Who says the magazine industry is in a financial slump? Urban magazine’s such as Vibe and Vibe Vixen continue to flourish in the midst of the Internet’s growing influence on pop culture. With that being said, Canadian singer Melanie Fiona covers the March 2012 edition of Vibe Vixen.
Inside the issue, the 28-year-old vocalist discusses the follow-up to her debut album, The Bridge, titled The MF Life, which dropped in stores yesterday. The Bridge put Melanie on the map, but she’s hoping The MF Life will make her a household name.
The MF Life is a more personal journey for Melanie, who worked herself to exhaustion in 2011 promoting her debut album all over the world. During the low points, Melanie helped herself to other women’s men, such as CSI Miami star Adam Rodriguez (because she thought she deserved him more). Predictably her relationships fail mainly because, like most young women, she confuses dopamine rushes for love.
Melanie describes a dopamine rush perfectly in one of her tracks off her new album: “I’m so obsessed with you, I wanna be mixed up in you, I wanna have your bones; It’s almost really dark and twisted, but it’s sexy as hell because that’s love and that’s the intensity!”
Sorry, Melanie, that is not love. That’s the dopamine. Love is an action, not a feeling.
On getting her heart broken repeatedly by other women’s men:
You know, my heart has broken and healed and mended for the last 10 years of my life. I feel like there’s nothing that heals a broken heart except for time really. And your heart breaks all the time… I definitely think there’s a point when it shifts your energy, and for me, I just know that even when I’m in love, I still write about heartbreak and that’s an emotion that I draw on and I know people need to hear about that. I think that there’s strength in owning that [hurt] and sharing that and saying like, Yeah this is who I am and this is where I’m at. And I think [that’s] why people love the music. I will always do my best to keep that truth in my music, whether it’s the happy things people are going through, the sad things people need to hear about, the sexy things people need to hear about. There’s a song called “Break Down These Walls.” The song is about being a strong partner for your partner and helping them to break down their walls of insecurity because you know love shouldn’t be that way. And there’s another song, “Bones,” which is super, super sexy. I’m so obsessed with you, I wanna be mixed up in you, I wanna have your bones; It’s almost really dark and twisted, but it’s sexy as hell because that’s love and that’s the intensity! It’s important that I feel that my audience gets a good balance of both; however, they always tend to want those heartbreak songs.
VIBE VIXEN: Tell me the story of your first heartbreak:
MELANIE FIONA: The first cut is the deepest. I had a boyfriend when I was 16; he was a jerk, but I loved him. It was when I was recording the first album, and it was right after I got off the Kanye West [Glow In The Dark] tour in 2008. I was absolutely devastated because that was like the first crazy-stupid love I’ve ever been in in my quote-unquote adult life. I actually made the decision to end it because I decided that I had gone back and forth enough. I had decided I was not going to allow this person to really break my heart, pick it back up, treat it like shit, pick it back up and just do this rollercoaster with me. That really took me outside of the character of my true self and who I wanted to be as a woman and what type of love I wanted to experience. I had to go through it; I had to go through the lying and the cheating and everything really. I figured out all those things that I really didn’t want to see after [the breakup] ’cause if I was in it while it happened, I would’ve been like, Peace! But I was so blinded by it that when it hit me, my heart was devastated. Right after I had gotten off the Kanye West tour, when I had experienced and achieved something so grand in my life, I took a look at my life and said, I’m trying to go up and this is the one thing that’s weighing me down. And I cut it. I cut it off clean. I mean like, Do not talk about me, don’t ever call me again, we have nothing to discuss, you are not the person for me and we don’t need to be friends. That hurt because this was five years of my life. I was young. But I experienced a lot, [and] I grew a lot from that relationship. When I got off the tour actually, I tattooed this purple heart on my left wrist and that is my center of strength to remind myself that I’m always stronger than I think. Every time there was a moment where I got emotional and I wanted to call him, I’d look at this tattoo and give myself ten seconds. I’d count to ten, take a deep breath and say, Remember why you did this, remember how you got here and remember what your focus is. Sure enough it stopped me every time from calling him back.
Wow, and you haven’t talked to him since?
No. We speak now like occasionally. I promise you I didn’t speak to him or see him for three years after we broke up.
As far as your current heartbreak, are you in a place where you’re swearing off men for awhile?
I’m on a Melcation [Laughs]. I am like all about me right now. What am I going to do with my life, and what are the things that are gonna make me happy and fulfilled? There are some guys that can be around that, and be like, ‘Yo, I totally love you and I support you’ and then there are other guys who are like, ‘Ugh, you want too much! You’re too independent.’ And it’s like no, no, no, that’s definitely not it. It’s just the right guy who’s gonna fit perfectly into what it is that I’m doing; it’s just a balance. But no, I’m not swearing off men. I just don’t want men around for the sake of having men around. Too often, we make that mistake of keeping men around for the comfort, you know, just that dependency. I think is where the problem lies. And when you get away from that and just really be like, I’m cool, you can get a man in your life on a random Thursday or a random Saturday and it just adds something to your week rather than being dependent on it.
