Terence Trent D’Arby’s 1987 debut album sold a million copies in three days. The music press went mad for him. Where was there to go but down?

BY KATE MOSSMAN


Imagine this. You’re 25 years old and your debut album of perfectly polished soul-rock-pop-funk sells one million copies in the first three days of release. It delivers three Top Ten hits, winning you numerous platinum gongs and a Grammy Award, and parachutes you right into the arena of the 1980s megastars you idolize. You drive the music press into a frenzy: they say you combine the voice of Sam Cooke and the moves of James Brown with the louche beauty of Jimi Hendrix. You are mentored by Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and Pete Townshend; you spend hours on the phone with Prince and sing on Brian Wilson albums. You even meet your hero Muhammad Ali, whose attitude you’ve ingested, saying: “Tell people long enough and loud enough you’re the greatest and eventually they’ll believe you.” In case anyone is in any doubt about just how important you are, you draw a parallel between your destiny and that of Martin Luther King.


Early one morning, at the end of one of your six-hour, joss-stick-infused overnight interviews, a journalist asks you what happens if your follow-up album isn’t as successful as your first. For once, you are lost for words.“That’s like asking me what I would do if my dick fell off . . .”


The man who slips into the hotel lobby in Milan looks like a fashion district local – one scarf over his dreadlocks, another curled round his neck – but there’s an inward energy about him, like one of those fragile celebrities who doesn’t want to be noticed but cannot help it: it’s all there in the cut of the trousers and size of the blue-bottle shades.


I’ve been given instructions for my meeting with Sananda Maitreya. 1. Please don’t mention the name “Terence Trent D’Arby”, as it is painful for him. 2. Please don’t make any comparisons with Prince regarding his name change, which occurred in 1995 after a series of dreams. 3. Please don’t ask him things like, “What songs do you think would make a good single from your new album, Rise of the Zugebrian Time Lords?”


The hotel is next to Milan’s cathedral, the Duomo, where Maitreya (formerly Darby) proposed to his Italian wife, the architect and former television presenter Francesca Francone, some years ago during a Catholic Mass. We go to the sixth floor and find that nothing is quite right up there: the room is too hot; he orders a whiskey and Coke and can’t find a bottle opener; we find one and it doesn’t work. Finally, he takes a long, reassuring slug and declares, “I feel like I’m going on a date when I’ve been married 25 years. I don’t know how to do this any more.”


He says softly: “One thing about Italians is you can’t let them in your head. They’re inquisitive. The English and Germans are a dog tribe; the Italians are cats. They’re very helpful, but it’s in their own rhythm, their own way, and it can drive you crazy.”


It’s an odd start to an interview, but even as a young man Terence Trent D’Arby liked to discourse on a broad range of subjects. An American who rejected his homeland, D’Arby was living in Britain through what he refers to today as “the Thatcher Revolution”; he was a strange, exotic bird, dropped down in the streets of London, cruising around on a motorbike in the video for his hit song “Sign Your Name” and appearing frequently on the Channel 4 show The Tube (he had a year-long affair with its host, Paula Yates). Today, his accent is New York, but back then it was English; the apostrophe he adopted was a mark of his rapid self-elevation. He was all things to all people, and once began a Q Magazine interview deconstructing the defeat of Neil Kinnock in the 1987 election.


“Oh my God, I can’t believe you thought I was a socialist,” he says now. “I was nothing more than an opportunist. Any socialist tendencies I may have had were cured when I got my first tax bill. All artists are socialists until they see another artist with a bigger house than theirs.”


D’Arby had cut his teeth in a German funk band while stationed in Hamburg with Elvis Presley’s old regiment; and like that other army boy, Hendrix, he came to fame in a London that wanted his music more than the country he came from. The producer Martyn Ware – a founder member of Heaven 17 and the Human League – worked with him on his debut LP, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby, which also included the hit songs “Wishing Well” and “If You Let Me Stay”. He describes D’Arby as “a box of fireworks going off in every direction. I have never met anyone so driven.” Ware would arrive at the studio in the morning and find D’Arby already sitting there in the dark, analyzing live recordings of Sam Cooke:“It was like he was studying at university to be a classic soul singer.”


Out in the world, his preternatural confidence was magnetic. “He was the world’s most beautiful man,” Ware says. “I used to walk around Soho with him and women would literally stop and stare – he looked like a god because he’s got that boxer’s body, and he was a bit androgynous, too. Even the men fancied him.” (D’Arby once said he had sex more often than he washed his hair.)


