Donny Osmond 'What I Meant to Say' album

This one is special. What I Meant To Say is Donny Osmond's 54th album (a mind-boggling statistic for an eternally youthful man in his mid-40s) and it may be, for him, the most satisfying yet.

After This Is the Moment, a smashing disc of Broadway hits produced by Phil Ramone, followed by Somewhere in Time, an album on which he covered some of his favorite classic love songs, Donny has taken the ultimate creative risk with his third release for Decca: a collection of original songs straight from the heart, which he also produced.

The "risk" is paying off handsomely. Not only did What I Meant To Say hit the charts immediately when it was released in the United Kingdom, it has given Donny one of the most rewarding creative experiences in his long and remarkable career. "As far as I'm concerned, as the writer and the producer, he says. "I don't worry that it's going to be 'accepted.' The point is, I have accepted it as my best work thus far. Even though it's my 54th album, it's the one that I'm most proud of."

The title of What I Meant To Say tells you everything. These are personal songs, and a glance at the titles - "Keep Her In Mind," "In It For Love," "My Perfect Rhyme," "Whenever You're In Trouble," "This Guy's In Love With You" - reveals the depth of intimacy and affection they express. "My Perfect Rhyme" is a long-overdue song for Donny's wife, Debbie. "I promised her a while back that I would write a song for her -- and about her." Sheepishly, he adds, "Actually, I made the promise some 26 years ago." After performing the completed song for her -- without a hint in advance of the lyric or the melody - "First, she got a little teary. Then she said, 'All right, you've just bought yourself another 26 years. That was the best line. I couldn't have been happier."

"Whenever You're In Trouble" was inspired by Donny's 19-year-old son, Brandon, who was suffering from a bad spell of homesickness after serving the first six months of his two-year mission overseas for their church. With its theme of enduring love, the song developed an even greater significance when Donny's mother passed away earlier this year during the making of this record. "It occurred to me after I wrote it that this song is everything she told us," he says. "She was always there for us - a shoulder to cry on, just an incredibly loving person -- the perfect mother. She made each of us nine kids feels like she was our special protector and that each one of us was 'her favorite.' So although it was inspired by my son, the concept of 'Whenever You're In Trouble' really comes from her. It's almost as if she wrote it through me, to my children."

The depth of feeling makes it clear that the process of creating What I Meant To Say was never easy and not necessarily fun. Donny says he had to dig deep in writing these songs and, in the end, be a bit ruthless in arriving at the material that ultimately worked. "Satisfying" is the word he keeps repeating to describe the experience. He laughs as he recalls a moment that actually sparked the concept of the album - a rather offensive suggestion from an interviewer who, after the release of Somewhere in Time, virtually accused him of "hiding behind" other people's songs.

"But the hard part was, he was absolutely right," Donny says. "Even though there have been a lot of people who've had wonderful careers - Sinatra being one of them - singing other people's songs, I thought, 'It's time to write my own material, and sing my own melodies, my own lyrics.' When Elliot Kennedy and Gary Barlow, the co-producers, sat down with me to start this album, they said, 'most of this, if not all of it, is going to have to come from you.' I remember letting out a big sigh and said, 'I realize that.' That's when I started putting the pen to paper."

On What I Meant To Say, Donny collaborated with several different writers but the strongest creative influence was probably his own experience.

A star since he was five years old, when he became an international sensation singing with his brothers, Donny Osmond drew inspiration not only from the emotional roller coaster of a career with extreme highs and lows, but also from a musical legacy that reaches back to the days when Henry Mancini was his conductor and Dave Grusin his pianist. He has absorbed the sounds of the last 40 years, from the soaring ballads of Broadway to the irresistible pull of R&B and funk, and made them all a part of his musical personality. "If you go back to the early days of Donny and Marie," Donny says, recalling the classic TV show he did with his sister in the 1970s, "I was performing, every week, at least three or four of the top 10 records on the charts at the time, so I was singing everybody else's style of music, in their style. It was like putting together an album every week. I was learning from the best in the business. My training was everywhere."

Working with Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy, he takes his first-ever producer credit on What I Meant To Say, though he realized in the midst of the process that he has been producing for years.

"When we started to work, Gary and Eliot said to me, 'You know your way around the studio - you're going to produce your own vocals on this project,' Donny says. "And it was like a weight just lifted off my shoulders. I had always wanted to try doing my vocals myself. I could 'perfect' them as much as I wanted or I could keep them as imperfect as I wanted. That's the challenge of producing, as I see it. You can overproduce songs and take the life out of them. I would go back to the old Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye records, even Sinatra - they're not necessarily in pitch, everything's not perfect, but because of the way they performed it, with passion, they're perfect. So, this time, I could leave in some 'mistakes' but know that the feeling is there."

That may be the key to What I Meant To Say, and why it is so special to him. Decades of experience and acclaim have prepared Donny Osmond for the challenge of creating an album of original music. And the challenge required him to strip away all those trappings, all the rhetoric of stardom, and reach inside his heart. What he discovered, at last, was what he meant to say.

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Donny Osmond - What I Meant to Say