An Ode to Mary J. Blige's 'Mary'

'Mary' was released 25 years ago today.

My fourth grade teacher, Mr. Jones, was unlike every other teacher I’d had up to that point. He was the first teacher I had who wasn’t straight, white, or a woman. And while his sexuality wasn’t exactly a focus for a room of fourth graders (there was chatter though), his taste in music was not just complimentary to my budding tastes, but also left its mark on a young me. 

His desk was in the back corner of the room, and it had three drawers on the right side, as those desks typically did. His CD drawer always captivated me. It was small, but I still remember what it contained, in part because he played some of that music for us while we did our work between lessons. He even mixed them into lessons a few times. I remember the excitement that ran through me as he wrote ‘Whitney Houston & Mariah Carey, “When You Believe”’ on the board and had us do an assignment related to the song.

Among his collection of CDs was Celine Dion’s Falling Into You, Whitney Houston’s My Love Is Your Love, and Mary J. Blige’s newly-released Mary. I was familiar at the very least with all 3, having been immediately obsessed with VH1 Divas Live in 1998 and following that with the 1999 edition. The first featured Celine, the second, Whitney and Mary. 

The Mary album was the newest of the trio, just released in August 1999. I distinctly remember the first time he played it at least halfway through while we were doing work. The album reached track 8, a cool-toned acoustic guitar-meets-hard-percussion duet “Don’t Waste Your Time.” 9-year-old me heard Aretha Franklin’s unmistakable voice sassily charge through with a “hmph” before launching into the chorus and my head spun around in a fashion that would gag the little girl from ‘The Exorcist.’ as track 8 reached the 45 second mark and I heard Aretha Franklin’s voice surge through the speakers. 

I knew it was Aretha, but at 9, my still-developing ear occasionally mistook other voices for hers so I needed to confirm. I had to see the CD case. I asked, or perhaps better yet, begged. There was no track listing on the back as is customary. Instead there was another photo of Mary. On the front, I found the tracklist, on the spine behind the CD tray, but it didn’t include any features. So I pulled out the booklet, and thumbed through the liner notes until I found her name. I was shook, yet satisfied. 

It would be 2 years until I received my own copy of Mary, on Christmas Eve 2001. In the interim, I’d downloaded “Don’t Waste Your Time” on Morpheus, one of the OG file-sharing programs. As the years have gone by, I’ve developed an unshakable love for this record from top to bottom.

Mary is a masterwork. It infuses adult contemporary sensibilities into hip hop, contemporary R&B, and pop. She weaves together classic sounds, motifs, samples, and even fellow singers and musicians to create a stunning album. Since What’s The 411, Mary has chronicled her journey through life in her lyrics. Mary represents a maturation of Blige, progressing from the pleas of and procclamations of superiority on “I Can Love You” of 1997’s Share My World to the reckoning with infidelity on “Don’t Waste Your Time” and clarity of her needs on “Not Lookin.” It’s a sprawling work, with the shortest song clocking in at 4:12. 

The album’s cover is also significant for Mary. It’s her first album cover that doesn’t obstruct part of her face. Instead, she puts her side-profile and the previously-shrouded scar below her left eye front and center. It visualizes the album impeccably. 

In addition to the album, Mary also continued to build on her dense, yet scarcely available catalog of remixes. Mary could (and should) easily be reissued as a 4-CD box set if it included all bonus content and all the remixes. More on that in a bit. 

The album opens with ‘All That I Can Say,” an effervescent ascension that mirrors Aretha’s “Day Dreaming.” The song was helmed by the hottest woman in music at the time: Ms. Lauryn Hill. She wrote, produced, arranged, and sang background vocals on the song. It’s an adoring breath of fresh air on a sun-filled morning. 

She finds love in her cover of The Gap Band’s “I’m In Love,” and strips back the superfluous fluff in search of authentic, no-frills love on the Eric Clapton-assisted, Diane Warren-penned “Give Me You,” which frankly should be more people’s wedding song. It’s one of the most gorgeous and real love songs out there. 

“Deep Inside” ushers Elton John’s unmistakable “Bennie And The Jets” into the new millennium with high class flavor and a classic Mary twist. Mary’s plea to be seen as a person, not a star perfectly encapsulates the growing pains of her evolution into a superstar. Elton not only replayed his piano for this track, he appeared in certain cuts of the video, too. 

Also worth pointing to the knockout performance of “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” that Mary and Elton did at Elton’s fall 2000 Madison Square Garden shows. It further highlighted a Mary who was branching out further musically. 

Mary doesn’t skimp on the devastation and heartbreak on Mary, either. She laments lost love on “No Happy Holidays” and “Memories,” unrequited love on “The Love I Never Had,” and the ramifications of infidelity on the narrative “Your Child.” And then there’s that Aretha duet.

As Mary’s manager Kirk Burrowes remembered, Aretha wasn’t even on their radar as an option for a collaboration, though Mary was a clear disciple of Aretha’s and had paid tribute to her on more than one occasion (she covered “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” in 1995 for the show ‘New York Undercover’ and included live cover of “Day Dreaming” on 1998’s The Tour). Burrowes wanted Mary to duet with Whitney Houston. When pitched to Clive Davis, he instead offered Aretha for the album, and a live performance with Whitney. Whitney and Mary converged at VH1 Divas Live ‘99, dressed in iconic matching red-leather ensembles, belting out Aretha’s “Ain’t No Way,” a 1968 classic that featured Whitney’s mother Cissy delivering the crucial soprano runs in the background. 

