Rochester's Tweet ready for comeback with new album
Tweet stopped by last year. You remember Tweet. Charlene Keys is her real name, but everyone called her Tweet when she was growing up in that house on Custer Street, just off of Genesee Park Boulevard.
“I was a little shy girl, they tell me now,” Tweet says. “I used to go in the closet and write songs on the wall. I sang in church and sang in high school and had a group. I always wanted to be an artist. But I kind of hid it from my family, even though I always dreamed of meeting Michael Jackson, of meeting Diana Ross, who was my favorite.”
To be a star like Jackson and Ross? That wasn’t the dream. Tweet saw herself as the backing singer.
But then, for a moment, it did happen. Backed by pals Missy Elliot and the producer Timbaland, Tweet was pushed to the front and hit the top of the 2002 urban music charts with her single “Oops (Oh My),” setting the stage for her Top-10 debut album, Southern Hummingbird.
That summer, Tweet seemed to be everywhere. Hosting MTV spring break events, singing for Jay Leno and the Soul Train Music Awards. And her big homecoming, the Rochester MusicFest when it was at its peak at Genesee Valley Park. An estimated 11,500 people set the event’s single-day attendance record on Saturday, with Al Green headlining and Mayor William Johnson taking a moment to award Tweet with a proclamation declaring the following day to be Charlene “Tweet” Keys Day, with a diamond-shaped crystal the size of an Elizabeth Taylor engagement ring, because there was no actual key to the city.
“There are plenty of Keys here,” Johnson said, noting the large number of Tweet’s family on hand. That Sunday, Tweet joined The Isley Brothers, Gerald Levert and Jaheim to break the previous day’s attendance record, drawing 14,000 people.
How did this happen to the shy kid from Rochester?
“It was such a whirlwind of stuff going on, I was just going with the wind,” she says. “I was enjoying every minute of it.
“Then the tables turned, the same people who were there for me, supporting me as an artist, turned on me. I had the rug pulled from under my feet.”
The traditional record-industry business model was collapsing. Tweet was lost in the shuffle of a merger between Elektra Entertainment Group and Atlantic Records.
"Everybody that was at Elektra got booted out," she says.
She returned to her hometown to play MusicFest again in 2004, but the event was fading and so was she, playing for 5,000 people at a rain-dampened Genesee Valley Park. Three years after Southern Hummingbird came the follow-up album, It’s Me Again, which hit No. 2 on the R&B charts but failed to produce a hit single the magnitude of “Oops (Oh My)” or “Smoking Cigarettes.” Two and three years between albums is too long in the frenetic world of popular music. Tweet recorded a third album, but it was never released.
Tweet’s fragile psyche had nearly led her to suicide before the success of Southern Hummingbird. Now having moved to Atlanta, her career stalled, and with the pressure of being a single mother, “I was crying and drinking every day, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day,” Tweet says.
She had to find a way to get beyond all of that. And Tweet says she has as she readies for the Feb. 26 release of her new album, Charlene. She made videos for two singles, “Won’t Hurt Me” and “Magic,” and she pre-released a couple of other songs.
“I didn’t get a lot of the opportunities I should have been granted,” Tweet says. “Now I’m flooding everybody with stuff I didn’t get to do on those first two albums.”
Tweet has never been an R&B howler; her style is cool and sexy. And it remains so on Charlene. “I didn’t want to compromise on the sound or try to fit in, be like what music sounds like today,” she says. And Elliott is back as well, featured on the track “Somebody Else Will.”
“We still talk and give each other advice,” Tweet says of her friend. “It’s a bond that will never be broken.”
That bond was forged in Rochester, back when no one knew Missy Elliot or Timbaland.
The building at the corner of East Avenue and Winthrop Street is a private residence now, but in the mid-1990s it was Dajhelon Studios. And its space-age recording spaces were happening. Jada Pinkett, star of the film Jason's Lyric, passed through. So did rappers Mary J. Blige and T-Boz of TLC, working on songs for the soundtrack of the new Michelle Pfeiffer movie, Dangerous Minds. The R&B group Jodeci recorded its album The Show, the After-Party, the Hotel at Dajhelon, which promptly shot to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 2 on the Top 200 album chart. Jodeci’s leader, Devante Swing, rented the entire building — it was cheaper here than pulling a similar stunt in New York City — and began developing a handful of artist hopefuls for his new label.
