Flashback article: Confessions of A Soul Singer. Blues & Soul Magazine, 1994.

Jeff Lorez has a heart to heart with the singer/writer who reveals the inner turmoil and pain he’s now exorcised with the release of his new album.

“I’ve lived in LA for most of my career” explained El Debarge when I spoke to the slender, youthful-faced singer at Warner Bros Records’ New York offices. Seeing El, it was hard to believe that “most of his career” meant fourteen years, beginning of course, with his most fruitful period in the early ‘80’s on Motown Records, as the lead singer of family group DeBarge. “In between I’ve lived in Houston and I moved back to Grand Rapids in Michigan but I never stayed there for more than six months. I always moved back to LA”.

“What made you go back?” I ventured.

“I was tryin’ to find myself. It was all part of El tryin’ to find El. I learned from all the movin’ that I’m still tryin’ to find myself. I ain’t gotten there yet! (laughs).

And with that, myself and El veered away from discussing the studio technicalities involved in recording his new album, “Heart, Mind & Soul” and onto an altogether meatier subject, the trials and tribulations El has gone through since his Motown days, in particular the problem he’s faced trying to balance El the artist with El the small town family man from Michigan.

“El has a bit of LA in me and a little bit of Grand Rapids, the simple life, hometown vibe… but there’s a whole lot more of LA in me! I used to think it was the other way around. To be serious with you, I’m finding that a lot of what I was tryin’ to be wasn’t me. I was tryin’ to be this “Waltons family picket fence kind of man” and that was the kind of pressure my social environment was puttin’ on me when I was growin’ up. When I got into a musical career I was tryin’ to fit all of that into who I was on stage and it doesn’t work. Mentally it became excess baggage on stage. I became inhibited when performing because always in the back of my mind I was supposed to have this goody good image and I couldn’t really let loose and be an entertainer because a true entertainer is free and I had all this excess baggage of what other people though of me and criticisms they’d have.

“So eventually I just had to say ‘fuck it!’”. I had no choice or else I was gonna go crazy. I asked myself “Who am I?” Those are the type of questions you ask yourself at 19 to 24, not my age. When I asked myself that question the tears came and I realized, “Damn El, you’ve been livin’ a lie all this time”. This only happened recently, just this January, during the recording of this album.

Thus, on the sleeve notes of his new album, El thanks co-writer and producer of five songs, Babyface for helping him “rediscover” himself. El elaborated.

“Babyface is true to himself and all the great writers, Marvin Gaye, The Isley Brothers (the two influences that are most prominent on El’s current album. In face, the title track from El’s current album actually features Leon Ware and Wah-Wah Watson re-creating Marvin’s distinctive “I Want You” sound) were true to themselves in what they wrote. They weren’t afraid to show their vulnerability in their work. Too many acts today are so pre-occupies with coming over hardcore that the art is suffering because no on it totally hardcore unless you’re a monster. No one’s so hardcore they can’t be reached.

“Human beings are like porcupines. The porcupine is on of the most vulnerable animals in the forest. They’ve got needles on themselves for protection. If they felt safe they’d never rise up which is what we do. We rise up and try to hide our vulnerability. Every man has an abundance of love and sensitivity in them but what we do is we rise up and put up our protective shell every time we get scared and what it shows is just how timid we really are because true strength doesn’t come from being hard, it comes from being vulnerable and being comfortable with that vulnerability.

“Babyface is someone that’s extremely sensitive and vulnerable and always lays himself open. Because of that I think he’d be easy to hurt as he doesn’t hold himself back. Marvin Gaye was another person who wasn’t afraid to bare his emotions and be openly vulnerable.”

El continues: “For a long time I’d stuff all my emotions and vulnerability inside because I didn’t want you to know that I was hurting. That was one of my greatest mistakes. I wish I’d never learned how to do that because I did it so well. Now I’m opening up again. When I wrote “All This Love”, “In A Special Way” and “Time Will Reveal” (all of Debarge’s biggest hits recently covered by the likes of Patti Labelle, Blackstreet and Jomanda), I wasn’t stuffing things away, I was letting go. Then because of pain and things I was goin’ through I started stuffing all the emotion inside and it became so obvious when I went solo. The funny thing is that my problems weren’t different than anyone else had but dealing with them openly, I hid them away. That was my weakness. I didn’t want to hurt and the irony of that was that I was hurting myself because it just grew bigger and bigger and one day I had to come to terms with it.

“One of the main problems with me, stuffing all this pain and emotion away was that it stifled my creativity because the real El who was writing all the big hits was “people person” and I shut myself off from people. I didn’t want to let the people who were hurting me know they were hurting me. I didn’t want to write about being hurt because I thought people would think I was just some weak little bastard (laughs)! Then I had this pride thing where I didn’t even want anyone to know they hurt me bad enough to make me write a song about them. It was ego. It was a trip, man! Now I know I can deal with whatever. If I hurt I’m gonna cry and I’ll sit at the piano and write about it. I know that when I got through things, somebody out there is hurting too and by me writing songs it lets them know they’re not alone and that can be so comforting.”

The precursor to El’s current “Heart, Mind & Soul” set was his Warner Bros. debut album, the sorely overlooked “In The Storm”, a concept album that in many ways began the cathartics that culminated with its follow up.

“During ‘In The Storm’ I was goin’ through so much. It came out in all the songs. All of my influences were gathered together on one album. I think it’s a masterpiece. The ‘Heart, Mind & Soul” album is an extension from that and every album from this point on will be an extension of the ‘In the Storm’ album. It’s the mothership.”

I’m many ways El teaming up with Babyface is a perfect match. Both are essentially small town, middle American sensitive soulsters who have, over the years, gone through their fair share of changes, re-locating to LA and dealing with the trappings of success. Thus, it seems perfectly understandable that the friendship forged through El’s recent album is set to flourish through future works.

“Something Face and I were talking about was going on tour together and doing a ‘Ladies Only’ tour after we’ve recorded a whole ballad album, just the two of us, we wanna make a difference and make some history, man. We wanna do big, big, big things. We have to do what we feel and try to show people that it’s alright to love and show emotion. It doesn’t mean you’re soft. It’s natural and God knows in this day and age we need it.”


Originally published in July 1994, Blues & Soul Magazine
El Debarge Heart ‘n’ Soul: Confessions Of A Soul Singer

Transcribed for the web by thedebarges.blogspot.com