“I was like, ‘I’ll do the whole album for free’,” Chucky remembers. In response, executive producer Sean “Puffy” Combs chose to hire a talented – and decidedly less-expensive – industry newcomer, 23-year-old Chucky Thompson. The album started coming together when the producers of Mary’s first album raised their prices for the second. My Life moved 90s R&B out of its adolescence, effectively marking the moment when New Jack Swing grew up and became hip-hop soul. She expanded the genre’s emotional landscape with introspective lyrics, soul-baring vocals over samples from an era when Issac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Barry White brought orchestral grandeur to Black popular music. With rough-edged vocals that gave her words the immediacy of a bee sting, Mary broke from R&B conventions by refusing to prettify her pain. Schlobohm Houses, one of the oldest public residential complexes in Yonkers, looped melodies familiar to Black kids raised on their parents’ 70s soul records and used the sonic backdrop for deeply confessional songs about being addicted to bad love, doubting her worth, and hoping God would be there when she called. But with My Life, the woman who grew up in the William A. Her debut, 1992’s What’s The 411?, was packed with spunky joints about searching for new love and being reminded of loves past.
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