Considering she's between albums, Deborah Cox is a busy woman. The gorgeous R&B singer -- who duets with Whitney Houston on her current single, "Same Script, Different Cast," from Houston's Greatest Hits, and has sold a couple of million of her own albums -- celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday July 13 with the launch of her "ultimate fan-artist" Web site.

"I've checked out other [artists'] sites and I didn't like the fact that they were the 'celebrity' and you felt disconnected from them," she explains. "I want to be able to connect with the people that are buying my music." To that end, the Mediatropolis-designed site is complete with audio, video, animation, Web chats, photo scrapbook and, Cox's brainchild, an interactive advice forum for fans.

"People send me emails and talk about their intimate life-challenging experiences," Cox recounts. "I found myself emailing back because this person's going through abuse or this person's father just died or someone wants to commit suicide -- really intimate stuff. So I thought I should create some kind of room where people can log on and give each other support."

The singer, who will soon begin work on her third album and will include video footage and audio bites of those sessions on the site, was signed personally to Arista in the early Nineties by the legendary Clive Davis, who signed top female stars Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin , Patti Smith, Whitney Houston and Annie Lennox. Then president and CEO of the label, Davis was recently forced to step down but plans to form Davis Entertainment. Whether Cox follows "is still in negotiations right now," she says. "My contract is still with Arista Records, so there's a lot of legalities that still have to be dealt with.

"I think I could make a great record with L.A.," she adds, referring to the new president L.A. Reid. "I've got his support because I've known him since he was at LaFace, so it wouldn't be a strange situation staying at Arista. I won't know anything officially probably for another few weeks."

In August, Cox will be heading to Uganda with World Vision and is also scheduled to meet with R. Kelly about producing some of her new album. "We were on tour last year and we talked about working together, so now it's finally coming to fruition," she says. "We're basically just meeting to get a vibe and a feel for each other. And then I'm going to continue working with Shep Crawford who did 'Nobody's Supposed to Be Here,' and 'We Can't Be Friends.' Instead of being like eight producers, [I'd like] maybe two to three because I want a different vibe this time."

The duet with Houston, written by Crawford for Cox as a bridge record, will likely be included on the album as well. They are trying to schedule time to shoot a video. "I don't know if it's going to happen. There's a lot of stuff going on in her personal life," Cox says.

Meanwhile, Cox will soon be seen in the film Love Come Down in which she stars as a woman searching for her biological parents with her boyfriend, a drug-addled aspiring comedian (Larenz Tate). Cox will attend the premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September and then get right to work on recording her third album.

"I'm just going to pop this baby out," she says.

KAREN BLISS
(July 15, 2000)