To the music press, he posed a dilemma. As a pop star he was so perfect, Charles Shaar Murray wrote in 1988, he was “like something invented by three rock critics on the ’phone”. They called him two things: a genius, and a wanker. To make things more confusing, the very same people calling him a genius were the people calling him a wanker. Worse still, D’Arby worshipped these people. While living in Germany he had devoured the NME and Melody Maker. “I had an intellectual crush on Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Julie,” he says today – “Julie Burchill. But she is so reactionary now.” He knew that British rock hacks thought American artists were boring to interview so he set out to be different.


***


Terence Trent D’Arby’s follow-up album, 1989’s Neither Fish Nor Flesh, was not the triumph he had predicted. It was an experimental psych-soul project featuring tribal drums, surf rock guitar and cosmic libretto: “To an outside world I will not be defined!” Early in its inception, D’Arby’s old team received a Dear John letter saying that he felt like this was his moment: he wanted to produce, master and engineer the project himself. He is credited as playing, among other things, kazoo, saxophone, sitar and timpani on the record. He invited Martyn Ware to hear the album when it was finished (in another darkened studio session, which D’Arby himself did not attend).“And although I thought it was very brave,” Ware tells me, “I just couldn’t hear the singles.” The album stiffed – spectacularly, for its time – selling just 300,000 copies (the debut sold over nine million). It brought about a downfall straight out of a Greek tragedy. In music lore, its creator disappeared from the face of the earth on 23 October 1989, the moment the record was released. The truth is slightly different: he soldiered on valiantly for a few years, did a naked cover shoot for Q in 1993 and his third album, Symphony or Damn, produced four top 20 singles in the UK, among them “Delicate” and “Let Her Down Easy”. But all this is irrelevant, because no one believes that Terence Trent D’Arby died in 1989 more than Terence Trent D’Arby himself.


“It felt like I was going to join the 27 Club,” he says quietly, referring to the rock’n’roll heaven inhabited by Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others who died at that unfortunate age. “And psychologically I did, because that is exactly the age I was when I was killed.”


His speech has an automatic quality and there is very little eye contact. You don’t interact with him, you lob questions over the top of what he’s saying and hope that he might catch them.


“The bottom line is, we’re all pretty much sleepwalking,” he says.“The most difficult thing artists have to deal with is the crushing difference between what they know they can do with their dream being supported, and the reality they have to navigate with the business.”


Over the years he has blamed his former record company, Sony, for the failure of his career, saying it refused to promote Neither Fish Nor Flesh. He drew parallels with George Michael, who fought a long battle with Sony in the same era, claiming it wished to keep him in a situation of “creative slavery” when he wanted to branch out with his sound. But George Michael is still with us. I’m curious to know whether, with hindsight and a change of identity, Sananda Maitreya finds that his feelings about the causes of his career failure have changed. “The good news is, most record company people are motivated by the same reason most of us are: greed,” he says. “So, no, when you look back at it, it didn’t make much sense for management not to want my second record to succeed.”


The alternative reasons he gives are a surprise. “I came around at a time when myself, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna and George Michael, we were considered kind of dangerous,” he says. “To the system, to the establishment, you become a rival politician.”


The establishment’s urge to end his career was so great, he says, that there were debates about him in the House of Lords. His real nemesis was not the Thatcher administration, but “the 800lb gorilla in the room, Michael, Master Jackson”, who saw him as a threat and, having bought up the Beatles catalogue in 1985, held “more power than the Pope” within the industry.


Every few minutes in our long conversation, Maitreya cuts away from dark realms of government plots and talks more candidly about the business.“It’s only a matter of time before a cheaper model of you comes along,” he explains. “Record companies say, ‘Hey, if you like this asshole, you’re going to like this asshole – plus we’re making a higher margin on this asshole.’ They don’t tell you that while you’re getting smarter, commanding more for yourself, you’re putting an egg-timer on your career.”


As a young man he once observed, “This industry doesn't like too many black faces around at one time. If someone puts me on the cover of a magazine, they ain’t going to be putting another black face on the cover for a while because it wouldn’t make commercial sense and that’s the way of the world.” Already selling millions to a white yuppie audience, D’Arby could afford to be philosophical about genre pigeonholing but the digs at his rivals abounded. He claimed that black artists before him – Lionel Richie, Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson – had emasculated themselves to get into the charts. He would be Jerry Lee Lewis, he once declared, rather wonderfully: “the embodiment of the white man gone bad”.


