Brandy paid homage to her hero, Whitney Houston, at last week’s NFC Championship Game when she sang the National Anthem. The Grammy-winning singer has now expressed how hard it has been to deal with Houston’s passing in a new book.
The “Boy Is Mine” singer wrote about the iconic vocalist in the foreword of a Houston biography, Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston, written by journalist Gerrick Kennedy. Houston and Brandy worked together in a 1997 TV film adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Brandy played the titular character while Houston played the Fairy Godmother and a bond between the two formed.
In the written passage, Brandy spoke about how she mourned Houston’s death and struggled with wanting to find someone to blame.
“It’s natural for people to want to place blame. I placed a lot of blame on a lot of people too, when it came to Whitney,” Brandy wrote. “We loved her so much and needed something or someone to attach blame to because it was so hard to accept that she was gone.”
Houston endured much turmoil in the latter portions of her life, ultimately leading to her death in 2012 at only 48-years-old. However, despite the public knowledge of Houston’s struggles with drug addiction, Brandy says that’s not hers and anyone else’s place to discuss.
“We don’t really have the right to speak on anything that she had to go through in her life,” she wrote. “No one knows what she was running from. No one knows what she was trying to overcome. No one knows the costs that came with being Whitney Houston. That level of fame, that level of expectation, that level of pressure.”
Brandy would go on to speak how Houston’s legacy led to the inspiration of other female singers, like herself, to be all they could be.
“Whitney’s voice could bring you closer to God,” she wrote. “She has inspired generations of little girls all over the world to sing from their hearts and guts. That was her magic, and that’s her legacy. And we’ll never see another Whitney Houston.”
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