She scored eight Grammy nominations, winning three, and the album stands as a fitting midpoint in her catalog, an unofficial marker of a more self-actualized Mary, post- No More Drama. copies off the bat, giving her the biggest first-week debut for a woman solo R&B star to date. The song secured Blige her comeback and spent 15 weeks atop Billboard’s Hip-Hop/R&B Songs chart, a streak broken only recently this past May by SZA’s “Kill Bill.” The Breakthrough became Blige’s third No.

It’s a stunning vocal showcase amid a litany of lyrical vows that capture the ecstasy of the honeymoon phase. On “Be Without You,” she’s practically levitating. In reality, Blige had a track record of romantic hits- What’s the 411?’s sweet missive “Real Love,” Share My World’s fizzy “Love Is All We Need”-but many of them are more about searching for the right love than finding it. Relishing the opportunity to prove himself a legit hitmaker outside of working with Dupri, Cox composed the simple, rapturous piano melody behind The Breakthrough’s lead single “Be Without You” in under 15 minutes, then called in his frequent collaborator Johnta Austin, who’d won his first Grammy for writing “We Belong Together.” In a 2007 interview, Austin recalled nearly scrapping the hook for “Be Without You” at first (“We’ve been too strong for too long.”) because he said he’d “never really heard Mary sing a straight-up love song.” 1 hit like the Jermaine Dupri-produced “We Belong Together.” Jimmy Iovine, then chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M, commissioned producer Bryan-Michael Cox, who’d co-written Carey’s smash, to replicate a hit for Blige’s album. Geffen positioned The Breakthrough for success, releasing it eight months after Mariah Carey’s own comeback effort, The Emancipation of Mimi, which proved how much a veteran R&B star could dominate pop with a resilient narrative if they also had a No. “I can make twenty more really depressed albums, but I choose to do something different,” Blige told NPR in 2006, echoing the classic text Sex and the City when a Paris-bound Carrie tells Miranda, “I cannot stay in New York and be single for you.”Īfter 30 years of being trapped in heartbreak and misery, Blige deserved her redemption arc. Everybody wants her to stay sad for them.

And yet, the dominant narrative is that Blige sings better when she’s in despair. Blige album is a chance for her to decompress, reboot, and present a stronger but softer version of herself.

What separates Blige from many other artists is that she is a believable work-in-progress. It’s gonna take a lifetime to really get to that point.” “I don’t think any of us will be free completely. “I’m freeing myself,” she said to NPR in 2006, defining her breakthrough as not just one epiphany but an endless series of revelations. The album reads less as a tribute to him and more like a sermon between Blige and the congregation of women who’ve seen themselves in her over the years. “It’s not just about choosing to be in love with him-it’s about choosing to be in love with myself,” she told Newsweek in 2005. Though the press described her seventh album, The Breakthrough, as a love letter to him, Blige insisted it was deeper than that. At the time, Blige was awash in bliss, two years into a marriage with her manager, Kendu Isaacs, and ready to sing it to the heavens.

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