Mary J Blige: ‘I lost my gut and my gift. But I got it back’ “ Rebecca Nicholson

The R&B singer turned actor tells Rebecca Nicholson about her heartache, reborn hope, and why she sometimes needs to get away from herself

In 2015, Mary J Blige gave an impassioned performance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. The crowd watched her through the pouring rain, and as her most famous single, No More Drama, came to a rapturous end, she fell to the floor, and looked as if she was about to break down into tears. “I didn’t know so many people knew my songs,” she says, two years later, over dinner in a London hotel. “It was really emotional for me, for so many reasons that I can’t even get into. But life is revealing them right now.”

There’s a lot going on in Blige’s life. She’s just off the plane from the United States, and she needs fried food, so the artist known as the queen of hip-hop soul ends up picking at fish and chips and drinking a cup of tea. She seems tired. She keeps circling back to the end of her marriage. In 2016, she filed for divorce from her husband of 12 years, Kendu Isaacs, citing irreconcilable differences. He had also been her manager. She doesn’t want this interview to be “all about that one thing”, yet she can’t seem to help but talk about it, again and again. The past five years have been hard, but change is on the horizon. “This is a whole other chapter of my life,” she insists.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2h4NaiT