Lost and found

Mary J. Blige is happy. And that’s a hard-won state for the singer whose pain has helped define a sound and style that shaped a generation of female vocalists. Blending pure soul emotion with hip-hop beats, cool and attitude, over the past decade she’s become perhaps the single central figure in contemporary R&B; -- the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, a new Aretha Franklin. But happy? The sound that infused five multi-platinum albums came straight from her open wounds -- at a punishing cost.

“I lost a lot,” she said. “I lost my voice, my mind, my dignity. I lost respect for myself. I lost a lot of money -- money that I didn’t even know I made, that other people have in their pockets right now. The bottom line is, I lost me.

“But everything that I lost, I gained back, because I put the alcohol and everything terrible out of my life. Once you understand what you’ve lost, you understand that you can lose your life. And once you choose life, you gotta start working on how to stay alive, and you just start working on you.”

Blige’s devoted fans know all about her bad relationships, her depression, her substance abuse. They’ve always taken her struggles personally -- as expressions of their own. “Mary’s strength as an artist is the pure pain that comes out of her vocals,” mega-producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds once said.

Trouble shaped her art. And now, she says, it’s gone.

Between her last album, 2001’s “No More Drama” and now, she’s cleaned up her lifestyle and fallen in love with musician-producer Kendu Isaacs (the two are engaged). So while her new CD “Love & Life” reflects Blige’s experiences just as sincerely as her earlier efforts, it speaks of very different feelings. The woman who’s sung for years about wanting to slow things down -- the chorus of one of her first hits was “All I really want/ Is to be happy” -- now lives in Bergen County, N.J., and exudes the sense that she has finally made it to the mountaintop. The diva who picked fights with journalists and played out a public soap opera with ex-boyfriend K-Ci Hailey (of the groups Jodeci and K-Ci & JoJo) says she’s shedding the bad times for good.

Contentment, though, brings different questions: Her fans have followed her faithfully through all her ups and downs, finding through her a sisterhood of raw emotion. What will they make of a satisfied, relaxed, adult Mary J. Blige?

Even in a depressed music business, commercial expectations for “Love & Life,” due in stores Tuesday, are high. (“No More Drama,” released in two slightly different configurations, sold a total of 3 million copies.)

In a sunny hotel room overlooking Central Park, dressed simply in a black T-shirt and black slacks (plus gold sandals and gold sunglasses, both of which she slipped off occasionally while she spoke), Blige, 32, acknowledged that she needed to leave spaces on the album for darkness, for talking about her not so distant past -- “I gotta cover my people that are still in limbo, like I was.”

Midway through “Love & Life,” there’s a spoken interlude titled “Finally Made It” that directly addresses her transformation (in it, she says that if she weren’t a singer, she’d “probably be braiding hair or working at a supermarket”). “When I say I finally made it,” Blige said, “I don’t mean I’m successful with money, I mean spiritually. Success in the mind, peace of mind, is success. That song is just showing people from my view how I did it, how I made it through all this madness.”

A new mix of sound

Before Mary J. Blige, female R&B; singers were clinging to the rules of an earlier generation. At the dawn of the ‘90s, stylists like Anita Baker and Patti LaBelle -- more pop than raw -- defined the form. Meanwhile, at Uptown Records, a sound known as “New Jack Swing” was being born, blending hip-hop beats with R&B; singing on records by Guy and Heavy D and the Boyz.

No one had brought these opportunities together, though, until an aspiring producer, previously an intern at Uptown, named Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs met a new singer from the projects of Yonkers, N.Y., named Mary J. Blige. Combs helped the tentative Blige, barely out of her teens, mix the sound of her streets with the songs she grew up hearing and to work out a look and image that made the package clear. Her emotions were unfiltered, her rough edges unhidden, her clothes identical to those her audience might wear, all establishing the quality that every fan constantly singles out about Blige -- her “realness.” The result: Her 1992 debut, “What’s the 411?” went triple platinum.

That album and 1994’s darker, more thematic follow-up “My Life,” created not just a new genre but a new sense of identity for young black women -- streetwise, glamorous, proud, the perfect midpoint of hard and soft for the hip-hop generation. In his book “Hip Hop America,” Nelson George wrote that “Blige immediately became one of the most influential artists of the ‘90s by bringing the female vocalist back to the center of African-American youth culture.” From more socially conscious artists like Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu to more purely pop singers like Beyonce and Ashanti, it was impossible for a female artist in the world of urban music not to show the effect of Blige.

