Introduction

Brandy Rayana Norwood (born February 11, 1979), known professionally as Brandy, is an American singer-songwriter, producer, actress, and dancer. In 2009, she introduced her rap alter-ego Bran’Nu.

Born into a musical family in McComb, Mississippi and raised in Carson, California, Norwood first appeared in a supporting role on the short-lived ABC sitcom Thea in 1993. Her engagement led to her own star vehicle, successful UPN sitcom Moesha in 1996, and resulted in roles in the 1998 horror sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and the TV films Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1997) and Double Platinum (1999), two of television’s best rated special programs.^[2]

In 1993, she signed a recording contract with Atlantic, releasing her self-titled debut album a year after. Following a major success with Grammy Award-winning “The Boy Is Mine”, a duet with singer Monica, and her second album Never Say Never in 1998, a series of successful records established her as one of the most successful of the new breed of urban R&B female vocalists to emerge during the mid-to late 1990s. Her latest studio album, Human (2008), was her first effort to be released on the Epic label after a label change in 2005.

The RIAA ranks Norwood as one of the best-selling female artists in American music history, having sold over 8.5 million copies of her five studio albums in the United States and over 30 million records worldwide, to date. Additionally, she has won over 100 awards as a recording artist. In 1999, Billboard ranked Norwood among the top 20 of the top pop artists of the 1990s. Additionally, in 2010, Billboard included Brandy in their top 50 R&B and Hip Hop Artists list of the past 25 years.

Early life and career beginnings

Norwood was born in McComb, Mississippi, the daughter of Willie Norwood, a former gospel singer and choir director, and his wife Sonja Norwood (née Bates), a former district manager for H&R Block. She is the elder sister of entertainer Ray J, as well as a first cousin of rapper Snoop Dogg.

Raised in a Christian home, Norwood started singing through her father’s work as part of the local church choir, performing her first gospel solo at the age of two.In 1983, her parents relocated to Los Angeles, California, where Brandy was schooled at the Hollywood High Performing Arts Center. Norwood’s interest in music and performing increased after becoming a fan of singer Whitney Houston at the age of seven, but at school, she experienced trouble with persuading teachers to send her on auditions as she found no support among the staff. Undaunted, Norwood began entering talent shows by the time she was eleven, and as part of a youth singing group, performed at several public functions. In 1990, her talent led to a binding oral contract with Teaspoon Productions, headed by Chris Stokes and Earl Harris, who obtained her gigs as a backing vocalist for their R&B boy band Immature, and arranged the production of a demo tape. In 1993, amid ongoing negotiations with East West Records, Norwood’s parents organized a recording contract with the Atlantic Recording Corporation after auditioning for the company’s director of A&R, Darryl Williams. To manage her daughter, Norwood’s mother soon resigned from her job,while Norwood herself dropped out of Hollywood High School later and was tutored privately from tenth grade on.

During the early production stages of her debut album, Norwood was selected for a role in the ABC sitcom Thea, portraying the 12-year-old daughter of a single mother played by Thea Vidale.Broadcasted to mediocre ratings, the series ended only 8 months after its premiere, but garnered her a Young Artist Award nomination for Outstanding Youth Ensemble alongside her co-stars.Norwood recalled that she appreciated the cancellation of the show as she was unenthusiastic about acting at the time and the taping caused scheduling conflicts with the recording of her album, stating: “I felt bad for everybody else but me. It was a good thing, because I could do what I had to do, because I wanted to sing.”

