Toni Braxton was eager to move beyond her image as a perennial sad girl. But a song about masturbation initially felt like a bit of a stretch. “You’re Makin’ Me High,” with its snaking midtempo bassline and lustful lyrics, sounded different from her usual heartbreak anthems. Her earlier hits—“Another Sad Love Song,” “Breathe Again,” “Seven Whole Days”—were all yearning ballads; co-writer/producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds seemed to be running a sadness gazette on her debut album, writing with old-fashioned flair: “I promise you/That I shall never breathe again.” This time, she’d be moaning about “doin’ it again and again.”

Braxton hesitated at first. “Aren’t we going a little left here?” she asked Babyface, who co-wrote and produced the track with Bryce Wilson, one half of the R&B duo Groove Theory, whose defining ’90s cut, “Tell Me,” has a similarly pulsing, G-funk rhythm. Ultimately, though, she saw it as a necessary evolution. “I don’t want people to think, ‘Why is she always depressed?’” she told Essence ahead of her second album, Secrets, in 1996. “Sad songs seem to work for me, but I don’t want to be redundant.”

She didn’t. The music video confirmed her evolution: Braxton, sporting a white catsuit and a mullet, ogles and ranks a rotating lineup of bachelors in a high-rise suite alongside Vivica A. Fox and Tisha Campbell. The outfit alone marked a clear departure from the cable-knit turtleneck modesty of Braxton’s earlier videos. She had always had a quiet sensuality about her. Here, it’s explicit. Despite that, her label, LaFace, framed Secrets as an expansion of Braxton’s fanbase, not a total reinvention. Public perception said otherwise. As writer Michael A. Gonzales noted in Vibe in 1997 (Braxton posed naked for the cover, gripping a sheet and nothing else), it seemed as if the singer underwent an “image metamorphosis worthy of Kafka,” emerging “more sexy supergirl than girl next door.”

The reinvention was part strategic, part personal growth. At 28, Braxton was still coming into her sexuality. A preacher’s daughter from small-town Severn, Maryland, the self-described “late bloomer” grew up in a strict Apostolic and Methodist household that banned secular music. In interviews, she recalled having to sneak-watch Soul Train as a kid, forgoing teenage indulgences like partying and wearing jewelry. She went from harmonizing with her four sisters in a girl group, the Braxtons, to becoming the first solo female act signed to Babyface and Antonio “L.A.” Reid’s fledgling label LaFace, alongside TLC. With Secrets, Braxton was legitimately breaking away from something—a sheltered upbringing, religion, expectations—and finally centering pleasure. “I was learning about myself and letting‬‭ people know that even though I’m a P.K. [preacher’s kid], I am‬‭ my own woman,” she told USA Today in 1997. She went so far as to describe Secrets as her Control moment, a deliberate, provocative pivot toward a more sensual sound. But where Control was a clear artistic emancipation for the youngest, shyest Jackson sibling, Secrets is a much subtler transition, attempting to reconcile Braxton’s traditional soul roots with a sexier, more youthful edge.

That intention is beyond clear on “You’re Makin’ Me High,” which became Braxton’s first No. 1 hit, paired with the double A-side single, “Let It Flow,” a soft, guitar-driven self-love ballad, also featured on the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack. Together, the two records offered a broader view of Braxton as an artist fluent in both desire and heartache. Her music already sounded effortless and slick. On Secrets, she digs deeper into a contemporary pop-R&B sound she’d own more fully on her third album, 2000’s Heat.

Although Braxton had already achieved diva status by this point—winning three Grammy Awards and selling eight million copies of her 1993 self-titled debut in the U.S.—she still lingered in the shadows of the decade’s powerhouse sopranos (Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion) in the midst of their own career renaissances. It was a good year for the pop diva. Carey and Dion dominated the first half of 1996, trading No. 1s on the Hot 100 consecutively until Bone Thugs-N-Harmony finally broke their streak in May. R&B had fully entered its hip-hop soul era, with Carey’s “Fantasy (Remix),” featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard, infusing rap features into mainstream pop.

Labels were now actively rebranding soul singers as crossover stars, and Babyface’s gleaming, keyboard-forward production became integral to crafting plush pop-R&B hits. With Secrets, LaFace looked to position Braxton not just as a classic torch singer but as a full-spectrum pop diva on par with the best. “R&B will always be her base, and it’s important that we satisfy that core,” co-founder and co-president L.A. Reid told Billboard in 1996. “But because of the incredible pop success we had on her first album, she has recorded a new project that will take her beyond being just ‘another sad-love-song artist.’”

