That’s the Soul Truth

It’s not easy to coax rapmeister Dr. Dre out of the world of hip-hop to work in R&B; or soul, fields that generally just aren’t edgy enough to interest him.

But there is one thing that can change his mind: truth.

That’s what not only got Dre to offer singer-songwriter Shari Watson a record deal, but also inspired him to give her a new identity as Truth Hurts. Her debut album, “Truthfully Speaking,” on Dre’s Aftermath label, includes tracks produced by Dre, DJ Quik, R. Kelly, Focus, Hi-Tek and others. Dre also is the album’s executive producer.

“Her personality, the way she came off, she was so real about herself, so confident,” Dre says. “I like listening to some R&B;, but I don’t like making it. But Truth was really open-minded about the vision we had for her and was ready to do whatever we wanted to do.”

If that sounds as if Watson was putty in Dre’s hands, think again.

Cooperative she may be. Mushy she’s not.

“When he first called me about the record deal, I was very kick-back,” Watson, 30, says. “Usually when he offers artists a deal, they go crazy. It’s not that I didn’t feel that excitement, but when he called it was 3 o’clock in the morning, on a Christmas Eve, and at that point I felt I was done with the music industry, and I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted to get into again.”

In no small part that’s because she’s had enough experience in the music industry to know what she wants and what she doesn’t.

She had flirted with success in the early ‘90s as part of the hip-hop/R&B; duo Shug & Dap, which put out a single, “Anotha Man,” that began to attract attention just as its label, Giant Records, folded.

She took a job as a staff songwriter with Aftermath, but her role changed after Dre heard her sing one of her songs that had been targeted for another singer.

“One thing about her was her flow--how fast she was in the studio,” Dre recalls. “I guess I could say that was a big part of it, but singing the song better than the artist she was writing for at the time, that’s really what sparked me.”

She had turned down a couple of offers from major labels that wanted her strictly as a singer before Dre signed her to Aftermath. “I wasn’t feeling those situations,” says Watson, who grew up in St. Louis and got an early look behind the scenes through her concert-promoter father, who brought the Pointer Sisters, Phyllis Hyman and others to the city.

Inspired by hanging around with musicians, she started singing early, and her mother directed her to formal vocal training at school. Watson studied opera through high school. She gave up a partial scholarship at the University of Chicago when she and a friend got the offer to record for Giant. “I didn’t want to be just any kind of artist,” she says. “I wanted to be able to say and write what I felt, and offer something different.”

That she has done in several songs on “Truthfully Speaking,” which recently debuted at No. 5 on the national sales chart. In addition to the DJ Quik-produced single “Addictive”--a self-descriptive track with a Middle Eastern vibe that pairs her with rapper Rakim--she displays a take-no-prisoners assertiveness in “Jimmy” (in which she fields a collect call from an imprisoned lover), the tough-talking “Push Play” and “The Truth,” expected to be the next single. Throughout, she injects a rapper’s cockiness into the soul singer’s musical milieu.

“I think people are tired of not having real music,” says Watson, who moved to New York for a time and now lives in Los Angeles. “This business is oversaturated with children, and people don’t feel that music. The only way real music is coming back to life is if we get away from the attitude that you have to be this [young] age or you have to look like this. Those barriers are slowly being broken.”

A single mother with a 6-year-old daughter, Watson says she particularly aims to send positive messages to “single mothers, to women who need strength, to young girls who need strength, to people who need healing and to be free to be who they want to be, and not be scared or be embarrassed at who they are.”

Her attitude and sassy vocals are getting noticed.

“The way I look at Truth Hurts is the way I looked at Grace Jones back in the day,” says Violet Brown, urban music buyer for the Wherehouse record-store chain. “When she came out, she was different from any other artist at the time. Her sound was different, she appealed to the R&B; crowd, but also to the dance crowd, and I think that’s what Truth Hurts did with ‘Addictive.’ ... That [hit] has really helped her, and I’m already starting to hear some other copycats of that sound. Pairing her with Rakim was genius.”

That was a happy accident rather than a masterstroke of design--”He just happened to be in the same studio the day we were working on that song,” Dre says, “heard what we were doing and said he wouldn’t mind being on it”--but he’s already looking forward to Watson’s next album.

“I’m not taking anything from the record we made--this one’s definitely hot,” he says. “I’d like to have had a little more time on that one [and] I would have loved to have been a bigger part of it, but that’s how it goes. I definitely will be a bigger part of the next one, now that we know exactly where we are going. I’m 100% sure the next record is going to be twice as good.”

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Randy Lewis is a Times staff writer.