1994–1996: Brandy and Moesha

Williams hired producer Keith Crouch and R&B band Somethin’ for the People to work with Norwood, and within eight months, the team crafted her debut album, Brandy.A collection of street-oriented rhythm-and-blues with a hip-hop edge,whose lyrical content embraced her youthful and innocent image in public, Norwood later summed the songs on the album as young and vulnerable, stating: “I didn’t really know a lot — all I wanted to do was basically sing. You can just tell that it’s a person singing from a genuine place, and also a place of basically no experience. I was singing about being attracted to the opposite sex, but I had no experience behind it.” Released in September 1994, the album peaked at number twenty on the U.S. Billboard 200. Critical reaction to Brandy was generally positive, with Allmusic writer Eddie Huffman declaring Brandy “a lower-key Janet Jackson or a more stripped-down Mary J. Blige […] with good songs and crisp production.” Anderson Jones of Entertainment Weekly asserted, “Teen actress Norwood acts her age. A premature effort at best, that seems based on the philosophy ‘If Aaliyah can do it, why can’t I?’.”

Brandy went on to sell over six million units worldwide,and produced three top ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including “I Wanna Be Down” and “Baby,” both of which reached the top of the Hot R&B Singles chart and were certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.”Brokenhearted”, a duet with Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men, became a number-two hit on the charts. The album earned Norwood two Grammy Award nominations for Best New Artist and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance the following year and won her four Soul Train Music Awards, two Billboard Awards, and the New York Children’s Choice Award. In 1995, she finished a two-month stint as the opening act on Boyz II Men’s national tour, and contributed songs to the soundtracks of the films Batman Forever and Waiting to Exhale, with single “Sittin’ Up in My Room” becoming another top two success. In 1996, Norwood also collaborated with Tamia, Chaka Khan, and Gladys Knight on the single “Missing You,” released from the Set It Off soundtrack. The single won her a third Grammy nomination in the Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals category.

In 1996, her short-lived engagement on Thea led to Norwood’s own star vehicle: UPN-produced sitcom Moesha. Appearing alongside Sheryl Lee Ralph and Countess Vaughn, she played the title role of Moesha Mitchell, a Los Angeles girl coping with a new stepmother as well as the pressures and demands of becoming an adult. Originally bought by CBS, the program was first broadcast on UPN during January 1996, and soon became the most watched show broadcast on the television network.While the sitcom managed to increase its audience every new season and spawned a spin-off named The Parkers, the network decided to cancel the show after six seasons on the air, leaving it ending with a cliffhanger for a scrapped seventh season.Norwood was awarded a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Youth Actor/Actress for her performance.

1997–2000: Never Say Never and film career

In 1997, Norwood was hand-picked by executive producer Whitney Houston to play the title character in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s television version of Cinderella featuring a multi-cultural cast that also included Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg, and Houston. The two-hour Wonderful World of Disney special garnered an estimated 60 million viewers, giving the network its highest ratings in the time period in 16 years, and won an Emmy Award the following year.

Beginning producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins was consulted to contribute to Norwood’s second album Never Say Never, which was released in June 1998. Brandy co-wrote and produced six songs on the album which yielded her first number-one rated song on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, “The Boy Is Mine”, a duet with singer Monica that has become the most successful song by a female duo in music history. Exploiting the media’s presumption of a rivalry between the two young singers, the song was one of the most successful records in United States of all time, spending record-breaking thirteen weeks on top of the Billboard charts, and eventually garnered the pair a Grammy Award for “Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal”. The album’s success was equally widespread, and after extensive radio play of the single overseas, the label released it globally during the summer. Never Say Never eventually became Brandy’s biggest-selling album, selling over sixteen million copies worldwide; and critics rated the album highly, with Allmusic`s Stephen Thomas Erlewine praising Brandy and her team for wisely finding “a middle ground between Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige — it’s adult contemporary with a slight streetwise edge”. Altogether the album spawned seven airplay and CD singles respectively, including Norwood’s second number-one song, the Diane Warren-penned “Have You Ever?”.

