High Note
Eric Benét Is Making New Hits and Living His Best Life
The R&B star tells us about The Co-Star, his new female-duets album, plus his unexpected success on TikTok and more
Eric Benét and I might be cousins. In any case, there’s a possibility our ancestors once walked on the same plantation — at least, that’s what the star, full name Eric Benét Jordan, half-jokingly tells me when we meet in the lounge of a New York hotel in late April. “It’s dope, right?” he says after pointing out our shared last name. “We probably are, we probably are.”
At 58 years old, Benét has both wisdom and jokes in his nature. TikTokers can catch one of the many skits where he’s talking in another accent or making a joke out of the latest trend. If you’re a true R&B head, you remember his hits from the Nineties, like the famed duet with Faith Evans on “Georgy Porgy” that spent 14 weeks on the Hot 100 chart. Now, a few days after headlining Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre, Benét is schooling me on health, authenticity, and the ability to keep an open mind.
He spent this spring on the R&B Invitation Tour, where he opened for Musiq Soulchild and Joe, giving the audience a trifecta of the Nineties’ best R&B. The tour has also been a way for Benét to promote his new album, The Co-Star, which is his first full LP in nearly a decade. While his tour solidified that he still can hit his falsetto notes, in songs like “Sometimes I Cry,” this album — which he’s released through his own label, JBR Creative Group — proves that Benét is cultivating his own legacy even further. As a music vet who has been in the industry for over 30 years, this is the start of a new chapter, one that is full of intention and learning, even in his wiser years.
The new album features 14 women as its only featured guests, continuing the concept of his 2024 summer EP, Duets, which used the same framework. Benét’s dedication to women’s voices, in a society and industry overrun with men, is hard not to notice. His ability to listen to women around him, whether or not they are singing, has generated him much success over the years. “It was Alison’s idea,” Benét says of Alison Ball, CEO and fellow co-founder of his label. “She was like, look at some of your biggest songs — [‘Georgy Porgy’] with Faith Evans and [‘Spend My Life With You’] with Tamia. You should do a whole album like that.”
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As a result, Benét and his team got to work with the Duets EP, teasing out the concept of having an all-women-features project, with their eyes set on an album that would extend the idea to even more songs. With Duets released and songs like “So Distracted,” featuring Chanté Moore, receiving much acclaim — it reached the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult R&B Airplay chart — Benét began piecing together the album but was stuck on a name. That is, until he tapped “Pretty Girl Rock” singer Keri Hilson, a dear friend and one of the artists he features on the album. “I was ruminating on what to call it for a couple weeks, and I did a session with Keri in Atlanta. I was talking to her about it, and off the dome, she was like, ‘How about Co-Star?’” Benét says, impersonating her voice. “I was like, ‘Girl, that sounds good!’”
The Co-Star feels like a compilation of Benét’s vast musical interests and expertise. Though he’s often dubbed a neo-soul artist, a category Benét isn’t fond of because he finds it too limiting, the purpose behind The Co-Star seems to be his way of stretching listeners’ ears. While there are traditional R&B elements on the album, it often feels like an international experience, with sounds from the U.K. and Brazil tapping into the musical experiences of his childhood. While the album is an authentic project of Benét’s, he leaned on new producers and songwriters like Tricky Stewart, Laney Stewart, DJ Camper, and Tony Dixon. “In the back of my mind, I’m thinking I still know how to structure a song and do what I do — but what I don’t want to do is not be relevant,” he says.
The Co-Star starts off in true R&B fashion with the sultry “Gaslight,” featuring Ari Lennox, in which Benét actually curses for the first time in his music. It’s a noticeable change for those who have been listening to him for the past three decades, yet a perfect placement that generates intrigue to continue through the next 12 tracks. Other R&B favorites, like Alex Isley and Tamar Braxton, appear on the project, with sweet and sexy tracks like “Remember Love” and “Something We Can Make Love To.” Veterans like India Arie, who’s featured on the soulful “Must Be Love,” and Melanie Fiona, on the soft yet funky “Me & Mine,” give a nostalgic feel. Then there’s the majestic sounding “Fly Away” — also on the Duets EP — featuring Corinne Bailey Rae, which feels like a meditation, with Bailey Rae and Benét’s voices intertwining as they take turns singing in falsetto.
Funny enough, Bailey Rae was another inspiration for the project, specifically the album’s last track, “Eres Mi Vida,” with Pia Toscano. “I’m proud of that song, and it’s really interesting to me,” Benét says. “When I write music, especially for a duet, I fixate on that artist, their timbre and cadence. When I found out I was doing a song with Corinne Bailey Rae, I heard a melody that was Latin or bolero-like. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, Corinne’s timbre singing this would crush people.” Benét demoed the song and sent it to Bailey Rae in London, but was let down gently. “I love her,” he says, laughing to himself before jumping into another impersonation, now of Bailey Rae’s British accent. “She said, ‘Oh, this is really lovely. I don’t think it’s me, though.’”
Still, even without getting Bailey Rae to sing the melody he’d written with her in mind, he felt excitement behind the concept. “I realized I wanted to write a song that felt like you fell in love with someone at a time where you had almost written off love,” he says. “And not only did you fall again, but you fell in love so hard that if this person left you, you would just cease to exist.” That concept is somewhat out of the norm for Benét, whose heartthrob jams like “I Wanna Be Loved” (2005), “Spend My Life With You” (1999), and “Sometimes I Cry” (2010) usually steer clear of codependent lyrical themes. “I don’t like writing those kinds of songs,” he adds. “I like to claim power, like: I’m a powerful entity, you’re a powerful entity — how about we be powerful entities together and go through life like that. But with this song, I wanted it to feel tragic and resonate as a beautifully frightening aspect of love.”
