Suzette Charles, 63, Releases Debut Album 33 Years Late
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- Suzette Charles was crowned the first biracial Miss America in 1984 after Vanessa Williams resigned when Penthouse published a previous nude photoshoot; Charles had been first runner-up performing Barbra Streisand's 'Kiss Me in the Rain.'
- Charles toured with Bill Cosby as a supporting act in the 1980s, says her father phoned Cosby to warn him off, and claims Cosby publicly embarrassed her on stage before rescinding a role she had been offered on the about-to-launch Cosby Show.
- Charles flew unannounced to Stock Aitken Waterman's London office in 1993, where Mike Stock wrote six songs for her; single 'Free to Love Again' reached No. 58 in the UK before SAW split up and RCA dropped her.
- David Foster signed Charles in 1994 to his Atlantic sub-label 143 Records, where she recorded an album's worth of material that remains unreleased to this day.
- Charles then married a doctor who she says blocked her music career; she raised two children out of the spotlight until her daughter left for college, when she divorced, returned to studying, and began dating attorney Paul Kaplan.
- Charles and Stock reunited at his studio in 2015 and began rerecording the old tracks alongside five new compositions in 2024, with Charles now describing her finished self-titled album as the most emotional of projects.
Why it matters: Charles is now one of the only women of her age bracket to land a finished pop record of this kind; her own quote from producer Mike Stock is that 'nobody in the music industry wants to cater to women of a certain age,' and her self-titled debut directly tests that market assumption with disco-pop tracks Stock compares to his work with Paul McCartney and Donna Summer.
