BabyBoy

BabyBoy is the debut album of American Independent Artist, Singer-songwriter Stanley Ray, released on January 4, 2020. The album was initially released through DistroKid but later got reissued through Artist Republik and then again for the 3rd and final time through EmuBands. It produced 4 singles, tinderlinderlover, Lavender Boy, Being With You, and Wild Lovin'. Ray began writing for the album as a 14 year old teenager in highschool. Solely writing each and every song himself and then recorded rough demos for each one. After graduating highschool at 18 and a failed attempt at trying to live in Vegas to pursue music, he settled back in his home town in Southern IL and sought out to start production for his debut album. But he struggled to find a reliable and affordable studio, as well as decent music mixing engineers, so he would go on to record his entire debut using a studio app on his Android phone, singing directly into his phones built in mic. He describes the experience as often stressful and very tedious at times, being that he'd never had to actually record and then mix his own vocals before in that type of style or format. The 2 songs he recorded demos for as a teenager that made it on his debut were Unhandsome and Being With You, after he slightly rewrote and then re-recorded both songs to help reconstruct them from their original mono/demo formats. Those 2 songs, along with 5 others made the final cut for the album, along with an intro song and an interlude, with Ray taking complete control of the mixing and mastering using 3 different music mixer/engineering apps from his Android phone. After a year or so, he silently moved to LA after saving up $1000 and would ultimately finish recording and mixing the album there, while also preparing way in advance by doing research online about how to properly promote a new album and spent countless nights reaching out to radio outlets and playlisting pluggers, intending to be very strategic about his plans of promotion for his album and hoping to land a spot directly in the lap of mainstream success. Later, Ray would confess that he feels he ultimately regrets not keeping the overall production for the album much more simple and sparse, saying that over doing it with the production and mixing resulted in revealing and uncovering the mistakes and flaws of each song, rather than making them sound good and like they were done in a real studio. The album carries a mixture of different genres and sounds ranging from soul R&B, Pop, New Jack Swing, Funk, and Hip Hop, along with Ray's amazingly high vocal register and different techniques of singing on each individual song. He revealed it was very intentional to sing each song in a different style, mainly out of fear that he would get boxed in as being an artist only known for "singing in one way" if he didn't switch up his vocal styles. He opens the album with an intro song that shows and introduces his ability to sing whistle notes, while doing the same on "tinderlinderlover" and "Unhandsome" during the climaxs/bridges of both songs, slightly burying the note behind his main vocals. Other songs like "Being With You" and "Wild Lovin'", he uses a more simple airy soft singing style and tone, along with thick and heavy vocal layering during both of the song's choruses. It's evident that the albums sound and overall structure was influenced by Ray's personal favorite musical artists of the 80s and 90s, like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Usher, Aaliyah, Monica, TLC, Janet Jackson, and Destiny's Child, but also by one of his favorite more modern-day artist Bruno Mars. It features a wide range of producers such as Jacob "Jay-Play" Thompson, Stackalini, Matthew Olden, Acam, DAYGLO, Prod.nato, and Gabriel Quirino. The albums 1st and lead single, tinderlinderlover, played a big part in the albums success. It also showed that Stanley was not trying to go the traditional route and release an upbeat dance pop song as his debut single just to try and go viral or generate an overnight buzz in fame. Stanley was clearly striving for longevity. The album originally had a fairly slow take off but would later go on and recieved positive reviews from numerous sources online helping Stanley take off as an Indie Artist.