Most of the names have been forgotten, but three stick to this day: Ginuwine, Timbaland and Missy Elliott. That’s the company in which Tweet found herself. A 1988 graduate of School of the Arts, she’d attended Monroe Community College with the idea of maybe getting into the television anchor business. A single mom at age 19, Tweet was working at Alling and Cory, a paper and packaging distributor on West Ridge Road, when she heard that backing singers were needed for whatever was happening at Dajhelon.
“It was like the high school in Fame, or Motown, every day,” Tweet says. “We were recording, writing, singing, putting shows together. It was a daily work ethic I would never forget.
“And I was used to being … artful, if that’s a good word.”
Artful — Elliott was the one who picked up on that. “I was playing ‘Motel,’ on my guitar,” Keys says (the song would later appear on Southern Hummingbird) “and she was hiding, listening. Then she comes out and says, ‘I didn’t know you could play guitar and write!’ She was taken aback.”
Ready to step out front, Tweet sent her daughter, Tashawna, to live with her parents in Panama City, Florida, where they had moved, and left for California as part of the vocal trio Sugah, another one of Devante’s projects.
It didn’t happen for Sugah. Nor for Devante’s label, which soon collapsed. Tweet joined her parents in Panama City. She was broke, with no career. A long-term relationship had fallen apart, and she was depressed. Tweet had a bottle of pills; she was thinking suicide.
“At the time, things were so stressful. What’s the best way out?” Tweet says. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Then Missy Elliott called. She needed backing vocals for her third album, Miss E... So Addictive. Timbaland was producing. Would Tweet sing for her?
But first, Elliott had to talk Tweet off of the ledge.
“I hadn’t heard from Missy in a while. It was a sign from God,” Tweet says. “I knew then, I’ve got more to do. Missy was a vessel from God.
“She’s my guardian angel.” Tweet has said that many, many times since then.
Payback: It doesn’t have a great reputation. Yet sometimes, payback can be sweet. A year after the release of Miss E... So Addictive, Elliott put out Southern Hummingbird on her new Goldmind label.
Beyond Elliott, another woman in Tweet’s life has stepped up. Tashawna, her daughter. She was 14 when we heard her on “Two of Us” from It’s Me Again. Now Tashawna is 24, a gospel singer, and a mother. Yes, the 44-year-old Tweet is a grandmother.
“I never hid anything from her,” Tweet says. “When she saw me crying, she said, ‘Mom, you can’t let this get you down.’ When I got back to creating music, she would be the one most honest with me. ‘Mom, that’s not so hot.’
“Now I can say it was worth it. Ask me in 2005, maybe not. I was bitter for a while. I was comparing myself to a lot of situations and a lot of artists. I had to come out of the bitterness. I had to go through the process in order to become the woman I am today. In 2005, I rededicated my life.”
She tells of a song called “Make Me Over,” by the provocative R&B Christian artist Tonex. “Every line in that song pierced my heart,” Tweet says:
Lord I’m tired
Make me over again
Every day is the same time is the same thing
And I’m ready for change Lord
Someone else’s words helped Tweet rediscover her own.
“My lyrics are all about my life, like diary pages,” Tweet says. When in “Won’t Hurt Me” she writes about a male friend who wants to take their friendship further, and his attempts to make her jealous by flaunting other women in front of her, Tweet merely says no. There is no bitterness, only self-assuredness. Yes, the story is drawn from reality, she says. The friend is real. The absence of bitterness, and the self assuredness — real.
So the new album is named Charlene. She’s been Tweet all of these many years, perhaps it’s time to recognize the other woman, the one who is just as real. It wasn’t so much Tweet as it was Charlene who returned to Rochester last year, for the graduation of a niece from Rochester Institute of Technology.
“Family — family’s so important to me,” Tweet says. “We sat around and reminisced. I don’t get to see them often, so we just sit around and look at each other. Barbecue, laugh, maybe watch movies.”
Maybe take a moment to drive down Custer Street. That’s when you remember where you were, and how far you’ve come.
“I always wanted to buy that house,” Tweet says. “It looks absolutely nothing like it once did. It’s a different color. It looks smaller.”
It didn’t shrink. The old house only looks smaller. That’s what happens when you grow.
JSPEVAK@gannett.com