After backing out of a role in F. Gary Gray’s 1996 drama Set It Off, Norwood made her big screen debut after winning the supporting role of sassy Karla Wilson in the franchise-flick I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. The movie outperformed the original with a total of $16.5 million at its opening weekend but critical reaction towards the film was largely disappointing, with film review site Rotten Tomatoes calculating a poor rating of 7% based on 46 reviews. Norwood, however, earned positive reviews for her “bouncy” performance, which garnered her both a Blockbuster Entertainment Award and an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Breakthrough Female Performance respectively. In 1999, she co-starred with Diana Ross in the telefilm drama Double Platinum about an intense, strained relationship between a mother and daughter.Shot in only twenty days in New York City, both Norwood and Ross served as executive producers of the movie which features original songs from their respective albums Never Say Never (1998) and Every Day Is a New Day (1999) as well as previously unreleased duets.

2001–2004: Full Moon and Afrodisiac

After a lengthy hiatus that saw the end of the Moesha sitcom, and a flurry of tabloid headlines discussing her long-term battle with dehydration, Norwood returned to music in 2001 when she and brother Ray-J were asked to record a cover version of Phil Collins’ 1980s hit “Another Day in Paradise” for the tribute album Urban Renewal: A Tribute to Phil Collins. Released as the album first single in Europe and Oceania, the song became an instant international success overseas, scoring top ten entries on the majority of all charts it appeared on.

Full Moon, Norwood’s third studio album, was released in February 2002. It once again comprised a row of R&B and pop-oriented songs with adult contemporary, many of them co-created with Jerkins, Warryn Campbell and Mike City. While its lead single “What About Us?” became a worldwide top ten hit, the album’s title track failed to chart or sell noticeably outside the United States and the United Kingdom, where it managed to enter the Top 20 of charts. Media reception was generally lukewarm, with Rolling Stone describing the album as “frantic, faceless, fake-sexy R&B.” Within the coming year, Norwood and Robert “Big Bert” Smith began writing and producing for other artists such as Toni Braxton, Kelly Rowland, and Kiley Dean.Norwood’s foray in reality television started in 2002 with the MTV series Diary Presents Brandy: Special Delivery; the show documented the final months of Norwood’s pregnancy with her daughter Sy’rai.

Returning from yet another hiatus, Brandy’s fourth album Afrodisiac was released on June 29, 2004 in North America, amidst the well-publicized termination of her short-lived business relationship with entertainment manager Benny Medina. Norwood ended her contract with his Los Angeles-based Handprint Entertainment after less than a year of representation following controversies surrounding Medina’s handling of the lead single “Talk About Our Love”, and failed negotiations of a purported co-headlining tour with R&B singer Usher. Upon parting Norwood admitted her switch to Medina made her appreciate what she had with her mother, stating that “it was such a drastic change that it didn’t work for me. Nobody out there can match her passion for me.” Despite the negative publicity, Afrodisiac became Brandy’s most critically acclaimed album to date, with some highlighting the “more consistently mature and challenging” effect of Timbaland on Brandy’s music, and others calling it “listenable and emotionally resonant,” comparing it to “Janet Jackson at her best”. Norwood described the CD as her most mature and versatile effort by then: “I just wanted to sing my heart out and connect with people. I wasn’t old enough or mature enough before to get into people’s hearts. Now I am.”Nevertheless Afrodisiac became a moderate seller: While the album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, selling only 416,000 copies to date, it generally failed to chart or sell noticeably outside the United States. “Talk About Our Love” reached number six in the United Kingdom but later singles failed to score successfully on the popular music charts.

2005–2009: America’s Got Talent and Human

After eleven years with the company Norwood asked for and received an unconditional release from Atlantic Records in the end of 2004, citing her wish to “to move on” as the main reason for her decision.Completing her contract with the label, a compilation album compiling her first four studio albums with Atlantic, entitled The Best of Brandy, was released in March 2005. Released without any promotional single, it reached the top 30 in Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., where the collection was appreciated by contemporary critics who noted the creativity of Norwood’s back-catalogue.Andy Kellman of Allmusic expressed: “This set, unlike so many other anthologies from her contemporaries, hardly confirms dwindling creativity or popularity.”Thereupon she reportedly started shopping for a new record deal under Knockout Entertainment, her brother’s vanity label.