Today he does not name the new, cheaper-to-run assholes who came up when the industry had “successfully killed my primary image”, so I draw his attention to a poem on his website, from 2002.


Read More: http://www.newstatesman.c...ent-d-arby

In the mid 80s when TTD was stationed here in Germany, my Dad once got him and his band to play a concert in a little town in the middle of nowwhere not far from where I live today....would have wished to be around back then

I adore his albums he released as TTD, but it seems he really fell off the wagon those last few years...and accusing the british government and MJ of all people of plotting against him...he can't really be serious about this stuff, can he?!?!?

All musicians are nuts. The music fucks with their heads. Van Gogh cut off his fucking ear!

He had to play the race card. Prince is still around and he's more nuts.

Dark skinned rappers are doing pretty well. Race aint the problem with him. His music is just too odd for the masses, why we like it.

I love me some ttd! But dude kind of killed himself Neither fish Nor Flesh is a fucking great album! but what was gonna be the big single? come on bruh To know someone softly could have been somewhat big. But the album was not gonna hve big hits either way. And his ego was bigger than kanyes after only ONE album! at least yeezy talked shit after a few albums in or so.

Besides i like his 90s albums best

Jay Leno would have him on in the day, didn't help sell his albums.

2freaky4church1 said:

Jay Leno would have him on in the day, didn't help sell his albums.

I remember that performance, he killed it, pitch perfect vocals, doing the splits...basically setting the stage on fire.

But sadly, even back in 2003, you couldnt sell albums on talent alone.

Maybe he should team back up with INXS, now that was a match made in heaven !

[Edited 10/11/15 13:57pm]

Dude is crazy and brilliant in this wild world of ours! May he continue with a long and successful other-life as Sananda Maitreya.

he says a few weird things in the interview, but he also talks quite a bit of sense, or so it seems to me

Wow. Just cause he couldn't follow up Introducing the Hardline with a successful album, it's MJ's fault. If MJ was the Darth Vader at Sony Music you'd think he'd have done more to ruin George Micheal around 1987.

IstenSzek said:

he says a few weird things in the interview, but he also talks quite a bit of sense, or so it seems to me

His interview did not come off as "crazy" to me either...He called out people he needed to call out..Even his name change is not "crazy"...He's not the first artist to do it..His networth is @ $2-Million...He should get his own Solo-segment during the 2016 BET Awards....

peppeken said:

Terr- i- fic!

I always thought of him as a bad joke/novelty act, and he's clearly not the sharpest tool in the box either.

[Edited 10/12/15 9:41am]

mynameisnotsusan said:

This shoulda been a hit - videos amazing but radio just wasn't playing him at this point

My favorite song by him and this one from the same album:

He has some weird obsession with mj Instead of complaining all the time about the past, why doesn't he just put out another album or tour?

He's been doing that on a very small scale.

mjscarousal said:

He has some weird obsession with mj Instead of complaining all the time about the past, why doesn't he just put out another album or tour?

Wow. That article cut to the core and left me kind of sad for him. I've been a fan sine 1987, and I love all of his TTD albums for at least a song or two if not the entire thing. I'm getting more of his Sananda albums but they are much more demo-like, but still great and brilliant in their own way.

I didn't realize that he was legitamitely dealing with some psyche issues. I thought he was just being a crazy hippie.

Lenny Kravitz and George Michael, I love them, but they were never better at Prince or MJ at anything. Neither was Ginuwine, Eric Benet, Bobby Brown, Giorgio, Usher or anyone else. But TTD was different. He writes lyrics with a sophistication Prince and MJ can only dream of. And vocally, he can go pound for pound with just about anyone and take you places neither of those guys can. I've been listening to his last 3 TTD albums this week, and I'm more blown away and amazed by him today than I was even at the time. We talk about the next MJ or the next Prince, but when will we ever see another TTD? Soul music has never seen anyone else, dealing from the place he was operating from. Only Prince and MJ are on that guy's level, and even then it's hard to say they have anything on his artistry.

