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A singing role again

By Nekesa Mumbi Moody Associated Press

NEW YORK — Two years ago, the biggest question surrounding Jennifer Hudson's career was whether she could act.

Everyone knew she could sing; it was her soaring, gospel-inflected voice that made her famous on American Idol in 2004. The question was whether her considerable talent extended to acting when she was cast in the drama-filled role of Effie in the movie adaptation of the musical Dreamgirls.

An Oscar win for best supporting actress answered that handily, and roles in the summer blockbuster Sex and the City and the upcoming The Secret Lives of Bees have only reaffirmed her newfound gift. But as Hudson puts the focus back on her singing with her self-titled debut CD, she has to answer more questions — including whether winning an Academy Award last year has made it easier or harder for her to be seen as a singer.

"Harder!" she declares with a laugh.

"The pressure is more on the music than on the film side, which is odd," Hudson muses. "It's like everything is expected to be big coming from me, and so it's like, 'OK, we know this is going to be huge too.' So it's magnified, and a lot of attention on it and from what I hear it's extremely anticipated — so it's like, (sighs) 'OK!'"

But Hudson is hardly harried about the release of Jennifer Hudson, released this week. She's used to defying expectations.

"I don't believe in limits, so I wasn't allowing myself to be limited and I wanted to show other sides of me, and to say, 'Well, if you like this side of Jennifer, let me introduce you to another side,'" Hudson says. "I used to consider my voice a tree with many branches, and that's what, to me, this album displays — all these different sides of me."

Those sides were obscured during her acting ascent: She had spent most of her adult life singing, but once her acting career took off, she shelved her dream of making an album while making movies.

"If I'm acting, I'm acting, if I'm singing, I'm singing," the Chicago native says. "There's no doing both, because I don't want to split my focus ... so one had to give way for the other."

Once she finally found time to revisit her music career, Hudson had to figure out how she wanted to reintroduce herself as a musician. Hudson counts Whitney Houston among her chief influences, but she was careful not to make a CD full of torch songs to showcase her powerful voice: "I didn't want to be typecast as just a big ballad singer."

Jennifer Hudson does contain soaring ballads and even her devastating rendition of And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going from Dreamgirls, but it also features a rap verse from Ludacris, a collaboration with T-Pain, production help from Ne-Yo and Timbaland, and a duet with fellow American Idol alum Fantasia.

Hudson "has such an amazing voice, you can pretty much pick any song, and she can sing it," says Harvey Mason Jr., one of the songwriters and producers on the CD who also worked with Hudson on the Dreamgirls soundtrack. "It really gave us a freedom to be really creative."

Still, Hudson doesn't necessarily have a voice or sound that neatly fits on radio playlists. She doesn't fit the gritty soul diva role like Mary J. Blige or Keyshia Cole, or the glamour queen part like Beyoncé, or the lithe singer type of Rihanna or Ciara.

Mason acknowledges that Hudson's straight-ahead singer approach might be out of sync in today's music market.

"I'm not sure how it's going to happen; I don't know how radio is going to receive her, how people are going to receive her," he says. "It might be a great breath of fresh air. It's going to be to her benefit that she doesn't sound like the typical singer who's a dancer."

The first single from the CD, the midtempo Spotlight, has been a solid hit for Hudson, now at No. 3 on Billboard's R&B/hip-hop chart. But it was a slow rise, and it hasn't had much crossover traction.

With no firm movie projects, Hudson says music will be her main focus once again, with plans for a tour in the near future.