Braxton was never just singing sad songs. Her best ballads convey emotions adjacent to sadness—loneliness, frustration, betrayal, resentment, humiliation. Her music resonated particularly with Black women eager for female R&B voices to lay bare what it felt like to want and wait for love, in the simplest terms: “Seven whole days, and not a word from you”; “How many ways, I love you/Let me count the ways.” The men in Braxton’s songs were the old-school type whose ghosting habits had women like her calling up radio stations, requesting sad songs for comfort. The underlying message was that they deserved better.

Babyface’s idyllic minimalism brought out the texture in Braxton’s smoky tone. But she was also wary of falling into the Single Black Female archetype. She told Ebony in 1994, “I’m not a desperate 26-year-old trying to get a man. [And] I’m not looking for a husband. I am looking for a person that I can go out with on occasions.”

That emotional clarity anchors the strongest tracks on Secrets. “Talking in His Sleep,” co-written by Braxton and based on an odd personal experience, recounts a partner’s admission to infidelity while sleeping. Here, she sings in clipped, operatic spoken word: “At. Night. When. He. Lays. Down…” It’s a monologue as gripping as a Judge Judy interrogation. The flip side is the tamer, Babyface-produced “How Could an Angel Break My Heart,” where Kenny G’s theatrical sax keeps the record firmly in unhip adult contemporary territory. On another of his productions, “Why Should I Care,” Braxton circles grief with clear-eyed logic over a gently piercing electric guitar: “I was afraid you’d break my heart in two/Fate would have it that you broke it anyway,” she relents. The song is a reminder that her power as a vocalist comes largely from restraint, her ability to sing heartbreak as both a revelation and a potential black hole.

Braxton always preferred messier love songs. While working on her debut, she told Babyface and L.A. Reid she wanted her music to address the “realistic side” of relationships: “Not, ‘Harold, will you be home early tonight, dear?’” but rather, she explained to Ebony, “‘Where have you been? Why haven’t you called me? I’ve been waiting all week long!’” Braxton’s interpretation of that was “Love Shoulda Brought You Home,” her 1992 breakout hit from the Boomerang soundtrack. (The song title echoes Halle Berry’s classic outburst in the movie: “Love should have brought your ass home last night!”) Braxton’s moody contralto immediately drew comparisons to Anita Baker, who had in fact recommended Braxton for the song, originally written for Baker. Both women were a natural fit on quiet storm radio, a late-night format where the mood was sultry, grown, and slow, but Braxton’s style was notably cockier. Her deep, undulating vocals set her apart from established artists in steady rotation. She became so famous for applying medical-grade melisma to songs that her style has been parodied repeatedly over the years. She’s among the last of a breed of R&B singers who’ve mastered the art of gospel runs, turning simple ballads into soulful novellas.

The most iconic display of that technique is “Un-Break My Heart.” Braxton practically recorded the song under duress—Arista head Clive Davis reportedly threatened to withhold the release of Secrets unless she did. For Braxton, the song felt regressive. “I knew I wanted to change my image and be a little sexier,” she told the New York Post in 2016. “It was strategic to be an [adult contemporary] artist because of the texture of my voice, but I wanted to be 25 years old. I thought ‘Un-Break My Heart’ would put me back in the same category of being an adult contemporary artist.’”

The song has since become a textbook example of Diane Warren’s method of working backwards from a song’s title. When Warren first brought the record to Davis and played it with the chords, he objected: “You can’t rhyme ‘rain’ and ‘pain.’” Toni Braxton could! Producer David Foster outfitted the track with tense strings. Babyface suggested they keep the song in a lower key for Braxton, who sounds sick inside, trying to will an ex-lover back into her life. Warren’s songwriting (“The nights are so unkind”; “Come back and bring back my smile”) matches Babyface’s in pure sweetness and formality.

I hated the song at first. It felt sweeping and overdone. Stunningly, Braxton delivers, drifting in and out of pockets, harmonizing over a wash of plucky Spanish guitars with controlled anguish. She transformed it into an overture that’s spawned a universe of house remixes—most notably the sparkling Soul-Hex Anthem version and Frankie Knuckles’ Franktidrama Club Mix, which blends Braxton’s original, syrupy vocals over spacious, heartbeat synths. “Un-Break My Heart” had just hit No. 1 that December when Braxton sang it, a bit pitchily, at the Billboard Music Awards, wearing a sheer gown, which she eventually tore off to reveal a lingerie catsuit underneath while breaking out the house version. Host Chris Rock couldn’t resist commenting afterward, “Look at sexy Toni. Woo!”—and, in a sign of the times, being shocked over two men dancing together on stage.

