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GROOVEOUT
By
Chris Sill
STRONGER
TOGETHER/STRONGER THAN PRIDE
“Three and a half years on this album and
I’m certainly stronger for it—and so are my
fans too—all of us, we’ve survived this thing
together.” Kristine W
It’s
hard to comprehend why, but Kristine W has been absent
from dance floors for close to four years. Why has an
artist with so much talent and potential struggled for
years to put together a second album? Her first album,
the 1996 groundbreaking Land of the Living, received
critical acclaim but garnered only mediocre sales. Those
kinds of results simply do not fit into today’s
sales-driven record industry. Disappointed and disillusioned,
it marked the beginning of a long and painful journey
for W.
“I buried my grief writing songs,” she says.
Down, but definitely not out, her turning point was
a hotel bathroom jam session with friends. She covered
an old James Taylor song that her mother used to perform.
“That was kind of like the start of it. I was like,
‘Okay, you gotta get your shit together and stop
feeling sorry for yourself. You gotta think about your
mission.’”
After that she began rehearsing new songs with her band
in Las Vegas. It was not an easy task. “It was
difficult to get them to see the music—trying to
create with a band was very difficult.” Routinely
she would fly to New York to collaborate on songs, then
return to Vegas to rehearse and audition them on “middle
America.” Her goal was to find the right ingredients
for mainstream success. “‘Feel What You Want’
was too deep for them [middle America],” she recalls.
“I realized I had to pull it back and not try to
be too artsy. With this album I thought—It’s
going to be really hard. I’m going to have to take
all these songs, create them, take them to Vegas, perform
them, see what I get, make the cake, pull this frosting
off of here, stick some more over there—it was
really something else. With your second album if you
want to break into the industry you have to be really
careful. I thought this is the hardest thing you’re
ever gonna do—all of these songs are like blood—so
that’s why this album has taken such a long time.”
Soon W’s hectic schedule of nightly shows at the
Las Vegas Hilton and writing and rehearsing for the
new album began to take its toll on her. She eventually
ended her longtime Vegas engagement to concentrate solely
on the album. “I was starting to get hammered creatively
every night,” she remembers. “I was having
a hard time writing—it was really hard—but
you just think of the big picture—you can’t
think of failure ’cause then you’re finished.”
She was bruised and battered but certainly far from
being finished.
“It’s
all coming together now, but it was hell!” she
states with a sigh of relief. “You gotta laugh,
you know? The worst thing you can do is get bitter and
freaked out. You really have to stay focused.”
Staying focused is exactly what she’s done. The
new album, appropriately named Stronger, will finally
be released late this summer. “Loving You,”
the first single, should be in clubs and hopefully to
radio by mid summer.
She explains, “‘Loving You’ is going
to be like an introduction, but I have an odd feeling
that it’s going to be big—it’s just the
right flavor at the right time and the right mix, and
when I get out there and sing it, I feel it.” While
W is banking on “Loving You,” she admits that
her label, RCA Records, sees the second single, “If
Only You Knew,” as the one to cross her over to
the mainstream. “That’s the one I wrote for
my crossover mainstream pop, pop, pop—big pop hit!”
she says. “It’s an interesting piece of work—it’s
like that little crush that everybody’s had on
somebody, you’re just absolutely crazy about them,
but you can’t get your nerve up to tell them—I
can see it happening all the way through your life—I
think it’s a universal message that maybe that
[person] might be the one. I just always go on feeling,
you know?” It’s that kind of connection with
the song that W and RCA are hoping leads people to the
album. She adds, “That’s why Love Reigns [the
album’s first title] fits, but I think just for
the battle for the album I have to call it Stronger
for what we’ve been through.”
While W looks for big results with a mainstream audience,
she knows it has been her gay and lesbian fans that
have given her the most attention over the years. “I
feel like I’ve already been successful. If I just
keep my gay fan-base, I’m happy. They think about
what you’re doing. They take a song and they digest
it, and they think about the words and they think, ‘I
wonder why she liked that song or why she wrote that
lyric?’ They’re interested, so that makes
them interesting to me.”
W’s early life was spent surrounded by minorities,
including gays. She recalls, “I grew up in a community
where I just never witnessed anything quite like what
I’ve seen in the big world. It was kind of in an
isolated area—where we were all dependent upon
each other so we had to get along. I can think of the
gay boys that were in my classes. I knew they were gay—it
wasn’t a big deal. It’s just kind of weird
when you get out in the world and see how things are.
Now it’s kind of interesting how the gay thing
is popping up on television and getting more media coverage.
It kind of scares me that they [media] are using it
for shock tactics and ratings—they portray them
[gay men] as real nelly. Most of the guys I know are
not nelly like that—that’s what really bothers
me. You know people would be shocked if they knew who
the gay people sitting next to them at work were—a
lot of my best friends are gay males and I think that’s
because we have a lot in common—the things that
a lot of people take for granted, we see beauty in.”
The beauty of W is that despite her struggles she has
survived and continued on her mission using music as
a healing force for all. “I always think that music
is a way to bring everybody together. We’re all
just a bit too divided now and it’s making me nervous
at this point in time and history that we can’t
get it together. But I am trying to cross over, not
just for myself but for all of us. It’s our time
now.”
For more on Kristine W, visit her website at
www.kristinew.com.
Chris
Sill spins tunes at Rich's and can be reached at csill@infohwy.com.
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