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Anita Baker makes comeback with world tour, hit album.
by Clarence Waldron, Mar. 3, 1995
Jet
Baker has returned from a four-year hiatus with a double-platinumalbum 'Rhythm of Love' and a tour that is selling out in everyconcert venue. She has recovered her sultry look after having two sonsand has a more mature, soulful singing style.
Anita Baker says she never thought her comeback would be this sweet.
The superstar singer is back on top after a four-year absence with a sizzling world tour which is selling out in every city. She's also riding high on the charts with a double platinum album, Rhythm of Love.
Her "Rhythm of Love Tour" is her first in four years and is winning rave reviews. "It's a nice little pat on the back," the singer tells Jet during a telephone interview after a four-night engagement in Chicago. "It's been four years. This is pretty phenomenal if I do ring my own bell.
This is a pretty much unheard of in the music business. I figured we'd come back to maybe half of what's going on, but it's like people just kind of reached out and gave us a real big hug." The amazing thing about Anita Baker is that she is so much more than she was four years ago. She sings these days with a certain freedom and a soulfulness of a singer who has grown in the last four years.
She surprises audiences with a hilarious impersonation of the Supremes as well as sexy Tina Turner. Anita Baker does Tina Turner? It's hard to believe but her impersonation is so on target it's almost worth the price of admission. Wearing one of Tina's trademark wigs from the '60s and a tight mini dress, she struts her stuff as she sings Proud Mary.
"I had to find something to give me an emotional break, to give the audience an emotional break. Let them laugh a little bit. And I figured I had nothing to lose. I didn't think there would be anybody out there in the audience anyway," she laughs.
Anita and her husband, real estate developer Walter Bridgforth, had two sons during her hiatus - first born Walter is now 2 years old and Edward is 10 months old.
After having her sons 15 months apart she was determined to lose weight. She has slimmed down to a sexy trim size. "You cannot do Tina Turner if the body is wrong," she laughs.
"With each baby I gained 40 pounds" she reveals. "So with Walter I was 167 pounds and I'm down now to 125. My pre-Walter weight was 117 so I've got a few pounds to go yet."
She admits that losing weight is very difficult, "especially pregnancy weight." She notes, "I started exercising 40 days after each of my pregnancies and that's very tough because I had Caesarean sections both times."
She works out every day and watches what she eats. "I'm not dieting, I'm just eating low fat, high protein. I don't eat any starches, no flour, and no cheese."
Her jazz-flavored album includes her rendition of My Funny Valentine and Dionne Warwick's The Look of Love. Another gem is Plenty of Room, a touching tune she wrote for her children and her mother.
"After I recorded it and after I heard it a couple of times I realized that not only was this something that I was saying to my children, it was something that I wanted to hear my mother say to me."
The superstar singer reveals that she was abandoned by her mother when she was about two years old in Detroit. "It's so hard," she sighs. "It's just so hard," she says again as she tries to explain her troubled childhood. Baker's mother was 16 years old when she gave birth to her. "Somehow to this day, I don't know how, but a gentleman that she was seeing took me to his parents to babysit while they went out on a date. That date ended up lasting a couple of weeks. When she came back to get me from this gentleman's mother, the woman said, `You left your baby for two weeks. I'm not giving you this baby back. You don't want this baby.'"
She reveals that her mother's father later came to these people and said, "Please, keep my grandbaby, because we don't have no business with her.'"
The singer says today, "And that was the best thing that they could have done for me."
The confident singer is struggling to come to terms with her past and develop a relationship with her mother. She did not know that the people were not her biological parents until they died when she was 12 years old. She was then raised by the couple's daughter who began to tell her life story to her. "She started telling me these things, saying `it's time for you to know.' And this pretty lady started coming around who said she was my mother. She never stayed very long. She had problems of her own that I'm starting to see. We haven't come full circle but we're talking. As a mother, I'm a little more forgiving these days. She was 16 and I'm 37 and I got my hands full."
The sensitive singer gives advice to today's youth about how to overcome obstacles and lead responsible lives. "Learn to be independent. You must learn to take care of yourself. After a certain point there is not going to be no one to take care of you. You have to say to yourself, `there's nobody to take care of me, there's no mother, there's no government, there's no easy money out here. I've got to learn to take care of me.'"