On “Don’t Waste Your Time,” Mary laments her relationship woes and suspicions to Aretha, who further leans into the role of wise elder she so naturally assumed on 1998’s “A Rose Is Still A Rose.” “Stop making truth out of his lies,” Aretha urges. 

The two engage in a belting match of such intensity during the bridge that it’s easy to see why Mary is frequently paralleled as her generation’s Aretha. Unsurprisngly, Aretha comes out on top, at times delivering notes at such ferocity that it sounds like the vocal actually clips (audio clipping happens when an audio signal exceeds what the system receiving it can handle). The song is a high point of Mary, and even earned the duo a Grammy nomination. 

Her ex-boyfriend K-Ci Hailey even shows up for the rugged and bluesy “Not Lookin.” It closes the chapter on that part of her life, for better or worse. “I know you’re sorry,” an exasperated Mary fires off as the music cuts off and the song ends.

Though he doesn’t appear on the album, it would be an oversight to not acknowledge the impact Stevie Wonder had on this body of work. His classic “Pastime Paradise” is sampled on “Time.” International pressings of the album also contain a spirited cover of “As” alongside George Michael, which was the lead single internationally, and served as a single from his compilation Ladies & Gentleman: The Best of George Michael. It was, frustratingly, excluded from both the Mary album and George’s compilation in the U.S. due to label politics around George’s then-recent lewd conduct arrest.

Although it’s not associated with the album, around this same time Mary also recorded a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed.” It initially appeared in a 1999 NBA commercial and on a 2000 Japan-only compilation called Ballads (and finally released in the U.S. on 2003’s Conception: A Tribute to Stevie Wonder). Her raspy voice fits the record and arrangement impeccably. And most don’t know this, but Stevie himself actually produced it. It’s an underrated and cast-aside cut that warrants more conversation and association with this prodigiously flourishing period of Mary’s career. 

A deluxe version of Mary included two additional songs: the brooding “Sincerity” featuring DMX and Nas, and “Confrontation” which sounds like it would be at home on earlier Mary records. The Japan pressing of the album added a bonus track “Almost Gone,” an interlude placed right in the middle of the album. Similar to the opening cut, “Almost Gone” was written, produced, and featured Lalah Hathaway. 

The album closes on an empowering note: a cover of First Choice’s “Let No Man Put Asunder.” The dance record topically foreshadows the No More Drama that would follow in 2001. Whether she’s single or attached, Mary is standing on her own two feet, not letting the weight of men and the baggage associated with them hold her back or slow her down. 

Mary didn’t skimp on the album, and she certainly didn’t skimp on the extras for the album either. Mary J. Blige has a treasure trove of remixes from her first decade in the business, though they are usually rare and still-difficult to track down. Mary remixes exist in staggering abundance. Even as I dug around for all the mixes, I was struck by just how many exist, and how many contain new vocals from Mary. It’s to the point where even as I finish this piece up, I have twice stumbled on more remixes than I discovered in my initial dive. As I mentioned above, Mary could easily be reissued as a 4-CD set with all the official remixes floating around out there. That’s how much space would be required to house this sprawling array of music.

To satisfy fans of her hip-hop-driven sounds, “All That I Can Say,” ‘Deep Inside,” and “Your Child” were all flipped over hard hip hop beats and laced with new vocals from Mary along with guest spots from Rah Digga, Mobb Deep, and Ghostface Killah respectively. All were scarcely available at best, relegated to promo and mixtape CDs and to this day never formally released outside of 12” singles. Except “Your Child,” which later appeared on international versions of the 2003 single “Love @ 1st Sight.” The former admonishes a cheating woman beater, departing heavily from the love-drunk tone of the original. While the latter two build on the themes of get-to-know-me-for-me-not-the-star and an unfaithful man fathering a child out of infidelity. 

Interestingly, during a 1999 Hot 97 interview with Angie Martinez, Mary divulged that her label pushed for Mary to be a double album, and she almost recorded enough material to make it happen, including these remixes. She resisted the idea though, because it would make the LP too expensive for her fans. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Craig Seymour for sharing his audio of that interview, which includes two of the below remixes, and a host of other rare tracks from the Mary album and beyond)

Numerous remixes exist for “As,” “Deep Inside,” “Your Child,” “Give Me You,” and “Let No Man Put Asunder.” “All That I Can Say” seems to just have the hip hop mix above (and a verse that Lauryn Hill performed on The Queen Latifah Show, which may or may not have even been recorded). In the U.K., the Niño club remix of “Give Me You”’s became the main release for the single which led to its inclusion on a pressing of the album and a separate music video clearly (and rightfully) targeted to the gay clubs. 

For the “Shelter Remix” of the album’s closing cover of “Let No Man Put Asunder,” she was joined by First Choice lead singer Rochelle Fleming. Like the other mixes it was relegated to 12” singles and promo CDs and has never been officially released on CD or digitally. Bafflingly 2002’s Dance For Me remix collection closed with the album version of “Let No Man Put Asunder,” despite a slew of remixes existing, the aforementioned convergence with Fleming, a fantastic expansion by Maurice Joshua, and a hard-hitting, resung mix. Here’s an assortment of the dance remixes that strike me most from Mary. 

A quarter of a century later, Mary stands as one of Mary J. Blige’s best and most important bodies of work. The overflowing reservoir of material makes it unequivocally clear that a sweeping re-issue is overdue. It’s time to bring the rest of Mary into the streaming era.