing to do with radio format or marketing genre.
“Her core audience is going to be people who love big, emotive voices,” said Mr. Hill of BET, “but that’s not a category you’re going to find in a record shop.”
Whether cooing her way through the midtempo “Spotlight,” or singing a self-esteem anthem like “Invisible” (“No more standing in the back of the line/’Cause I’m invisible for the last time”), she always builds to a wailing climax — the moment when she ceases being merely a skilled vocalist and becomes Jennifer Hudson, star.
That transformation was apparent at the “Good Morning America” studio in Times Square on a hot Monday in July, when she ran through a rehearsal of “Spotlight” at about 6:20 a.m. She began with her arms somewhat awkwardly at her side, as members ofthe show’s crew checked clipboards, studied monitors and unfurled cables. By the second chorus she was exploding her part loudly and playfully, leaving her band to follow their script as she extemporized a torrent of loose, emphatic syllables scattered across the scale. Every face in the room was turned to her, and once she finished the room erupted into applause.
But can Ms. Hudson muster that magnetism in situations other than a song’s climax?
Tor Erik Hermansen of Stargate said that early this year he and his producing partner, Mikkel S. Eriksen, had been summoned by Mr. Davis to make a “copyright” — his shorthand for a timeless pop classic. In a marathon session with Ne-Yo they wrote “Spotlight” for Ms. Hudson, Rihanna’s summer hit “Take a Bow” and Ne-Yo’s “Closer.” When they recorded with Ms. Hudson, they had expected a strong personality on the order of Effie White.
“She is such a good singer, but at the same time she’s humble to the point that you sometimes think she is insecure,” Mr. Hermansen said. “Then she goes to the mic and she just blows you away. The swagger that she has onscreen and on the mic didn’t come across till she started to sing.”
In “Dreamgirls” she played the squelched talent of a Supremes-like girl group, whose career was deflected in favor of her inferior but more beautiful backup singer, played by Beyoncé. The film’s view of a sexist, unfair business, Ms. Hudson said, rang true for her. “That’s how the music industry is structured,” she said. “It’s 90 percent image, 10 percent talent.”
After performing on “Good Morning America” Ms. Hudson expressed some frustration that wherever she goes, fans rush her and call her Effie. “No one knows me,” she said. “They know Effie. They know Louise. But you never really get to know, O.K., who is Jennifer Hudson. This album and the music side help introduce Jennifer Hudson.”
So what do you want this album to tell people about Jennifer Hudson?
“Nothing in particular,” she answered sweetly, then quickly added, “I just want them to at least have a sense of what I’m like, who I am, where I come from, what I do, where I’ve been.”
"Look and Live." It is scheduled to be released over the internet on October 14, and Richard D' Abreu Jr, has set an ambitious goal of 5,000 downloads worldwide in the first week (Oct. 14 - 21), in order to garner the attention of the industry. I think it's very possible, but we will need help first from God, but also from all our friends.