In June 2006, Norwood was cast as one of three talent judges on the first season of America’s Got Talent, an amateur talent contest on NBC with executive producer Simon Cowell and host Regis Philbin. The broadcast was one of the most-watched programs of the summer, and concluded on August 17, 2006 with the win of 11-year-old singer Bianca Ryan. Norwood was originally scheduled to return for a second season of the America’s Got Talent in summer 2007, but decided eventually not to do so, feeling that “she couldn’t give the new season the attention and commitment it deserved,” following the fatal 2006 car accident, in which she was involved. She was eventually replaced by reality TV star Sharon Osbourne.

Norwood’s fifth studio album Human was released in December 2008, involving production by Toby Gad, Brian Kennedy, and RedOne.Distributed by Koch Records and Sony Music, the album marked Brandy’s debut on the Epic Records label, and her reunion with long-time contributor and mentor Rodney Jerkins, who wrote and executive produced most of the album. Generally well-received by critics, Human debuted at number fifteen on the U.S. Billboard 200 with opening week sales of 73,000 copies. With a domestic sales total of 196,000 copies, it widely failed to revive the success of its predecessors and became the singer’s lowest-selling effort to date. While leading single “Right Here (Departed)” scored Brandy her biggest chart success since 2002’s “Full Moon”, the album failed to impact elsewhere, resulting into lackluster sales in general and the end of her contract with the label, following the appointment of Amanda Ghost at Epic Records and her split with rapper Jay-Z’s Roc Nation management. In December 2009, she officially introduced her rapping alter-ego Bran’Nu with two credits on Timbaland’s album Timbaland Presents Shock Value 2, and was cast in the pilot episode for the ABC series This Little Piggy, also starring Jeff Davis, Rebecca Cheskoff and Kevin Rahm, which was recast the following year.

2010–present: A Family Business and sixth studio album

In 2010, Norwood and her brother Ray J premiered the VH1 reality series Brandy and Ray J: A Family Business along with their parents. The show debuted in April 2010 and chronicled the backstage happenings of both siblings, while taking a bigger role in their family’s management and production company, R&B Productions. The show concluded after eleven episodes and was renewed for a second season, which began broadcasting in fall 2010. A compilation album with previously unreleased content from the entire cast, entitled A Family Business, was released on the Time–Life imprint Saguaro Road Records on June 21, 2011, its first single being “Talk To Me.”

Norwood appeared as a contestant on season 11 of Dancing with the Stars and was partnered with Maksim Chmerkovskiy. She ultimately placed only fourth in the competition, which was a shock to the judges, viewers, studio audience, and other contestants that considered her one of the show’s frontrunners throughout her entire competition.

After artistic experimentation with rap via Timbaland,critical praise toward her 2010 string of a cappella performances of soul music classics, and venturing into reality television with her family, Norwood revealed her intentions to begin working heavily on her sixth studio album. According to Norwood, the album will see a return to her authentic R&B sound, but with a “progressive” edge. Hip-Hop producer Bangladesh has been commissioned to helm the bulk of the album, while Norwood has expressed her intent to connect with a variety of musicians,including producer Hit-Boy, Tha Bizness, Danja, production duo Kadis & Sean,  Jim Beanz, WyldCard,  newcomers Kevin McCall,D.C. native Rich Harrison, Rico Love,production collectives The Woodworks and The Runners, singers Sean Garrett,Chris Brown and Frank Ocean,and songwriters Ester Dean and Stacey Barthee. In August 2011, it was confirmed that Norwood signed a joint record deal with RCA Records and producer Breyon Prescott’s Chameleon Records and will release her sixth studio album in early 2012. In addition, it was announced that Norwood is planning to record of a joint album with brother Ray J, tentatively titled R&B.

In November 2011, it was announced, that Norwood has joined the cast of Tyler Perry’s The Marriage Counselor, expected to be released in 2012.

Source : Wikipedia