I'm just an everyday person, and I just sing about the same things that everyday people go through," says Tweet, Missy Elliott's new soul protegee. If enough everyday people catch their boyfriends sneaking into motels with other women or go on drunken benders and attempt suicide, then Tweet's shockingly revealing debut, Southern Hummingbird, should be a smash.

Tweet says that she's lived the stories in such songs as "Motel" and "Drunk," with lyrics like "I'd rather be drunk than drown in my tears." She says, "I'd save my pennies to buy little forty ouncers of malt liquor. I reached that point where you drink to ease the pain, but then once that beer is gone, you're back to the same thing. So I decided to kill myself. I had a plan: I was going to use pills."

Tweet hit bottom toward the end of 2000, when it seemed her musical career was over. A church singer since childhood in her native Rochester, New York, Tweet joined a trio called Sugah in 1994. She says the group was designed to be the "millennium Supremes before Destiny's Child -- we had a sound before our time." When Sugah dissolved without ever releasing an album, so did Tweet. "We wasted six years, basically," she says. "When I left, I was at the edge. We broke up without even a record deal, and I moved back in with my mom. I felt like a failure." Tweet spiraled into depression and alcoholism, and she might not have escaped if Missy Elliott hadn't found her. Elliott, who had worked with Sugah back in the mid-Nineties, phoned out of the blue to see whether Tweet would sing backup on her album Miss E . . . So Addictive. According to Tweet, Elliott's call came the week she planned to end it all. Instead, she flew to L.A. and joined Elliott in the studio. Between sessions, Missy overheard Tweet playing an acoustic guitar and singing one of her original compositions; immediately, she said she would try and get Tweet her own record deal.

Southern Hummingbird is a refreshing anomaly: combining the twisted beats of hip-hop producers including Timbaland, funky-fresh cameos from guests like Elliott and Bilal, and tortured acoustic-guitar lullabies, Tweet comes off like an R&B Alanis Morissette. And don't be surprised if Tweet raises a few eyebrows here and there. "Motel," for example, hot-wires the folkie strum of classic Tracy Chapman with such hotheaded lyrics as "Go to hell, baby, 'cause I know I saw you going into a motel!" And with a hit single, "Oops! (Oh My)" -- featuring the refrain "Oops, there goes my skirt dropping to my feet, oh my/Oooh" -- Tweet may have the naughtiest song in the Top Forty.

Or maybe not. " 'Oops!' is about self-love," she explains.

Masturbation? "That's what Missy told me she thought it was, but it's really about me getting over my insecurities," she adds. "One night, I came home from a club, noticed myself in the mirror and realized I'm OK -- regardless of what I'm trippin' about. Instead of going to a psychiatrist, I started writing songs. I'm not afraid to sing about anything -- I'll tell someone to go to hell. I can only write about what I know, and I tell the whole thing. I kept it inside for so long, it's like therapy when it comes out. I just wanna be free."

MATT DIEHL
(May 9, 2002)