He’s confident, in fact, that his dates opening for the Pointer Sisters -- one is tonight, when Anita, Ruth and June Pointer and their band headline at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, in their third area appearance in two years -- will be a lot of fun.
In a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles, the Grand Rapids, Mich., native said he’s very proud of his first solo album, “El DeBarge,” released on Gordy Records at the beginning of May.
“I like it very much. I think it’s a good album. I like the songs, it’s very well-produced, and I sang them to the best of my abilities, with a lot of feeling,” he said.
Already, he’s doing find with “Who’s Johnny?” a cute, uptempo song from “Short Circuit,” the film starring the robot known as No 5. But DeBarge, who didn’t write any of the tunes on the disc, said his favorite track is “Love Always”, a sophisticated ballad by Burt Bacharach, Carol Bayer Sager and Bruce Roberts.
“It feels so right to me, the chords and the melody. It was one of those songs that I sand in one take. I just went in the studio and I just sang one time through, and it just felt so good.
“The songs on this record, I chose them. I tried to choose tunes that would sound like me, that would sound like something I would do, like for instance ‘Private Lines’,” a bouncy slice of techno-pop that kicks off Side Two.
“But most of the ballads would express certain realities in my life, heartbreaking situations, things that I’d gone through,” DeBarge said. “I sometimes would go through certain things and write about them.
“Sometimes it’s hard to pick up a pen and write a song about it.”
DeBarge -- the family, not El DeBarge -- had hits with such tunes as “All This Love,” “I Like It” and last year’s smash “Rhythm of the Night.”
And everybody but El is recording another family album.
“The group is working on their album now, without me,” he said, adding that he’s sure he will record with them again. “The idea now is to let them record on their own so they can express themselves. The group is very talented, and this is the way for them to show their talent. So I didn’t really want to, and they didn’t want me to, sing on their album either.”
At first, he was going to record two songs on the upcoming family disc, but later he decided to withdraw from them. “In every group there’s always disagreements, and I think people trying to pretend there are not are really just fooling,” he said, evoking the history of another onetime Motown family act, the Jackson 5.
“But the thing that made me go solo was, me being the focal point in the group DeBarge, and having so many other talents within the group, we were really getting in our own way,” he said.
“What I do is, I have lots and lots of songs. I have 10 people in my immediate family, my brothers and sisters, all of whom write songs. So we have like billions of tunes,” be said.
The group has been singing together since El DeBarge was 6 (he turned 24 on June 4). As they grew up in Grand Rapids, they sand at talent shoes and clubs and individual DeBarges sand with other groups, he said.
“I would be in one group, Bunny was in another, Randy was in another, Bobby was in another,” he said. But they eventually rejoined as family because “we always wanted to be together professionally.”
“I could never be the Revolution, I could never be part of the band,” DeBarge said, referring to Prince and his band, the Revolution. “I would either have to be by myself or with my family.”
His going solo has given the rest of the family room to grow, he said.
Although he wrote for his solo LP. DeBarge said he reserved his own tunes for subsequent solo work. “Each album is a statement of growth.” he said “I would say, like when you listen to the music and you hear my performance, you can feel the growth, and the album cover also expresses that growth.”
He’ll be singing in front of a seven-piece band, one sax, a gang of keyboards, guitars and percussions.
“I’m a very classy man, and my whole family is very classy,” he said.
Written by Carlo Wolff for Schenectady Gazette, 1986.
Transcribed for the web by thedebarges.blogspot.com
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