^ But why does he always shade them? He seems to be jealous of their success.

funksterr said:

Wow. That article cut to the core and left me kind of sad for him. I've been a fan sine 1987, and I love all of his TTD albums for at least a song or two if not the entire thing. I'm getting more of his Sananda albums but they are much more demo-like, but still great and brilliant in their own way.

I didn't realize that he was legitamitely dealing with some psyche issues. I thought he was just being a crazy hippie.

Lenny Kravitz and George Michael, I love them, but they were never better at Prince or MJ at anything. Neither was Ginuwine, Eric Benet, Bobby Brown, Giorgio, Usher or anyone else. But TTD was different. He writes lyrics with a sophistication Prince and MJ can only dream of. And vocally, he can go pound for pound with just about anyone and take you places neither of those guys can. I've been listening to his last 3 TTD albums this week, and I'm more blown away and amazed by him today than I was even at the time. We talk about the next MJ or the next Prince, but when will we ever see another TTD? Soul music has never seen anyone else, dealing from the place he was operating from. Only Prince and MJ are on that guy's level, and even then it's hard to say they have anything on his artistry.

He was killed at 27 or committed suicide?

There could be some truth to his MJ theory but after his debiut album he didn't deliver the hits for radio.

And TTD/Sananda has none of the stage presence that Prince has or MJ had.

-

I never bought into his boisterous comments being part of his downfall because controversy sells.

He was simply outdone or outsmarted by other artists at the time.

I have all of Sananda's work (even the obscure Christmas When You Are Near song only available @ Amazon) but none of his output hits as hard as TTD's.

Sananda takes more chances but it's been a much more casual approach.

He good... but he's like TTD's cousin.

mjscarousal said:

^ But why does he always shade them? He seems to be jealous of their success.

As he said in the article: This industry doesn't like too many black faces around at one time. It's probably more true than not for the era.

Plus T never got proper credit for his own talents and accomplishments. Vibrator was supposed to be his 'pop' album for the masses but it didn't really fit well into any genres or trends, or click with audiences like Thriller or Purple Rain. As fantastic an album as Vibrator is, it's too complex for it's own good and I just can't see 'average joe', who was probably turning to R Kelly for his soul-music fix at the time, liking it. That's TTD's biggest fault... he was just TOO damn smart, too out-of-pocket, to be an easy sell. He had a down-home voice but an uptown attitude and worldview. Who is his audience, then? Hard to say. So while he had that megastar talent, it was never going to last for him, at a 'pop phenomenon scale like it did for MJ and Prince. The things he does better than them are also the things that limit him to a smaller level of success. Yeah, he might be jealous the moe I think of it, but I would be too.

As for MJ, he was legitimately threatened by Sony's involvement with TTD. They were on the same label, which means they are competing for the same resources. Two soul singers, but one is light-skinned bi-racial, younger, and more dialed in to European trends. The fact is that MJ, did tell people not to work with TTD. I can't blame MJ one bit for worrying that TTD was a threat to his throne and might put it all together and become the next global phenomenon. Now if TTD was white, it might have been a whole different story. Like Smokey saying the other day 'Justin Bieber PLEASE cover all my songs!'.

When would MJ have had time to sabatage all these careers between touring, recording music, writing songs, traveling around the world, conducting interviews, appearances, charity work, etc. If MJ had all this power as some you think why didn't he win any grammy's for BAD? Surely if he had the power to sabatage all these careers, he would surely have the power to sabatage ballets to get grammys. I would argue that he was powerful because he was viewed as a threat because of the things he was trying to influence through his music but as we can see he didn't have that much control behind the scenes as we can see with how things transpired in his life. Its easy to blame MJ for mostly anything because he is the biggest star in the world but he is the biggest star in the world because everyone geniunely loved him not because he sabataged careers.

funksterr said:

mjscarousal said:

^ But why does he always shade them? He seems to be jealous of their success.

As he said in the article: This industry doesn't like too many black faces around at one time. It's probably more true than not for the era.

Plus T never got proper credit for his own talents and accomplishments. Vibrator was supposed to be his 'pop' album for the masses but it didn't really fit well into any genres or trends, or click with audiences like Thriller or Purple Rain. As fantastic an album as Vibrator is, it's too complex for it's own good and I just can't see 'average joe', who was probably turning to R Kelly for his soul-music fix at the time, liking it. That's TTD's biggest fault... he was just TOO damn smart, too out-of-pocket, to be an easy sell. He had a down-home voice but an uptown attitude and worldview. Who is his audience, then? Hard to say. So while he had that megastar talent, it was never going to last for him, at a 'pop phenomenon scale like it did for MJ and Prince. The things he does better than them are also the things that limit him to a smaller level of success. Yeah, he might be jealous the moe I think of it, but I would be too.

