A soul talent's divine future

For Divine Brown, the future began in front of a TV set, where as a child she danced and sang along with the performers on "Soul Train." The way ahead was what she saw when she gazed at the cover of Donna Summer's "I Remember Yesterday" album, and wanted to be that singer, with that dress and that hair.

Not such an unusual dream, though Brown had one big advantage over most other kids who fantasize about being on record and onstage. She had a big voice, which grew to five octaves, and which over the years developed into one of the most impressive R&B instruments Canada has produced.

Three years ago, the open secret of Brown's talent became known to an audience far beyond the Toronto jazz clubs and recording studios where she honed her craft as Divine Earth Essence, and before that, Booboo Brown (her given name is Michelle). "Divine Brown," her debut album on Warner Music, got a whole lot of radio play for the nostalgic single, "Old Skool Love."

"The Love Chronicles," her just-released second album (also on Warner), goes back to the old school for an advanced degree in creative time-tripping. The disc's 12 new songs pay the sincerest kind of homage to the types of soul music she heard when she was a kid, from doo-wop to funked-up disco.

"I thought of the songs that I would listen to growing up, of the memories attached to some of the old stuff that my parents were playing, and of the feelings attached to those memories," she said during an interview at a Toronto hotel. "I thought it would be really cool to have a record that explores the different eras of soul music."

Some of what she wrote was a direct response to particular songs or musicians who got her moving in her parents' living room.

The sleek disco number "Boogie Slide," for instance, is a tribute to Donna Summer.

The synth-heavy "Sunglasses," which Brown co-wrote with Nelly Furtado (for whom she has sung backup vocals), takes off from Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night," a hit from 1984 that played a key role in convincing Brown that a homegrown talent could make it.

"I remember hearing it and thinking, 'That's a dope song, and he's Canadian,' " she said. In her song, the protagonist "can't go anywhere without my oculos escuros" -- Portuguese for "sunglasses," which Brown picked up not from the Portuguese-speaking Furtado but from her own exposure to capoeira, the Brazilian martial-arts discipline.

The new disc was recorded "90 percent" with live musicians, indicating an elevated level of investment that you can also see by comparing the first videos from both the debut album and "The Love Chronicles." The simple, two-person shoot for "Old Skool Love" all takes place in an apartment, while Paul Boyd's video for "Lay It On the Line" has a storyline and a cast of dozens who come together at the end for a street party with vintage cars in sight.

At 33, Brown looks like a woman in charge, and when she speaks, her strong, active hands do a lot of the talking. She's come a long way since she made the rounds at age 18 with an album's worth of demos, for which there were no takers.

"The general consensus was, 'Your songs sound too mature for your look,' " she said. She put those songs aside (though one was eventually rerecorded for her Warner debut), and decided to concentrate on her craft as a singer, wherever and whenever she could.

"I gigged sometimes six or seven days a week," she said. "I did voiceovers, commercials, worked on sessions in studios. Anything I did to survive was music-related."

A pivotal moment came when she split up with the father of her very young daughter, who is now 10. Becoming a single parent, she said, forced her to focus her energies on becoming a success in her own right, independent of those who might hire her for a studio gig or ask her to sing backup.

To call that drive for independence fierce might be an understatement. The new album is entirely a Warner project (her debut was partly financed independently), but Brown managed to retain control as executive producer. She co-produced two of the songs herself, and marshaled a posse of others (including James Bryan, Colin Munroe and Slakah the BeatChild) to do the rest. During our conversation, she paused while spelling a name for me, and when the Warner publicist jumped in with the next letters, she politely but firmly waved him off.

"I'm not stupid; I think I can figure the rest of it out for myself, thank you," she told him. "Next time I need help, I will call on you."

"The Love Chronicles" should appeal to the same people who liked "Old Skool Love," as well as those who lapped up the vintage-sounding soul music of Amy Winehouse, even before she became notorious.

The diverse range of material leaves no doubt that Brown welcomes every chance to be thought of in the same company as the A-list divas of R&B. The expansive, virtuoso ballad "One More Chance" could be a song for Mariah Carey. "It's Over" sounds so much like a brassy Beyonce vehicle, I half-expected to hear a cameo rap by Jay-Z.

"Bebe," a catchy patter song that features tight choral vocals a la the Andrews Sisters, sounds like the kind of retro thing Bette Midler was doing on her first album 35 years ago. That may just be a reminder that R&B isn't really wide enough to encompass Brown's taste, which also includes a lot of Joni Mitchell's music (she covered Mitchell's "Help Me" on her debut), and made room on the new disc for Ron Sexsmith (who co-wrote "Sweet Surrender").

"In five years, I see myself touring the world," Brown said, when I asked about her future. "I might have done one or two things on film or television, acting roles. Maybe I'll be writing songs for other people."

Maybe she will at last be that figure on the TV, a figure of fantasy for another generation of little girls.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)