Song:Comforter
Album:20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best Of Shai
The R&B group Shai had brief success in the early 90s. They had three top ten hits including Comforter though it wasn't their biggest hit. I guess it's easy to confuse them with similar groups of the era like Boyz II Men. One big difference with Shai is they wrote and produced all their own music. All four guys were students at Howard University in Washington, DC. Carl "Groove" Martin and Darnell Van Rensalier were fraternity brothers. They were a duo at first but they decided a quartet would work better. They added fraternity brother Marc Gay and Van Rensalier's former roommate Garfield Bright. They found the name Shai in the Egyptian Book Of the Dead. Martin wrote If I Ever Fall In Love. They recorded a demo and it was a hit at Washington radio station WPGC. That station was part of a chain. And when the song spread to other stations in the chain, Shai signed with MCA's Gasoline Alley label. Then they recorded an album. If I Ever Fall In Love reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992. The only thing that kept it from #1 was Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You. Comforter was the second single. That and the third single Baby I'm Yours both reached #10 on the Billboard Hot 100. As I said, Shai wrote and produced their own music. Martin thought he was the leader and that led to the group's decline. When their 1995 album Blackface didn't do as well as the first album, Martin left Shai. And MCA dropped them. You can get all their hits on this budget comp. Van Rensalier and Bright still lead a version of Shai. When he isn't singing, Bright is a professor at Georgia State University. Here's the video for Comforter by Shai.
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