"Socializing was nonexistent," she says of her student days.
#AMERIE 1 THING DRUM COVER FULL#
She would major in English and minor in fine arts, but began pursuing her pop ambitions full steam. When her family relocated to Fort Lee, Va., in 1998, Amerie wanted to stay close. "And my mom listened to a lot of traditional Korean music" - a drum-and-vocal-centric form that undoubtedly influenced her approach. "We always had soul music in the house," Amerie says. Then to Germany, back to Texas, and eventually to Alaska, where she graduated from high school.Īlong the way, she glommed on to a wide spectrum of pop, developing an affinity for Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Marvin Gaye, Madonna, the Beastie Boys, the "Grease" soundtrack and whatever else her parents were playing on the family stereo. Army family, Amerie Rogers was born in Massachusetts, but quickly moved to her mother's native Korea. The transition to Def Jam comes after a life of endless transitions. "If it's not gonna be put out right, I don't want to do it."
"There was just too much turmoil on the executive level," she says of the lack of promotion she felt at her old label. release for Columbia Records, but the singer had grown skeptical of her paymasters and put the project in cold storage as she plotted a move to hip-hop powerhouse Def Jam, where she's currently signed. That desire for complete control came to a head in 2007 when Amerie decided to shelve her then-forthcoming disc, "Because I Love It." The album would have been her third U.S. "I didn't come here to get a such-and-such record, I came here to get an Amerie record that we're gonna create together." "I like to work with people who are willing to create something with me, versus just giving me just their off-the-rack track," Amerie says of her collaborators. Baby, you're no good for me, no!" Her vocal trills morph into growls as the beat threatens to boil over. Unlike the chorus of "1 Thing," here our hero finds herself suspended in a different type of romantic disbelief: "Why are you the only thing that I care about?.
You can hear it in lead single "Why R U" - a pining love song with a scrappy boom-bap track courtesy of the production team the Buchanans. In a world where uber-producers like The-Dream, Timbaland and Danja often play musical chairs with pop's A-list vocal cords, listening to the radio can have a particularly numbing effect - one that makes Amerie's grittiness feel all the more resonant. "They don't really sound like themselves - they just sound like the producer who did the record. "On the radio, you have a lot of artists sounding like each other," Amerie says between bites of bruschetta. Weaving urgent melodies through sandpapery beats, it's an album tailor-made to stand out in an era where R&B singers are often treated as interchangeable parts in the great American pop machine. release after a lengthy four-year absence. On Tuesday, Amerie will try to do it again with "In Love & War," her first U.S. "It's this one thing and I was so with it," she belts on the song's delirious refrain. Half diva, half brainiac, this is a Georgetown University graduate who likes to read science magazines while she prepares for her latest photo shoot, a team of handlers fussing over her hair.īut most know Amerie as the voice behind 2005's chart-topping R&B single "1 Thing." With its bursts of percussion and ribbons of insistent melody, the song remains one of our decade's most revelatory pieces of pop music. "It has the same pH balance as our tears," the 29-year-old singer explains. It's lunchtime at Seraphina in Midtown Manhattan and Amerie is ransacking her purse, searching for a shaker of Himalayan salt. Despite receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews for her just-released CD,"In Love & War", the set sold an appalling 12,000 copies in its debut week.Īn interview she gave to the Washington Post on the eve of the album's debut gives us a hint of what to expect from her in the future:Īmerie Wants to be More Than A '1 Thing' Wonder
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