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The Babyface Collection

Forty-six tracks from the most commercially successful songwriter-producer of the nineties — heard here mostly as a singer, which is the half people forget.

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Babyface

Kenneth Edmonds has written or produced an almost absurd number of hit records — for Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men, TLC, Toni Braxton, Madonna, Mariah Carey and many others — and co-founded LaFace Records with L.A. Reid, which gave the world Outkast, TLC and Usher.

What this playlist emphasises instead is his own singing, and it is a useful correction. He has a light, high, slightly frail tenor that he uses with unusual intelligence: he writes songs for his own voice that would not suit anyone else, keeping the melodies conversational and leaving space for the lyric to work.

His subject, consistently, is the ordinary business of relationships — not seduction or heartbreak at their peaks, but the negotiation in between. That is a harder thing to write about and a much less glamorous one.

What to listen for

"Whip Appeal" and "It's No Crime" are the early, funkier records, and both come from the period when he was still working closely with L.A. Reid.

"When Can I See You" aside, "Every Time I Close My Eyes" in the Timbaland remix is the interesting version — hearing that arrangement applied to a Babyface ballad is a genuine collision of eras.

"This Is for the Lover In You" with LL Cool J and the original Shalamar members is the best idea on the list: reuniting Howard Hewett, Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel for a remake of their own song.

The Toni Braxton duets — five of them here — come from Love, Marriage & Divorce, one of the best late records either of them made, and "Hurt You" is the pick.

"Love Makes Things Happen" with Pebbles is the deep cut from the early years.

"You Make Me Feel Brand New" is the Stylistics cover, and "For The Cool In You" and "Simple Days" are where the writing is most personal.

Go deeper

Tender Lover (1989) and For the Cool in You (1993) are the two solo albums that matter; Unplugged NYC 1997 is where the songwriting is most exposed.

Then work through the production catalogue. Toni Braxton's debut, Boyz II Men's "End of the Road" and TLC's CrazySexyCool are three very different demonstrations of the same hand.

Why the singing matters: the production catalogue is so enormous that his own records get treated as a footnote, and they are the opposite — songs written specifically for a light, slightly frail tenor, which is a thing almost no other writer of hits for big voices would have known how to do. The restraint is the craft.

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