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*It’s a rarity in contemporary urban music, where a band of musicians – musicians that play instruments – create five successful studio albums, more than a dozen hit singles, world tours and collabos with some of the biggest names in music. It is a lone example that falls under one condition – Mint Condition.
The band, at its commercial pinnacle in the early ‘90s, catapulted to fame with their hit “Breakin’ My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes).”
With lead singer Stokley Williams' treble powerhouse vocals and the funk, R&B, pop hybrid sound the band was the ultimate of a generation and has since become the model of modern R&B.
With their new disc, “E-Life”, Williams, Jeffrey Allen, Ricky Kinchen, Homer O’Dell, and Lawrence Waddell, move into the techno-age with a very solid old-school blend.
The five-man band is currently doing select dates in promotion of the new disc, but EUR’s Lee Bailey caught up with bass man Kinchen and keyboardist Waddell about the new project and its inspiration.
“It’s everyday situational stuff,” Waddell began in explaining the disc’s title. “but in the context of today’s e-world; the world of text messaging, cell phones, MySpace. Nowadays you meet people on MySpace so the relationship may have started on MySpace. It’s that type of world now.”
Band mate Kinchen admitted that he was rather caught up in that e-world, spending much of his time on MySpace, in fact.
“At one point, I wasn’t getting any work done in the studio,” he admitted. “It was kind of affecting my kids and that’s kind of the intro of 'Baby Boy Baby Girl.' It was taking away from me doing other things and I had to kind of get my life together, it’s summertime, I need to focus on my kids a little bit more and making sure I’m taking them to the park and everything, instead of e-mailing all day.”
That epiphany sparked the lead single which features Anthony Hamilton.
“I always wanted to work with him,” Kinchen said. “He was the one who came through and was feeling the project and kind of helped us out. He has kids and he could relate to the whole thing.”
Another track on the disc, “I Wish I Could Love You,” also deals with techno-world issues.
“The song was influenced by a girl that one of the guys was seeing,” Kinchen continued. “She would just be on the phone all the time, talking and text messaging. So, some of the songs relate to the whole text messaging and sex messaging thing. People today can’t really communicate; they can’t really say what they want to say (verbally), but they can say it in a text message.”
However, in addition to some lyrical content on the disc, the band explained that the way the project was produced also ties into the disc title.
“Some of the record we’d record together and then I’d be out of town and my part wasn’t cutting it so I had to do it over. So I would have to plug in my laptop, plug the base into to it, e-mail it to Stoke and he’d drop it into the song and he’d go mix it,” Kinchen described. “So we did a lot of file sharing with this record and that had a lot to do with the title, too.”
Waddell added that although he’s not as addicted to the web as some of his band mates, he relates to the “E-Life” theory.
“I do some classes online, but since I do that, I don’t even really want to be on it that much, so the social aspect hasn’t happened for me that much,” he said. “But I relate to it. It is our world. It pretty much permeates every activity almost. You have a cell – you’re gonna text; you’re gonna check directions; for me it’s school, so for all of us it’s still related. We are in an e-world.”
Waddell described a not-so-e-time, when the band was discovered in 1989 and first signed with legendary producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.
“They had this multimillion dollar facility and we thought it was the most unbelievable stuff in the world,” he said. “Now you can get the same stuff, digitally, on computer. That’s even how we recorded it. This thing is there and we can’t get away from it. Even our recording process was e-recording in a way.”
Whatever way it got done, “E-Life” was done well. The disc doesn’t disappoint with the Mint Condition brand of funky R&B that only real musicians could provide.
“I think it is a difficult road,” Waddell said of staying the course or being a band. “I do feel like we’re in the vanguard in a lot of ways as far as trying to stay with what we do, which is actually playing and being a self-contained band. I don’t say ‘in the vanguard’ in a snobbish way or thinking no one else has anything to contribute because they don’t do it that way, but I’m very proud of the way we do it.”
“E-Life” is available now. For more on the band and tour dates, check out their official website at www.mintconditionmusic.com.
“It is hard, difficult, but certain,” Waddell continued, “and we keep trudging because we believe in the song. The song transcends.”