SPOTLIGHT Fans of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise have be-


come involved with the ladies that populate the various cities in which they reside, in effect inviting us into their lives, and homes, on a weekly basis. With six incarnations of the wildly popular reality se-


ries, which first began with the Orange County edition, there are many choices as to which Housewives stand out for viewers. And no one quite represents the Real portion of the


series’ title the way that Atlanta’s Kandi Burruss does. She says what she means and means what she says, and is a text book example of what you see is what you get, as she told The Rage Monthly. “When I joined the show, it wasn’t like an idea of, ‘I


want to get on this show!’ They approached me about doing it, and I was like, ‘Okay that sounds like fun.’ And I still approach it like it’s just something to do; I don’t take it seriously. I’m not going to go out of my way to fake something for them. Hopefully, you can find something in my life interesting enough, and if not, oh well.” Trust me, there’s plenty to find interesting about the single mother, who aside from being a music mogul and reality TV star, also owns the Atlanta-based boutique T.A.G.S., as well as being a sexpert on her Internet talk- show Kandi Koated Nights. Well before she was a TV fixture, Burruss had carved out another entertainment niche for herself, namely music, beginning with her time as a member of the suc- cessful ’90s girl group Xscape. After the group broke up, Burruss turned her focus onto the behind-the-scenes aspect of music making as a producer and songwriter. She penned “No Scrubs” for TLC, “Bills, Bills, Bills” and “Bug A Boo” for Destiny’s Child, “There You Go” for Pink and wrote tunes for the likes of Mariah Carey and Whit- ney Houston, as well. Her knack for songwriting brought her acclaim and


awards, including a Grammy for “No Scrubs” and she was the first African-American woman to win the coveted ASCAP “Songwriter of the Year” award in 2000. Her debut solo CD, Hey Kandi, dropped that same year.


Yet, it would be almost ten years before she was ready to step back behind the mic again for her new album Kandi Koated, as she explained. “Well, I’ve been wanting to do another album for years


now,” Burruss said. “But different things kept coming up, interfering with it. I know after my first album, I was disappointed with the fact that it didn’t do as well as I wanted it to. At first, I had an attitude of ‘Well, forget it. I’ll just stay behind-the-scenes.’” She admitted that she had that frame-of-mind for


“about a year,” before she snapped out of it and got her proverbial ducks in a row with new management, who would help her “shop a deal.” Then Burruss discovered she was pregnant with her daughter Riley, and after a few years had passed “the reception wasn’t the same” within the music industry. “I became known so much as just being a songwriter,”


she professed. “When people were hearing my songs, they were like, ‘Ooh I love the song! But can I get it for my other artist?’ Things just kept not coming together like I wanted them to. I was like, ‘Forget it, I’ll just put the project out myself,’ and when that happened I was on the show.” Kandi Koated definitely highlights the point that Bur- russ can stand front-and-center as a soulful chanteuse on tracks, such as the lead single “Leave U,” “I Want You,” “Haven’t Loved Right” and “I Fly Above.” She cited “Leroy Jones” as the song that means the most to her on a personal level. “I wrote it about my step-dad, because I wanted to do a song about a positive male role model,” Burruss explained. “People are always trying to say that I like writing male bashing songs, which is not true. I’m dating again, and I need a man who not only loves me, but is capable of loving my daughter like she’s his own child. And that’s what my step-dad was for me, so I did that song for him.” Relationships are literally at the heart of the 15 songs


that make up Kandi Koated, which occurred naturally, as far as the songwriting process went for Burruss. “It was organic; it just happened that way,” she stated. “I had a lot of songs on this album that were inspired by relationships that I’d either been in, in the past, or the people who I’m meeting now. I clearly wrote the songs from a perspective of real life situations. “For instance, ‘I Want You’ is from when I met this guy


and he’s really, really cool. And, we started out as work- ing friends; eventually one day he said, ‘I don’t want to play games, I’m feeling you, I hope you feel the same way.’ So, everything he said to me in that conversation I put in as the lyrics in the song. You’re listening to a real conversation.” Speaking of conversations…there has been plenty of


chatter regarding her providing castmate Kim Zolciak with services rendered as the songwriter/producer for the hit single, “Tardy for the Party.” Burruss was kind enough to set the record straight. “Basically what happened was that we did the song, and gave it to her to put up on iTunes,” she described.


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RAGE monthly | JANUARY 2011


F


Keepin’ It Real with Atlanta Housewife


By Tim Parks


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