"I sing about... love," he confesses, his voice dropping to an almost religious hush. "A lot of people ask me, ŒWhy do you just sing about love?' And I say, ŒLove is important. If you don't have it, you go crazy. Being alone is like being in jail. You need to get out.'"
"But," he adds, "I also sing about other things. For instance, I sing about how you try to help a person, and they steady try to do you wrong."
Anthony Camera
Orlando Terrell's latest disc, Sexy Smile, is
available exclusively at Wax Trax.
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At the top of Terrell's list of wrongdoers is the world-famous, bazillion-selling hip-hop act Outkast. He alleges that the group's label, Arista, took his demo tapes, sent him rejection letters and then passed the tapes along to Outkast members Big Boi and Andre 3000, who then used Terrell's music as the template for their 2000 smash album Stankonia. Indeed, Terrell -- a card-carrying ASCAP member -- even tried to sue Outkast that year for copyright infringement.
"They ripped me off," he states flatly. "They took the music and made it similar. So I went to a lawyer and tried to sue them, but they never responded back. Then I finally got in touch with Arista Records and said, ŒWell, you know you've got a lawsuit against you?' and they were like, ŒWhere?' And I said, ŒIn Denver.' Then they filed to get it dismissed. The judge, he gave me ten days to find a lawyer to rewrite the lawsuit, 'cause I wrote it myself. So I went to a lawyer, and he said he'd take the case on a contingency basis. But he backed out at the last minute; he said the music was similar, but not similar enough. The case was thrown out of court."
Terrell, 33 years old and currently unemployed, now channels most of his passion and ambition into writing and recording new songs. And although playing live shows is the cornerstone of music promotion, he's only performed in front of people a couple of times in his life -- the most memorable being a talent show he participated in while visiting Grand Rapids at age eighteen. "They started throwing stuff at me," he admits with a raucous laugh. "So I just start dunking and dodging and shit. I didn't have a band or anything; it was just me. I had one of my songs all recorded on tape, and I just sung along. But I didn't get mad at the people who were throwing stuff, 'cause by the end, they had all walked off. The song was called ŒI Need You Here.'"
Such setbacks are enough to send rock stars into hissy fits or entire emo bands into a fetal position. But Terrell is a survivor, and -- outsider or not -- his music is the most soulful, honest, unique and untainted outpouring of a human heart that one could ever hope to hear. "I keep all these," he says, digging through a duffel bag full of form rejection letters on record-label stationery. "I just keep them, 'cause any response is a good response. I got to try to get a record deal before I stop breathing. I'll just keep selling tapes, and hopefully somebody will say, ŒHey, this guy's all right. I want to see what he's all about.'
"You just have to remember that nothing could happen without God first," he concludes without a trace of defeat or despair. "You just feel it. When it's that time, love will make it happen."
