By 1998, Sunset Gower Studios had set the stage for nearly a century of TV and film history: from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Funny Girl; Bewitched and Saved by the Bell to The Golden Girls. That year the storied lot also played host to Moesha, the one and only hit sitcom on the fledgling—and quickly tanking—network UPN, which had just begun filming its fourth season. The show’s titular main character was played with charm and vulnerability by a 19-year-old Brandy Norwood, who, by season four, had become as synonymous with Moesha the character as she was with the music she made with her own name. The season’s premiere episode even celebrated the conflation: Moesha, played by Brandy, finally meets her idol, Brandy, also played by Brandy. Cute, right?
The effect was anything but for the woman at the center. Instead, it was a rupture. “After years of living in [Moesha’s] world,” Brandy writes in her new memoir, Phases, “something inside me snapped like an overstretched rubber band.” She did the unthinkable: She walked out of Gower without telling a soul. “The good girl in me wouldn’t have dared. But today, she was dead.” Brandy wasn’t being dramatic. Her subsequent breakdown, exacerbated by an eating disorder and physical exhaustion, marked the end of her years as America’s sweetheart—and one of its most profitable stars. “I had become a brand—a product to be packaged and sold,” she remembered. “And the pressure to maintain that image—that flawless, bubbly, wholesome image—was suffocating me from the inside out.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
She’d been saying yes for the entirety of her adult life. Yes to season after season of Moesha. Yes to recording, at age 15 and at breakneck speed, her first of two multiplatinum albums, with gargantuan world tours wedged in between. And most of all, yes to being the first: one of the first Black celebrities to have her own Barbie doll. The first Black singer to land a Cover Girl campaign. The first Black princess, when she starred as Cinderella alongside her idol Whitney Houston, another generationally talented Black woman forced into impossible perfection and later punished brutally after cracking under it.
The biggest realization Brandy came to after her breakdown was excruciating to admit: She had no idea who the hell she was as a person. She was, in her mind, “a question mark in designer clothes.” Starting over was first impossible, then daunting, and then slowly manifested through a combination of therapy and more spiritual remedies (brief flirtations with Scientology and the Nation of Islam didn’t take hold). Freedom became something real—freedom from expectations, yes, but more thrillingly, the freedom to decide who this new, complicated Brandy Norwood was as a creative force. On her way to figuring out who she was as a person, she finally realized how she wanted to sound.
This was where Brandy found herself when she began work on what would become her masterpiece, Full Moon, an album that, in the years since its release in 2002, has been recognized as the foundation for contemporary R&B, and which paved the way for a litany of singers attempting to mimic its vocal technique, from Ariana Grande and Kehlani to Solange and Ty Dolla $ign. But before Brandy became revered as the Vocal Bible, all she’d wanted was to sound like Michael Jackson. Not exactly like him, but to understand and replicate the magic he conjured when he stacked his voice for his background vocals and stadium-filling choruses.
