Listening again now, Mint Condition’s first single seems like a clear concession to the market - 1991’s “Are You Free” sounds like an attempt to fit in with the New Jack Swing that was ascendant at the time, though it also nods to the “dynamic, high-energy” roots of the band. “When we got signed, bands were on their way out,” Williams says - the rise of sampling and drum machines would eventually kill the ensemble approach to R&B - but “we were still out here singing, dancing, playing our own instruments.” As a result, “We’d bump heads with the general manager.” Williams remembers being asked, “Why don’t you do what Jodeci is doing?” Much like executives at Warner and MCA, the manager of Jam and Lewis’ label didn’t hear a future hit on Mint Condition’s demo. Band, the Human League, New Edition, and Janet Jackson, among others. “We’d go to MCA, we’d go to Warner, and everyone would say, ‘I don’t hear a single.’ ” But the group was able to obtain a deal locally with Jam and Lewis, former Prince bandmates and super-producers behind unimpeachable hits for the S.O.S. “We were shopping our album,” Williams remembers. The track ends with a daydream - “Here comes my darlin’/Here comes romance/Here comes my lovin’, please honey will you dance” - that crumbles before the listener’s eyes: “Pretty brown eyes/Breakin’ my heart.”ĭespite their uptempo pedigree, Mint Condition included this track on a four-song demo they sent around to labels. Keyboards stab like they’re trying to jar the drummer (also Williams) out of his rhythm, and the bass pops with string-breaking force. MINT CONDITION FULL“Sometimes you’re putting together a song, and there’s no words yet, but you’re just singing a melody, and words will form out of whatever vowels you sing.”įollowing Wonder’s advice led to a bottom-of-the-ninth, swing-for-the-fences ballad, full of muscular, anguished wailing that makes Williams’ “flying by the seat of my pants” remark seem overly modest. “You have to trust your vowels - Stevie Wonder once told me that,” he says. I was just flying by the seat of my pants.”īut playing around with a plodding rifle-shot groove one day during rehearsal, Williams started ad-libbing a melody. I didn’t learn what I was doing with my voice ’til maybe the third album. “We had to really work hard on doing the background vocals, where you just block harmonies, the note stays, and it doesn’t move until I move. “We’re primarily instrumentalists being singers wasn’t really our forte,” Williams explains. MINT CONDITION HOW TOTheir lack of ballads early on may have had something to do with the fact that the group was still learning how to sing. You had to be able to play instruments, sing, do choreography, the whole nine.” Mint Condition’s gigs were “dynamic, high energy,” to the point where a member of Living Colour told Williams, “People think Mint is an R&B band, but you actually have more rock & roll energy.” FOCUS ON YOURSELF KING □□□♂️ #fyp #fypage #foryou “ Prince was big, and people were flocking here because so many people were getting signed. “We were an uptempo group,” Williams says. Mint Condition weren’t known as a ballad band in 1990, when they were playing around Minneapolis and hunting for a record deal. In a way, the single’s random reemergence is fitting, since it was an unexpected hit the first time around as well. It’s been fun to see the younger generation get into it.” “Many people were hitting me - ‘Have you seen the TikToks?’ ” he says. They’ve also been a source of humor for Mint Condition’s lead singer, Stokley Williams, who watched a number of them while quarantining during a recent bout with Covid. A woman erupts in frustration because she discovered her date is color blind, which means he’s unable to recognize her “beautiful unique green perfect eyes.” Another guy fears the worst - his girlfriend is away in Miami, and he noticed “her following went from 231 to 232 after a night out,” a sign of a potential romantic competitor.Īll three silly premises have become popular TikTok videos in the last month, each set to Mint Condition’s “Breakin’ My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)” - a towering ballad of abject misery originally released in 1991 - with the vocals pitched up to a comic degree, so the clips end up being amusingly self-deprecating, like the creators are poking fun at their own lovesickness. A man pounds the wall in fury because he’s alone on Valentine’s Day - again.
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