Celebrity News
Love has a way of teaching us what we need and revealing what we’ve always deserved — and Fantasia Barrino-Taylor is letting us in on how this has been made true through your marriage.
In a recent cover story with Elle, The Color Purple star reflected on the profound impact her husband Kendall Taylor’s love has had on her life.
“He treats me like a queen. He tells me I’m a queen every day,” she told the platform. “It’s not a day I don’t wake up to him saying, ‘Good morning, beautiful.’ I wasn’t quite used to it. It made me feel very, very uncomfortable in the beginning. But he has reminded me of who I was.”
The American Idol winner acknowledged that she once felt “broken” until meeting her husband, sharing that through their relationship, she was able to undergo personal growth, realizing the significance of her past trial and vulnerabilities.
“I was broken. It wasn’t until I met my husband and I started becoming a woman that sat back and realized that everything I went through was necessary,” Barrino-Taylor says.
“I started to learn how to play chess, not checkers. I started to realize that the business is the business. Kendall, he’s pretty dope. I didn’t think I was going to have that because I didn’t think I deserved it. But remember, I told you I didn’t love myself. When I started to love on myself, I was like, girl, yeah, you deserve, you deserve, you deserve,” she adds.
The 39-year-old singer, who plays Celie in the new movie musical adaptation of The Color Purple, premiering on Christmas, has been known for her harrowing tunes that portray heartbreak, “pain,” and betrayal. But as she embarks on her new chapter, Barrino-Taylor is taking on a new approach to her performances, explaining that while she used to draw inspiration from personal experiences, she now sings from a place of empathy for others.
“That’s where it used to come from. But now I’m singing from a place of other people,” she explains. “As a soul singer, I tend to pick up and carry everybody else’s stuff. I’m still singing ‘Free Yourself,’ but I ain’t in that place. So now the way I sing it and the way I set it up, it’s like, ‘Yo, maybe you want to be free from your coworker who pissed you off. You had a long week. You need to free yourself.’"
“So, it’s not like bump a man or bump with it. I bring it from a different place. And now I feel like I’m a soul singer and I connect with everybody else’s soul and I’m singing to them now.”
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Featured image by Fantasia/Instagram
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