Never Say Never was released in June 1998, and its first single, the Monica duet "The Boy Is Mine," was a mammoth hit, topping the Hot 100 for a staggering 13 weeks. Finally, Brandy set about recording her second album. In 1997, she branched out by taking the title role in Disney's made-for-TV version of Cinderella, appearing alongside her idol Whitney Houston the film's star power and integrated cast made it a significant ratings success. Apart from "Sittin' Up in My Room," her only real activity over the next couple of years was the Set It Off soundtrack single "Missing You," on which she teamed with Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, and Tamia. Early that year, she also debuted on UPN as the star of Moesha, for which she took a lengthy recording hiatus. In 1996, Brandy scored her biggest hit yet with "Sittin' Up in My Room," recorded for the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack it hit number two pop and number one R&B/hip-hop. Brandy was certified quadruple platinum within two years. In September 1994, Brandy released her self-titled debut album, which immediately produced Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten smashes in "I Wanna Be Down" and "Baby," both of which hit number one on the R&B/hip-hop chart "Brokenhearted" and "Best Friend" went on to smaller successes. Around the same time, she won a supporting role on the short-lived ABC sitcom Thea. At the age of 14, she landed a record deal with a performance at an Atlantic Records talent showcase. Brandy enrolled in the Hollywood High Performing Arts Center and launched an acting career, appearing in films like Arachnophobia and Demolition Man. With the help of her family, she began hunting for a record contract, and in 1992 began singing backup for the young R&B group Immature.
When she was four, her father was hired as music director at a church in Carson, California, and after a few years, she decided to pursue a professional singing career, inspired by Whitney Houston. Amid constant work onscreen and on-stage, Brandy's musical output during the second half of the 2010s was limited to a handful of singles and featured appearances, but she issued her seventh album, B7 (2020), early the next decade.īrandy Norwood was born in McComb, Mississippi, and began singing in church at age two. Since the mid-2000s, Brandy has recorded less often, with Human (2008) and Two Eleven (2012) maintaining her unbroken streak of Top Ten R&B/hip-hop albums.
While she could have continued to crank out safe contemporary R&B as her acting career took precedence, she made the most out of her subsequent studio time, highlighted by Full Moon (2002) and Afrodisiac (2004), progressive stylistic hybrids that earned her consecutive Grammy nominations for Best Contemporary R&B Album. The title role on the popular sitcom Moesha, a chart-topping and Grammy-winning duet with Monica ("The Boy Is Mine," the longest-running number one female duet in Billboard chart history), and the multi-platinum follow-up Never Say Never (1998) all reaffirmed Brandy's broad appeal through the end of the '90s. Blige or TLC, specializing in pop-oriented R&B epitomized by her first two singles, "I Wanna Be Down" and "Baby," both Top Ten crossover hits that made her debut, Brandy (1994), a multi-platinum smash. The singer and actor emerged during the post-new jack swing era like the kid sister of Mary J.
For the template on this page, that currently evaluates to autocollapse.Brandy is among the few artists to achieve mainstream success as a teenager and make smooth artistic transitions across a multi-decade career. If the |state= parameter in the template on this page is not set, the template's initial visibility is taken from the |default= parameter in the Collapsible option template.