While it seems that Bad Boy is falling apart all around him, Carl Thomas may be the artist that can save it. The Chicago native is best known for lacing two popular rap tracks with his sultry vocals — Biggie's "The World Is Filled With Pimps and Hoes, " and the remix of Puffy's "Been Around the World." Even when competing with the throbbing tracks and the personalities rapping over them, Thomas' voice stood out. His newest single, "I Wish," comes off his long-awaited debut album, due this summer. It's the kind of soul you've probably been wishing for for a long time — it's insistent, infused with the kind of raw emotion and distinctive vocals that make for music that takes a hold of you and refuses to let you forget it.
While Thomas is mysterious about his current love life, (we do know he's left Chicago behind to take up residence in Brooklyn) he has plenty to say about love. After reading this, you'll be compelled to hear his music because even in conversation, he's sexy and sincere — an irresistible combination. He's living proof that there are still soul singers who make records about real, complicated, grown-up emotions instead of today's adolescent pleading for sex. Here he talks about love, sex and relationship, and why Murphy's Oil soap is a necessity. Welcome to Carl Thomas.
"My definition of love? It's a manifestation of how you feel about someone. I think that true love is definitely given from God. I think that love is what you make it. I think it's also what you perceive it to be. And in the middle of all that, love feels exactly how it feels. It feels a lot of ways at times. Love represents itself in my life in many different ways: my family, my music, my God There is time when love can hurt and love can frustrate you. But all in all, it's exactly what you make it."
" It is a doing, it's not a saying, you know. It's way more of a verb, as opposed to a talking or a pondering. I believe true love to be confident. You know how sometimes you experience that gray area if you not sure. I've been there before. A lot of young, young kids, regardless of what they say they feel about love, they're all in a search for an introduction to it. Because when you do find it, no matter how young or how old, your introduction to it is so untainted it's almost overwhelming. It's before we've been hit with the ice of experience. For the guys, before we learn anything about that playa mentality, it's really pure when its puppy love, when it's that school thing — when nobody can say anything bad to you about that person. I believe true love to be cooperative. There are plenty of individuals who bury themselves in occupations, people who allow things outside of themselves to define them. That's just an example because it's easy for people to bury themselves in things to just turn that off. So
metimes people bury themselves in church — I don't need no man, I don't need no woman. Bury themselves in family — anything to forget about what really makes you happy."
"Ultimately, I think it has something to do with each other but its definitely different for each person. I just try to sing about different aspects [of love] from the begging aspects to the 'I don't want it no more.' I think sometimes we [soul singers] don't know more about love but we might know a little bit more about expressing it. You become a soul singer because it gratifies you. I'm doing what I'm doing because it gratifies me and it makes me happy. The bottom line to you doing this interview and me making a record is that is makes us feel good. I feel good getting up on stage in front of people and just entertaining them and making them feel good. It's my desire to just make you feel sexy, because I want to live a sexy lifestyle. I just do. I think it's sexy because I don't care what anybody thinks about it. I don't care. I think that's the sexiest thing about it. My ability to respectfully know how much I don't care about what people about what makes me happy."
"It wouldn't matter to me if someone who likes my music happened to see me cry in church, or somebody that I did a rap record with sees me giving turkeys to homeless people. I'm sexy from my music to my clothes to the way I wax my floors. Murphy's Oil soap makes your floor look sexy. My belief is that God created everything in a divine order. Then there was humanity and then there was gender and then there was race. If you make decisions outside this divine order, your humanity comes into question. It's my wish that people look at love from a human standpoint, not from a Black standpoint, a White standpoint, a female standpoint or a male standpoint. Being human is a constant imperfect state of being and if you're not comfortable with that, you're going to have a long hard life. The blame game is deadly, it's powerful. It can literally kill love. Are you more concerned with the man or woman who can't express themselves or are you more concerned with why? Love is individual but it's bigger than an individual th
ing. It has omnipresent capabilities."
If you're in love with someone, you wake up each and every day and you choose to love them, even though you're arguing about this and that. Loving them is bigger than any negative aspect of your daily living. It's bigger than the arguments about the garbage, and the friends and why you didn't call me. But if you're conscious that I love you, if you're in love with someone — be honest, how long can you really be mad at them? You're too busy trying to get back to the fun shit. I don't want to come off to you as somebody who teaches seminars but I've made it my business as singer and songwriter and musician….[to have insight about love.] How can I sing about being hurt when I never had my heart stomped on? How can I sing a song about infidelity when I've never dogged a woman? I've been on both sides of the track of love. I've hurt and then I've been hurt. I know what it feels like on both sides. Neither side feels good. I think I'm a love student. The reason that I sound the way I do is that I accept my appr
