People: Still giving it her heart and soul
Toni Braxton acknowledges the days are long gone when she can pose nearly nude for Vibe magazine or wear the kind of revealing dress she did at the 2001 Grammys.
But at age 38, the R&B singer still is not shy about wearing clothes that offer a glimpse of thigh here or a little cleavage there – even with her family in the audience.
Braxton is married to Keri Lewis (former keyboardist for Mint Condition, the opening act on her current tour) and they have two children: Denim, 5, and Diezel, 2.
Two of her sisters, Tamar and Trina, are working as backup singers and dancers.
What’s it like juggling family and stardom?
“Challenging,” Braxton says. “It’s been hard, I can’t deny it, ‘cause I’m a real hands-on mom, really involved with my kids and their day-to-day activities.”
Now that she’s on the road, she laments she “can’t be as involved.”
Don’t tell that to Denim.
Braxton and her husband installed cameras in all the rooms of their house, so she can monitor the kids on the Internet when she’s away. Sometimes she catches Denim letting the family dog out of its cage and calls him on the phone to tell him to stop.
She jokingly says of her son: “He definitely believes in God.”
While her fans love her songs, she has mixed emotions about some of them – like “Seven Whole Days.”
“Hated it!” says Braxton. In fact, she says of the sigh after the lyric “seven whole nights”: “I did that to be smart.”
On the other hand, while she loved “Another Sad Love Song,” producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds “only thought it was OK” and considered it filler until it became a hit.
Braxton says she doesn’t feel pressure to keep up with the crop of younger singers who have come along since 1992, when she first hit the scene, though she’s added a pinch or two of hip-hop flavor to her music over the years.
She says she’s often asked to sing at weddings of friends and family members, and usually turns them down.
As she puts it, desperate-for-love ballads like “Un-break My Heart” and “Breathe Again” are “not a good sound for your wedding.”
Even in “You Mean The World To Me,” she notes, she tells her man to give her one good reason to believe all his lies.
While she’s a master at singing about broken hearts, it was a problem with her own heart that gave Braxton a recent scare.
Just after Diezel was born, after returning to work on the Broadway show “Aida,” she came down with a case of pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart caused by a virus.
At the time, Braxton admits to thinking about the movie “Beaches” – and fearing she’d be like the Barbara Hershey character, who dies.
Now she paces herself while on tour. Every once and again she might feel a little flutter, but she declares herself “100 percent fine.”
The birthday bunch
Singer Billy Davis Jr. (the Fifth Dimension) is 66. Actor Gedde Watanabe (“ER”) is 51. Singer Chris Isaak is 50. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”) is 36. Actor Sean Hayes (“Will and Grace”) is 36. Actor Chris O’Donnell is 36. Country singer Gretchen Wilson is 32. Actor Jason Schwartzman (“Rushmore”) is 26. Actress Kaitlin Cullum (“Grace Under Fire”) is 18.