BeBe Winans' solo career has been a struggle to establish himself separate from his musical family, and
Dream, his fifth solo album, chronicles some of the recent difficulties.
Winans has drifted from Atlantic Records, which released his self-titled solo debut in 1997, to Motown, which handled
Love & Freedom (2000) and the concert set
BeBe Live and Up Close (2002), and on to the custom label Hidden Beach (distributed by the Epic division of Sony) for the holiday collection
My Christmas Prayer (2003) and now this album, technically issued under Hidden Beach's new gospel subsidiary, Still Waters, in conjunction with
Winans' own TMG (The Movement Group) label. (Whew!) All of which is to say that, really, this is
Winans' first "non-specialty recording" (as Hidden Beach label head
Steve McKeever puts it) in five years, spanning a divorce and what
McKeever refers to as "a much-needed sojourn." Divorces are, of course, a dicey matter in the gospel world, and perhaps it's not surprising that
Winans has a little less to say than usual on the subject of religion. In his husky tenor (reminiscent of
Teddy Pendergrass at his most unctuous),
Winans is often apologetic, notably in "Love Me Anyway," in which he regrets that "my indiscretions have caused you much pain." Clearly intended as the album's centerpiece is "I Have a Dream,"
Winans' musical setting of
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous speech from the 1963 March on Washington, which employs excerpts from the speech itself along with
Winans' earnest singing of some of its passages. The result isn't as embarrassing as might have been feared, but not nearly as powerful, say, as
Bob Marley's "War," drawn from one of Haile Selassie's speeches.
Dream actually works better in its less ambitious moments, such as a good cover of
Amy Grant's "So Glad." It probably isn't "the album of my life" that
Winans claims it to be, but it does find the artist working through his personal problems in an artistic context and suggests he has more good music ahead of him. ~ William Ruhlmann