A Soul Baby Grows Up
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Last month Johnson’s major-label debut, Chapter 1: Love, Pain & Forgiveness, finally hit the shelves. The young singer learned a thing or two in the intervening years, including how easily the minutiae of marketing can take priority over the music: the record was originally slated to come out in July 2000 but was delayed repeatedly as the label vacillated on what song to release first. Though she no longer harbors illusions of instant fame, Johnson does have good reason to be optimistic: the single, “I Am Your Woman,” written for her by R. Kelly, is in Billboard’s top 50, the album debuted at number one on the magazine’s Heatseekers chart (which lists the best-selling titles by artists who have never appeared in the top half of the Billboard 200), and she’ll be opening for Kelly on his upcoming U.S. and European tours.
For most of Johnson’s life, her father protectively discouraged any aspirations she had toward a career in the business. “He’d joke with me, ‘You can’t sing, shut up.’ He didn’t want his baby girl to be in the industry because he thought it was full of snakes.” But by the time he recorded his 1994 comeback album, Back in the Game, for Delmark, he’d changed his tune, allowing Syleena to cowrite and sing on the gospel-drenched “Dipped in the Water.” As a freshman at Drake University in Iowa that same year, she declared a psych major, but before her first semester was up she’d entered and won a school talent show.
