While he continues to figure out if he’ll face legal action for jumping rockstar style on fans during his performance of “Adorn” at the Billboard Music Awards, Miguel is enjoying all the exposure he’s received from that incident and from the appreciation of his music by a new wave of fans. But it wasn’t an easy journey for Miguel, who was once selling car warranties to make ends meet and sleeping on a friend’s uncomfortable couch. He spoke about his journey with Paper, writing “Adorn” for his girlfriend as a way to be more comfortable expressing his feelings and helping to revive Mariah’s career with her new banger, “Beautiful,” which he wrote for himself but passed on for his last album. Here’s a few excerpts from the interview that had us talking:
On The Origin Of “Adorn” And How He Struggles To Express His Feelings In Person Compared To In His Music:
Miguel is leaning more toward the tender side he showed on “Adorn,” which he wrote for his long-term model/actress girlfriend Nazanin Mandi. Still, expressing his emotions isn’t as easy for him in person.”As comfortable as I am dealing with it in my music, it’s so much harder to do for real. I’m not even going to pretend.” Back in 2007 Mandi temporarily called off their relationship. “I was mad young, just wildin’ out,” he recalls, “and she was smart enough to leave, like she should have.”
On His Life Before Making It Big:
He was also struggling with a go-nowhere deal with Black Ice, an independent label that had cartoonishly styled him as an “urban” artist in oversized sportswear and chains. He says he couldn’t handle being alone, and crashed on a friend’s sofa for a while, getting up every morning with a backache at 4:30 a.m. to get to his day job selling car warranties. “I was good at it, but it was so bad,” he recalls. “Imagine you’re lonely, you’re missing someone, you’re like, ‘I f**ked up,’ and you have the worst job in the world.”
On Changing The Scope Of R&B:
“I really wanted to stretch musically on this song, not only sonically but structurally, and just kind of remind people that R&B has no boundary,” he says on the track commentary for Kaleidoscope Dream. “There’s no rulebook to how R&B is supposed to sound.” His voice can flip seamlessly from a cool falsetto to yearning soul belts, winning him frequent comparisons to Marvin Gaye, while his lyrics evoke an emotional complexity rarely heard in his home genre. “What I’m trying to say with my music is, ‘You don’t have to pretend,’” he explains. “‘Say what you mean.’”
And Having A Crush On Mariah Carey Before Working With Her On “Beautiful,” Which Was Originally For His Kaleidoscope Dream Album:
“The moment she dove into that pool and came out of the water…oooh,” he recalls of Carey’s 1997 “Honey” video, released when Miguel was just barely pubescent. “When she first walked into our session I was like, ‘I had such a crush on you, B***h!’” Asked if those were his exact words, he grins. “Nah, I had to keep it cool.”
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