LOVE AND LOSS are themes Benét has navigated throughout his career. The youngest of five siblings, Benét grew up in Milwaukee with parents who had traveled more than 1,000 miles north from Mobile, Alabama. The Jordans’ migration to the upper Midwest was a result of fleeing the racism they grew up with in the “heart of Dixie.” “My mother would tell me stories about when she was 13 and she and her sister couldn’t walk home a certain way because they would be chased by white evil motherfuckers,” he says. That backstory, and what they went through after moving north, is etched in the Co-Star song “Southern Pride,” where Benét sings, “They say that in the northern states/There’s a lighter shade of hate to raise a family.” Yet, despite it all, Benét says his parents remained loving and nurturing, even to the point that when Benét had a crush on a white girl in high school, bringing her home for dinner, his parents were warm and accepting. “I get emotional thinking about that, because it blows my mind,” he says. “After hearing all the stories, how could you?”
Although he hates the cliché of “spiritual,” Benét’s beliefs today are more rooted in positivity and good character than what he learned growing up in the Methodist church. Still, he credits his church rearing for being partially responsible for his ability to perform. “It was my introduction to singing in front of people and eliciting an emotional response,” he recalls. “I found that if my voice was true and strong and it rang true in my mind, the front row of the old lady nurses would get happy. That’s power right there.” While the church taught him how to perform — which is how he saw the church, a performative space where its congregants role-played routine and cultural duty — it was among his family at home that he cultivated his voice, or one can say voices. “I come from a family where everybody sings and everybody has this musical acumen. My older brother Steve would do skits of five different people with five different voices,” says Benét, who has lost count of the amount of impersonations and voices he can currently mimic because he’s always coming up with new ones. “I knew from singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in kindergarten that my ears weren’t like the other ears in the class.”
Between the ages of 10 and 12, Benét began rustling through his siblings’ records and magazine subscriptions, listening to the sounds of artists like Antônio Carlos Jobim and Sérgio Mendes, adding to his collection of musical heroes like James Brown. By 1984, Benét had tried his hand at college, later dropping out to do music full-time. He and his sister Lisa joined a local Milwaukee band called Gerard before breaking off to create their own band. Around this time, he met Ball, who gave him and Lisa their first record deal, with EMI. When they were dropped after releasing one album in the early Nineties, he found himself working odd jobs to pay the bills as a new father to his oldest daughter, India. “I became an assistant engineer in this little recording studio, and was working at UPS to make ends meet,” he says.
To add to the pressure, in 1993, when India was 14 months old, her mother died in a car accident. “I was very much a single dad, who was a kid himself trying to figure out life. I was still growing and trying to figure it out.” At night he’d work on his own music, eventually creating a demo he shared with Ball — who was working for Warner Bros. by now, and signed him again. This led to his solo debut, 1996’s True to Myself, and then his breakthrough album, A Day in the Life, in 1999. Benét continued to make music through the 2000s, but went on hiatus after the release of his album From E to U: Volume 1 and the birth of his second and third daughters after marrying in 2011.
“The reason why it’s been nine years since I had a single on the radio is because my wife and I had two amazing human beings,” he says. “If I’m in the studio all the time, making records, getting gigs, I’m basically gone. So I was like, ‘I’m not going to make any new music now. I’ll tour because I have to, but I’m going to be there as much as I can until they’re older.’ It’s not easy.” His girls Lucia, 13, and Luna, 10, are now of an age where he feels comfortable going back into work and refocusing on his career.
BACK IN FULL swing, Benét has a routine that helps him maintain his balance with family and career. When he wakes in the morning, he skips breakfast and drinks his coffee black before dropping his daughters at school. He then goes to the gym for an hour before clocking into the studio, so he can be home in the evening for his family. He says his choices not to drink alcohol and to watch his diet are the reasons he’s kept the vocal range to hit the high notes on songs like “Sometimes I Cry.”
Focusing on family and enjoying the moment is also how he navigates the complications of getting older. This past New Year’s, his music director died, giving Benét a new set of grief to navigate. “It’s something that never gets easier, which is tragic because as you get older it’s happening more frequently,” he says. Yet he’s leaning back into his belief of positivity: “The inevitability of the bad news coming makes the happy days meaningful. In my twenties, I’d probably take for granted that I’m in New York, or time I can spend with my family. But the times when it’s the absence of grief, my soul is completely present. I feel that it’s a galvanizing armor.”
While the hits of the Nineties are what put Benét on the charts, he says these days he feels more authentic in the ways he can express himself. “I’m more authentic now than I’ve ever been,” he says. “People who knew me [before the fame] knew I was a goofball and class clown, but when I was first signed, the record label was like, ‘Look, you’re the smooth, sexy motherfucker. You can’t be doing “Howdy Doody” impersonations and shit.’ Somewhere along the line, I felt I had to curb all of that. I didn’t try to put on sexuality, but I did try to hold back my goofiness.”
Now, as the co-founder of his own label, in his fifties, finding a new audience on TikTok, Benét has fans who aren’t even aware he is a big-time artist. “Social media gave me an opportunity to show who I am, and that side of me has been embraced by a younger audience who may not know a lot of Eric Benét music — but it’s fine, because I’m still connecting with people by being myself,” he says. “Somewhere around the forties, you don’t give a fuck anymore, and fortunately for me it worked out.”