NEW YORK--Without adversity, a diva is just a singer.It’s the back story, the tale of struggle and tenacity, that draws audiences to read more than musicianship into her performances.
The singer touches on something personal so the listener can feel like a witness, a confidant, a judge, a voyeur or perhaps all at once.
Seven years after her last album of pop songs, two years after her divorce, Whitney Houston re-emerges with full diva qualifications on “I Look to You,” released a few days ago.
Most of its revelations aren’t verbal. They’re in the husky, vehement sound of her voice.
Miss Houston started her career as a goody-two-shoes with a glorious vocal instrument.
On her 1985 debut album, she sang about innocence, love, loyalty and dignity as her voice catapulted through purrs and rasps, pop brightness and soul-gospel flourishes.
(That album’s cover showed her in a white, draped dress, with one shoulder bared; so does the cover of “I Look to You.”)
She might have become her generation’s defining soul singer in an era not dominated by the rough and tumble of hip-hop.
Then came her turbulent marriage to and divorce from Bobby Brown (with a reality-television show flaunting its tensions), shaky public performances like her skin-and-bones appearance at a 2001 Michael Jackson tribute, her admitted drug use and her long absence from pop after her 2002 album, “Just Whitney.”
(She released a Christmas album, “One Wish,” in 2003.)
The singer hasn’t been forgotten.
As she did in 2002--when she told Diane Sawyer on “Primetime” that she had used alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and pills with a terse “at times”--Miss Houston will promote her new album with a television interview that should be a ratings bonanza: the season opener of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on Sept. 14.
“Just Whitney” was a bristling, defensive album.
It lashed out at media coverage “trying to dirty up Whitney Houston’s name” and adamantly touted her marriage and her man.
“I Look to You,” with Miss Houston’s longtime mentor Clive Davis as her co-producer, is more subdued, canny and cautious.
She still sings about the power of love, though it’s not always benign anymore. The album is split between songs that hint at her travails and songs that try to ignore them, like the lightweight, Motown-tinged first single, “Million Dollar Bill,” written and produced by Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz.
The title song, written by R. Kelly, harks back to Miss Houston’s heyday, only to reveal how much she has changed.
Like “I Will Always Love You,” the Dolly Parton song that became Miss Houston’s signature hit in 1992, “I Look to You” is a gospel-rooted ballad that builds up to a vow of devotion before humbly tapering off.
In 1992, she sounded tearful but clear and airborne, making triumphant octave-wide upward leaps. “I Look to You” is a prayer, a desperate appeal to faith:
“After all my strength is gone, in you I can be strong.” Now her voice is thicker and lower, and her improvisatory phrases are shorter. They curve downward as if tugged by gravity, making her approachable, even sympathetic.
Miss Houston’s back story also infuses the upbeat, electronic “Nothin’ but Love,” which promises love to “even the ones who tried to break me,” and a hymnlike Diane Warren song, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength,” which aims to become an inspirational diva standard:
“I crashed down and I tumbled, but I did not crumble/I got through all the pain.” The album’s final song, also by R. Kelly, is “Salute,” a sparsely arranged minor-key breakup song that jeers, “You say I’ll never do better/Yeah, right, whatever.”
For danceable tracks, the album draws on other current hit makers, including Fernando Garibay, Stargate and Nathaniel Hills (a. k. a., Danja).
And Miss Houston collaborates with the producer and singer, Akon, on midtempo songs promising reconciliation--with a man, but also, perhaps, with the audience that now listens to Beyonce, Keyshia Cole, Rihanna and Ledisi.
At times, in the wistfully insinuating “Like I Never Left,” her voice is nearly indistinguishable from Akon’s computer-tuned croon.
She’s tentatively climbing back into the pop machinery, no longer invincible but showing a diva’s determination.