As for MJ, he was legitimately threatened by Sony's involvement with TTD. They were on the same label, which means they are competing for the same resources. Two soul singers, but one is light-skinned bi-racial, younger, and more dialed in to European trends. The fact is that MJ, did tell people not to work with TTD. I can't blame MJ one bit for worrying that TTD was a threat to his throne and might put it all together and become the next global phenomenon. Now if TTD was white, it might have been a whole different story. Like Smokey saying the other day 'Justin Bieber PLEASE cover all my songs!'.

vibrator is good though, damn. i find myself going back to it quite often even after all this time.
i remember back then it was the perfect album to bridge those last few months before we finally
got the gold experience. it actually made me forget i was waiting for the gold experience, that's
how good i thought it was.

but then i always loved ttd's over the top semi-intellectual look-at-me-i'm-a-half-god lyrics
i almost wet myself when i first heard "turn the page" but i can imagine that a lot of people just
thought 'what/the/fck?" and hit skip.

the disconnect with him, for me personally, came after wildcard, which i think is a great album,
in most of it's incarnations. then there were some online songs, most of which i loved as well, in
particular "paradise postponed" and "amoeba".

but then he just got onto some other level and i tried hard but never managed to connect to the
music he made from that point on. seriously some of these 24 song albums he's released since
then, i like 1 song. 1 (!). and i went back again and again because i simply refused to believe it
was the music, i just kept thinking 'i must have missed something'.

to me those songs all sound the same, again and again.

funksterr said:

mjscarousal said:

^ But why does he always shade them? He seems to be jealous of their success.

As he said in the article: This industry doesn't like too many black faces around at one time. It's probably more true than not for the era.

Plus T never got proper credit for his own talents and accomplishments. Vibrator was supposed to be his 'pop' album for the masses but it didn't really fit well into any genres or trends, or click with audiences like Thriller or Purple Rain. As fantastic an album as Vibrator is, it's too complex for it's own good and I just can't see 'average joe', who was probably turning to R Kelly for his soul-music fix at the time, liking it. That's TTD's biggest fault... he was just TOO damn smart, too out-of-pocket, to be an easy sell. He had a down-home voice but an uptown attitude and worldview. Who is his audience, then? Hard to say. So while he had that megastar talent, it was never going to last for him, at a 'pop phenomenon scale like it did for MJ and Prince. The things he does better than them are also the things that limit him to a smaller level of success. Yeah, he might be jealous the moe I think of it, but I would be too.

As for MJ, he was legitimately threatened by Sony's involvement with TTD. They were on the same label, which means they are competing for the same resources. Two soul singers, but one is light-skinned bi-racial, younger, and more dialed in to European trends. The fact is that MJ, did tell people not to work with TTD. I can't blame MJ one bit for worrying that TTD was a threat to his throne and might put it all together and become the next global phenomenon. Now if TTD was white, it might have been a whole different story. Like Smokey saying the other day 'Justin Bieber PLEASE cover all my songs!'.

The 80's was the era for the Black Superstar. MJ, Prince, Whitney Houston, Janet, Lionel Richie & Luther Vandross was killing it.

mjscarousal said:

When would MJ have had time to sabatage all these careers between touring, recording music, writing songs, traveling around the world, conducting interviews, appearances, charity work, etc. If MJ had all this power as some you think why didn't he win any grammy's for BAD? Surely if he had the power to sabatage all these careers, he would surely have the power to sabatage ballets to get grammys. I would argue that he was powerful because he was viewed as a threat because of the things he was trying to influence through his music but as we can see he didn't have that much control behind the scenes as we can see with how things transpired in his life. Its easy to blame MJ for mostly anything because he is the biggest star in the world but he is the biggest star in the world because everyone geniunely loved him not because he sabataged careers.

