Trivia / Bobby Brown

• Breakup Breakout: Excluding splinter group Bell Biv DeVoe, Bobby is the most successful member of New Edition. While all members had successful solo runs, Bobby outperformed all of them between 1988-1992.
• No Export for You: Weirdly inverted. The Bobby/Whitney duet "Something In Common" was released as a single in the United Kingdom, but only got a promo release in the USA, making it ineligible to chart on the Billboard pop and R&B charts due to Billboard's rules at the time.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There's a persistent rumor that the vocals on "Every Little Step" were actually performed by Brown's former New Edition bandmate Ralph Tresvant because the former was too strung out on drugs to record the song. While Brown's former manager Steven Machat corroborated the claim in 2013, Bobby and Ralph themselves were more coy about it; only saying that the song had switched hands between NE and Bobby during the recording of their respective albums.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Several songs that were given to Boy George ("Don't Take My Mind On A Trip", "You Found Another Guy", etc.) were originally written for Don't Be Cruel, but Bobby rejected them.
  • "Every Little Step" wasn't even intended for Don't Be Cruel. L.A. Reid and Babyface were intending to give it to R&B group Midnight Star, but Bobby heard the demo they made and liked it enough to record it.
  • Forever was going to be called Bobby II and be produced by Teddy Riley, R. Kelly, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and Sean Combs.
  • Bobby was supposedly in talks to work with Tupac Shakur, but the latter was murdered before anything could actually get off the ground.
  • An album called Mystic Magic was supposedly going to be the original follow up to Don't Be Cruel in 1990-91, but was shelved for unknown reasons, and replaced by Bobby instead.
    • During his 1991 Japan tour, he preformed "Tap Into My Heart", a lost single from Mystic Magic that was never heard outside of live performances.

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