The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook

Author:John Seabrook [Seabrook, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-10-05T05:00:00+00:00

FOR CHRISTMAS OF 2003, Rogers and his Bajan wife, Jackie, went to Barbados for the holidays, as had been their custom for years, to visit family and friends. They stayed in a villa at the Accra Beach Hotel.

As often happened when they went to Barbados, Rogers heard about some singers. “There’s always someone who wants to audition, because people know we’re writers and producers,” he says. “I’ll be down at the beach and somebody will come up to me and start singing—it’s like that.”

As it turned out, a good friend of Jackie’s had a fifteen-year-old daughter named Kleanna Browne, who was in a girl group called Contrast with two other teenagers, Jose Blackman and Robyn Fenty. All three were students at the Combermere School, a well-known secondary school for striving West Indian parents. The group had never actually performed in public, but they had worked up a version of “Emotion,” Destiny’s Child’s cover of the Bee Gees song; and “Killing Me Softly,” the Lauryn Hill version; and “Dangerously in Love,” Beyoncé’s song. The friend said they sounded really good.

Rogers arranged to meet the girls at the hotel. They were late, because one of them, the Fenty girl, took so long changing out of her school uniform and fixing her hair and makeup. “The others were saying, ‘Where the hell is she?’ ” Rogers recalls.

“And then she walked in,” Rogers remembers, “and I said to myself, ‘If that girl can sing, then—holy shit! Because she had such a presence! Her makeup was perfect, and she had these capri pants and matching sneakers, with her green eyes and her long supermodel neck.” But of course, Rogers immediately thought, “She probably can’t sing, because usually it’s the pretty one who can’t.”

But Fenty could. Rogers had the three of them sing together, and each sing separately.

“And the whole time I’m thinking, ‘OK I have to have a follow-up meeting with this one.’ ”

The following day, Fenty, her mother, and her mom’s boyfriend came back to Rogers’s villa. The girl was quiet, listening intently. Rogers wanted to hear her voice again, just to be sure, so he taught her the song he had written for Kelly Clarkson, “The Trouble with Love Is.”

“I’d sing a line,” he says, “and she’d sing it back to me, and I was going, ‘I think this girl’s got something.’ She was rough around the edges, but had a very distinctive sound to her voice. She also had a charming girl-next-door quality, Rogers thought.

He called Carl.

Sturken: “When Evan called me from Barbados the first thing he said was, ‘I know we said no more artists. . . .’ ”

Rogers: “But man, this girl is special.”

Sturken: “Go for it.”

Rogers explained to Robyn and her mother that he’d like to bring her to the New York area, to work in their studio in Bronxville, which was called the Loft, located next to the Metro North train station. She would live with Evan and Jackie in their home in Stamford, Connecticut.

“Her mom was hilarious because she was so low-key about her,” Rogers recalls.

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