The love of fans paired with major-corporation backing of an artist goes a long way toward mega-success, and that includes Michael Jackson, too! In the mid-90s MJ was a multimillion-dollar selling artist loved by fans worldwide, with a 30-something year career; 16 of them as an adult solo artist. Considering his longevity in the music biz and command of an epic share of Sony's sales I feel it is reasonable to say that he had influence within the company to demand where it would place its A&R resources. Could my speculations be realistic? Here are my ideas of what might have occured between MJ and TTD plus a summary of busniess events following MJ's death.

Guerilla (Gorilla) Action?
Looking at things from a busniess perspective, if MJ perceived TTD as crowding his space at Sony he would do what he could to protect it! It was probably hard for MJ to ignore TTD's presence given his notorious bid for fame and ambition to expand his identity beyond an R&B singer/act into a rock musician-megastar. TTD regularly expressed his interest in The Beatles from his career debut, until today in fact, as a wishful challenger of The Beatles' sales records and as a fan. He might have desired to cover some Beatles songs on a record. In 1985 MJ famously bought the Beatles' catalogue to control the publishing rights to these songs (http://www.dailymail.co.u...logue.html). Also, TTD was having difficulties with the Sony execs contesting his artistic freedom. I speculate that MJ may have declined TTD's bids to buy rights to record Beatles' songs (and perhaps bade Sony execs to nix loan requests to front the expense). Perhaps this is how things went down. While this alone could not stop TTD from producing his own works, having his desired creative path blocked might have obscured his vision toward future productions. I imagine it is true what TTD says, that he felt stifled by the record company and beaten by the Mega-artist MJ in the circa-Vibrator stage of his career. Well--TTD and Sony parted ways, and that was the end of that. His career was deflated, and he looked toward a new path and assumed his new name, Sananda Maitreya. He would not have access to Beatles songs from his now-competitor Sony, nor be granted permissions from MJ.

Trail to Liberation
MJ never did sell any of the catalogue rights-ownership back to the once-bidding Paul McCartney--he greatly needed to retain some cash-generating holdings. At MJ's death in 2009 the publishing rights to the Beatles' songs were half-owned by the Jackson estate, and half by the Sony Corp. MJ had mega-debt ($500 million to $1 billion) and much of it was transferred to Sony as compensation for their loans to the artist (http://www.eonline.com/ne...m-j-s-dead). Forward to 2014 and the the Beatles' catalog publishing rights are aquired from Sony/ATV Music Publishing by a production company named Grace. One of this company's productions is an animated children's series (http://variety.com/2014/m...201129538/).

Lo and behold, in 2015 Sananda Maitreya is citing children's songs as an inspiration for his music today and he now has 3 covers of Beatles' songs featured on his new album The Rise of the Zugebrian Time Lords. The rights to the songs he always desired to record are now freed from his music-company competitor. Grace was willing to deal him recording rights to some of the songs. It was a long wait for Sananda to realize a piece of his dream.

Future Features?
Maybe one day in the future we'll be seeing Sananda Maitreya-scored children's animated features?

I am just amused that some of yall really think he was invested in sabataging all these careers. When exactly would he have had the time? Trent has always been jealous and pressed over Michael. Even during the peak of his career he always said shady things about him even Prince. They weren't on the same label during the peak of his career so these claims kinda seem far fetch. By the late 80's and early 90's he didn't really have any maybe big cross over hits even when he was popular he never really had any cross over hits.

[Edited 10/13/15 1:22am]

i can dig it!

funksterr said:

Wow. That article cut to the core and left me kind of sad for him. I've been a fan sine 1987, and I love all of his TTD albums for at least a song or two if not the entire thing. I'm getting more of his Sananda albums but they are much more demo-like, but still great and brilliant in their own way.

I didn't realize that he was legitamitely dealing with some psyche issues. I thought he was just being a crazy hippie.

Lenny Kravitz and George Michael, I love them, but they were never better at Prince or MJ at anything. Neither was Ginuwine, Eric Benet, Bobby Brown, Giorgio, Usher or anyone else. But TTD was different. He writes lyrics with a sophistication Prince and MJ can only dream of. And vocally, he can go pound for pound with just about anyone and take you places neither of those guys can. I've been listening to his last 3 TTD albums this week, and I'm more blown away and amazed by him today than I was even at the time. We talk about the next MJ or the next Prince, but when will we ever see another TTD? Soul music has never seen anyone else, dealing from the place he was operating from. Only Prince and MJ are on that guy's level, and even then it's hard to say they have anything on his artistry.