Between Braxton’s debut and Secrets, Babyface took on the task of writing and producing most of the soundtrack for 1995’s Waiting to Exhale, the film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel about four friends in different stages of heartbreak. The lineup remains unmatched in star power, and “Let It Flow” stands out as one of the soundtrack’s core ballads, a gorgeous acoustic guitar track exemplifying how smooth Braxton sounds when she leans into softness. The Secrets track “I Love Me Some Him” is, similarly, peak swooning Toni, a shimmering lovergirl anthem produced by Soulshock & Karlin, the Danish duo behind CeCe Peniston’s spunky “I’m in the Mood” and Monica’s “Before You Walk Out of My Life.” Braxton’s vocals here sound laid-back and linen-smooth on a decadent, stripped-down quiet storm number. Again, on the album’s midtempo opener “Come on Over Here,” she promises devotion while admitting she’s hard to please. The song was co-produced by Reid and LaFace singer-songwriter Tony Rich, aka the Tony Rich Project, whose 1995 single “Nobody Knows” is a defining bluesy ’90s cut, peaking at No. 2 on the Hot 100. He adds an atypical bounce to the track and arrangement, giving Braxton’s vocals a sort of new-jack verve. She fades out with one of her trademark breezy mumbled ad-libs.

As much as Braxton wanted to avoid redundancy on Secrets, she was the undisputed voice of heartbreak. She’s firmly in pleading mode on “Find Me a Man,” preaching affirmations about not settling for less. (The line, “I’m just a girl that doesn’t like the thought of being alone” borders on rom-com melodrama.) “There’s No Me Without You” is spare and dreamy, but melodically among the stiffer Babyface ballads. The best thing about it is the prechorus, a spiraling inner monologue that sounds like it could be a seven-minute modern-day group-chat voice memo: “You told me everything would be fine/Then why am I losing my mind?/How come I feel like a fool?/Why do I keep losing you?/Why do I love in despair/When you’re not there?”

Braxton’s music showed such a high level of self-awareness that news of her being broke was genuinely shocking back then. A year after releasing Secrets, she filed a lawsuit against LaFace and its parent company, Arista, attempting to void her contract. Her labelmates, TLC, had previously filed for bankruptcy in 1995, and by 1998, Braxton would do the same. (She later shared that Prince called her to offer guidance, and they remained friends.) Her appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show that year was the ’90s version of a viral moment—Oprah chastising Braxton for overspending on Gucci flatware. (A fair point.) “Nobody can believe that you’re gonna be broke. Is that true? That you’re gonna be B-R-O-K-E broke? Like broke?” Winfrey asks, incredulous.

“That moment completely changed my career,” Braxton recalled in a 2012 episode of VH1’s Behind the Music. “It made people look down on me.” Braxton has since explained that a 10-year gag order prevented her from speaking freely about the lawsuit at the time, so the narrative is only relevant to Secrets in hindsight—a cautionary tale of a naive artist caught in a predatory business, trying to regain both her sexual and financial independence. Braxton never did quite recover in the public eye. Both her debut and Secrets went eight times platinum. The Heat sold a quarter of that amount, succeeding on the strength of its vehement Hot 100 No. 2 hit, “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” an epic read. While 2005’s Libra and 2014’s Love, Marriage & Divorce, her joint project with Babyface, remain underrated, Braxton’s subsequent albums never matched the critical and commercial heights of Secrets or the sheer gelatinousness of “Un-Break My Heart.”

Although Secrets wasn’t a Janet-style pop reinvention, the album stands as an early, significant instance of a woman in R&B redefining her sound and image before “good girl gone bad” became a packaged arc. It took four years for Braxton to regroup and release another album, post-bankruptcy. (She filed a second time in 2010.) Decades later, she was still reclaiming her sexuality. In 2020, she expressed regret over not having more sex when she was younger, saying it “was not a good look” at 52. When she appeared on Sherri Shepherd’s talk show in 2023, the host quipped, half-seriously, “At this age, you really think God cares if we a ho?” Braxton can barely contain herself. On the couch, she bursts into a gleeful body roll in agreement, finally allowing herself to be less demure.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.