When she was a child, Amerie Rogers kept everything – her books, her
schoolwork, her friends – just so: the books arranged according to size, the
homework prioritised, the friends told to come back later when little Amerie
had completed her maths. A military brat, she grew up with her younger
sister and their Korean mother on a succession of army bases to which her
African-American father had been posted. South Korea, Germany, Texas, Alaska
– the 27-year-old spent about three years in each location, double that in
Texas.
Even when she wasn’t studying, Amerie often preferred to stay home. “I wasn’t
allowed to go out Monday through Thursday,” she says, “because I had to
work. And if there was no homework, there would be something educational to
do. But on the weekend sometimes, I would draw the curtains in my room, and
when my friends came round and said ‘Can you come out and play?’, I would tell
them, ‘My parents say I’m not allowed today.’ Or, ‘I’m on punishment.’
Because I just really enjoyed being by myself.”
So, she attended to her studies diligently, learnt various musical
instruments, won a place – and sat her degree, in English and fine art – at
one of America’s top universities. Then she told her mother that she was
going to pursue a career as a singer. “She cried,” remembers Amerie
(pronounced Ay-merie). “She was like, ‘You want to be just a
singer?’ That’s how she looks at it. I mean, she loves that I’m doing it,
and she doesn’t look down on it or anything. But she was heartbroken, like,
‘You’re so much more than that.’”
Six years on from that conversation, Amerie is about to release a third album,
Because I Love It, that confirms her as one of contemporary American soul
music’s most exciting and visceral new stars. Two gold albums, a brace of
Grammy nominations, a TV show and a film part – not to mention, in the song
1 Thing, the hottest single of 2005 – have positioned her nicely.
Her legs, which have always played a prominent part in her artwork and videos,
are rumoured to have been insured for $1m. And her new material – in
particular, her new single Take Control, which she co-wrote with Gnarls
Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green; the likely future hit Crush; and the Crazy in
Love-like Gotta Work – are about as perfect as modern pop-soul has a right
to be.
The first is almost carnal in its urgent, unbridled energy, a feral vocal
incantation and come-and-get-me lyric exploding over a furious, brutal
sampled guitar-and-drum loop. The second is already sounding like the best
pop song of the year. The third is one of seven tracks on the new album
written by Amerie alone.
Where on earth does this come from? What, in Amerie’s background of closed
curtains, of people-pleasing, head-in-a-book earnestness, prepares you for
the rush of blood to the heart and head that the best of her music
represents? She says she sang for just a year in a school choir: what, then,
was the wellspring for a voice that is one minute an amorous, rhapsodic coo,
the next a sandpapered, full-throated roar? Or for the writing talent that,
before that fateful chat with her mother, Amerie had kept hidden from
everyone, perhaps even herself?
It sounds as if her record label was asking the same questions when it began
wondering how to promote her. There was talk of omitting all mention of her
college degree, for fear that it might make her seem too remote, too
clever-clogs, for the R&B market. “When they first said that, I was
like, ‘ What?’,” Amerie recalls. “Their argument was that if
people were thinking ‘Oh, she went to school’, it seemed less artsy, when
they usually want to hear, ‘I was down and out, I didn’t have anything to
live for, then I found solace in writing songs on scraps of newspaper while
I was sleeping in my car.’ That’s true for some people, but it’s just not
me. And I’m way too strong-minded to have anyone build an image for me.”
Amerie has shown her independent streak in other ways, cutting loose from the
producer Rich Harrison, who helmed her first two albums, and co-producing
much of Because I Love It herself. That’ll be the control freak in her, you
think. But is it as straightforward as that? Listen to the eccentricity of,
in particular, her vocal-harmony arrangements, which come from way out in
the left field, and urgency seems as important a factor as order or control.
When I suggest this, the singer leaps on it. Leaning right across the table,
she takes up a pen and begins trying to draw what her vocal parts sound like.
“If I’m in the studio,” she says, “trying to explain the harmonies to people,
I’ll go, ‘Okay, it’s going to be like this.’” She starts drawing a
fantastically abstract series of bisecting lines across the page, ending up
with a spaghetti junction that resembles automatic writing. “That’s why I
work with just one engineer when I’m recording, because he knows my
utterances: ‘Again’, ‘Listening’, ‘Again’, ‘One’, ‘First and second’,
‘Second to the third’. There are so many sounds, I have
to get them out. People see my writing books, and I’ll have lines
everywhere, draw arrows here to here, here to there. I try to explain by
going, ‘The song’s here, I’m going to have a harmony do this’” – she
suddenly drags the pen at a mad angle through the main thread – “‘And then I
want one that does this.’ It comes, and I don’t want it to go. It’s like,
‘Let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it.’”
There’s no point beating around the bush about this: Amerie is beautiful. She
has legs so recognisable, they come with an insurance premium. She makes
music that sounds like sex. If she’s red-hot right now, those aspects of her
are as important to her success as her undoubted artistry. Yet she shies
away from celebrity parties, is reported to have insisted that her dancers
avoid brazenly erotic moves, and was once pilloried when, interviewed for a
magazine over lunch, she said grace before the meal. She may not self-edit
in the vocal booth, but isn’t she tempted to do so with the media present?
“No,” she laughs, referring to the for-what-we-are-about-to-receive. “I’d do
the same thing now. I’m not going to go, ‘Hey, God, I won’t be praying
because it’s kind of embarrassing with this person here.’ I consider myself
to be more spiritual than religious, but praying is something that I have to
do. Anyway, not everyone is going to see me exactly as I see myself. It
hasn’t ever gotten to the point where I’ve been so incensed that I’ve
thought, ‘I’m not going to do this.’ I’ve been accused of being a bit of a
good girl sometimes, or I read stuff and they’re basically saying, in a
roundabout way, ‘She’s a bit boring’; because, you know, I’m not a drunk,
and I don’t do this and that. But that’s just how I am. To be an artist, do
you have to be on a road of self-destruction? Like a martyr or something?”
As if with her mother’s feelings in mind, Amerie is currently co-writing a
novel (she wrote, she says, “a humungous, epic one when I was about 10”) and
has just moved to Los Angeles to oversee the music and film company she
recently founded. As for the parties, “I’m like a hermit,” she admits. “They
have to drag me out to them. They say, ‘There’s going to be this great
party, Puffy’s having it.’ And I’ll be like, ‘Cool, sounds great.’ The day
of the party? I don’t want to go. But one thing I don’t ever want is to be
known more for my private ins and outs than for my work. There is this
really big desire, everywhere, to be famous. But I mean, for what? Some
people are content with, say, just singing and dancing, but to me there’s a
difference between a performer and an artist. Artists have voices, whether
they’re singing, painting, acting or writing. And singers are a dime a
dozen. It’s the soul that makes a difference. What’s your perspective, what
do you have to say, what do you have to offer? That’s not about technique –
or you’re just singing a bunch of notes.”
A bunch of notes would never be enough for Amerie (or, indeed, her mother). As
our conversation ends, I’m still trying to locate that wellspring, to
work out how she managed to emerge from that neatly ordered room, and how
such passion coexists with such control.
She tells me about her mother’s friends commenting on how Korean she is, and
how she herself has noted the way she says “Hi” and “Bye” with a Korean
singsong. In an instant, the root for her vocal harmonies reveals itself: an
utterly unwestern intonation that explains some of the strangeness in her
music. As to the question of its brilliance, its abandon, its sense of
danger: the curtains are still closed on that one.
Take Control is released on May 7 on Columbia; Because I Love It follows on
May 14
