Stacy Lattisaw Sixteen CD

A few years before the teenage-to-womanhood liberation of Janet Jackson's epic Control album, Stacy Lattisaw stripped a lot of her R&B roots away on this album-length ode to being teenager. It's a heavily sugarcoated synth pop affair, no doubt due in part to the production aesthetics of Narada Michael Walden, who took many of the ideas implemented here and evolved them for other artists such as Whitney Houston later in the decade. The topics are highly predictable in nature, with titles like "16," "Black Pumps and Pink Lipstick," and "What's So Hot 'Bout Bad Boys" pretty much delivering as advertised. However, Lattisaw's vocals are in prime form, as she easily reaches a wide range of notes and delivers passages with relative ease, something that a very young diva in training by the name of Beyoncé no doubt heard on her parents' turntable. ~ Rob Theakston

Recording information: Room 10 Recording, Washington D.C; The Automatt, San Francisco, CA.

Arranger: Narada Michael Walden.

Personnel: Stacy Lattisaw (vocals); Stacy Lattisaw; Kathy Sledge (vocals); Corrado Rustici (guitar); Mike Gibbs (strings); Marc Russo (saxophone); Jerry Hey (horns); Preston Glass (percussion, background vocals); Carla Vaughn, Yolanda Glass, Jim Gilstrap, John Lehman, Vicki Randle, Myrna Matthews (background vocals); David Sancious (keyboards, synthesizer); Narada Michael Walden (keyboards, drums, percussion); Angela Bofill (background vocals).

Audio Mixer: David Frazer.