“In each and every one of those females, there’s a piece of Mary J. Blige,” Blige said. “Alicia Keys, India.Arie, all of ‘em. And it’s well taken -- like, thank you. I look at them and I see they’ve been studying the ‘My Life’ album, studying my interviews. I know what I am, so I see it in other people.”

Blige does single out one of her successors for her originality. “I think the one that takes and really makes it into her own is Beyonce,” she said. “Maybe she’s been inspired by me, but she does her work -- she does her with it. She doesn’t do like Ashanti and just take the whole thing. You gotta find yourself in there somewhere.”

“Love & Life” reunites Blige with Combs after a long hiatus -- and on very different terms from when they first met as upstarts.

“He’s still Puffy, the real hyper guy, and I’m Mary, real hyper and emotional when I get ready to be,” she said. “We saw what used to happen back in the day and we said we can’t let that happen now, we gotta respect each other’s space and decisions.

“We had a little meeting. He started it, said, ‘I know I haven’t been sensitive in the past’ ... and I was like, ‘Oh, he has changed!’ We’re like family, like brother and sister, so it got a little ugly -- on the DVD [packaged with the first 500,000 albums] you’ll see. It got a little ugly, but not like it did back then because ... I’ve learned how to control my emotions to a certain extent.”

One instantly notable aspect of the new album is the ease and confidence of Blige’s vocals. For years, especially on stage, she could tear down a crowd with pure emotion, though her relationship to pitch was often uneasy. But on tracks like the sexy “Ooh!” or the brightly melodic “Willing and Waiting,” her singing feels loose, effortless. “That comes from touring, singing 90 minutes of songs all night long, from warming up and practicing -- I learned how to do it properly. Two years ago, I would never have been able to sing these songs, these notes and keys. Hitting a high note is like hitting a low note for me now.”

Starring at the Grammys

This vocal maturity became clear in a dazzling rendition of her confessional hit “No More Drama” at this year’s Grammy Awards -- a standout at the ceremonies. (“That was an out-of-body experience,” she said. “I just lost my mind, I lost my Mary flesh and went into something else.”) Further evidence comes on “Whenever I Say Your Name,” a knockout duet with Sting for his forthcoming “Sacred Love” album. “As a singer, Mary really is the heir to Aretha Franklin,” Sting recently said, “and I had to bring myself up to that mark.”

Two songs that bookend “Love & Life” establish the way this vocal confidence matches the themes on album, for which she co-wrote all but one track. The opener, “Don’t Go,” offers mature take on the hard work that goes into sustaining relationships (“Every day is not a perfect day” is the first line Blige sings). Later, the plain-spoken “It’s a Wrap” tells of the need to walk away from an abusive or unfaithful mate. The clear distinction she draws between staying committed to a lover and knowing when enough is enough marks “Love & Life” as the work of a secure, grown woman.

Less clear is the ominous song “Friends,” a tale of betrayal that never quite reveals its genesis. The story behind the song, according to Blige, is an experience reminiscent of that in “Stan,” Eminem’s memorable chronicle of an obsessive fan. “There was this prank caller that started bothering me around the ‘My Life’ album,” she said. “When he first called, he was a fan. Then when he next called, somebody had told me he was a bad person, so I told him, ‘Don’t call me no more,’ so the guy started cursing me out, and I started cursing him out, and we been cursing each other out for years. Meanwhile, this guy knew everywhere I was, all my business, he knew every car, every house I had.

“Turns out every friend I had, so-called, was calling him and telling him everywhere I was, trying to drive me crazy.... And you know how I found out? From the caller himself.

“He calls me, I call him, we check on each other -- he’s like my brother now. See how things turn around? He said, ‘All those years, Mary, I never meant to hurt you, I love you, but your friends around you -- I was trying to warn you that they was calling me so that I would hurt you.’”

In moments like this, “Love & Life” shows that Blige can never fully get away from life’s dark side. But mostly, it demonstrates the emergence of something this notorious tough girl never really had before -- the fearlessness that comes from true self-confidence.

“I’m in a pretty safe place now, because I’m no longer afraid of what people could try to do to me,” she said. “There’s nothing the press can do to hurt me, no person trying to scheme against me, there’s no weapons for them against me.

“I’ve been in every bad situation there is. There’s nothing that can embarrass me anymore. You tell me, ‘Mary, you got some green in your teeth,’ or ‘I caught your husband cheating.’ You can’t come out of Yonkers and say ‘She used to sniff coke’ -- I told everybody that already! You don’t have any ammunition against me because I’m out there. Now I’m not ashamed.”