Robin Thicke: Pretty Fly for a White Guy

He returned to Interscope and began to work an album of his own. He also began to grow out his hair, vowing not to cut it until he heard himself singing on the radio. He eventually got there, with "When I Get You Alone," a minor hit from his 2003 debut, "A Beautiful World." The album was a critical hit but a commercial dud, selling fewer than 75,000 copies, back when stars were selling that many in a day.

"It was disappointing," Thicke recalls. "And I'd stopped writing songs for other people, so the money ran out. I was living way beyond my means, renting a very expensive house up in the Hollywood hills." He struggled to get Interscope to pay for studio time and musicians to work on a second album, until the Virginia Beach hitmaker Pharrell Williams -- a fan of Thicke's debut -- persuaded the label to let Thicke sign with his Star Trak imprint.

Released in October 2006, "The Evolution of Robin Thicke" sold modestly at first but began to take off just as "Lost Without U" was ascending on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart. Thicke, whose evolution included a haircut, was touring as John Legend's opening act when the song reached No. 1, and stayed there. And then Oprah Winfrey had him on, which officially signaled his arrival.

On "Evolution," Thicke was making throwback soul -- sensitive, classic-sounding music performed with a live band, often with Thicke's own piano up front, alongside his open, vulnerable vocals. He was singing personal songs about loneliness and frustration, but also love and sexuality and social change, sometimes at the same time, as in "Would That Make U Love Me," on which he wondered: "If I'm a different color/Could you be my brother?"

The new album, "Something Else," finds Thicke digging deeper into classic soul (Motown, Philly, Chicago) with echoes of '60s pop and, on "Hard on My Love," the fuzzed-out guitar-rock of Jimi Hendrix, or at least Lenny Kravitz channeling Hendrix.

Album-opener "You're My Baby" is a warm embrace, "like I'm just going to open up my arms and bring you in -- because I was thinking more and more about togetherness," Thicke says.

On "Dream World," a hazy, slow-burning soul-pop song, Thicke imagines a world in which the ice caps aren't melting, energy falls from the sky and he isn't "so damn sensitive." (Might not be a great place, though, as his sensitivity is one of his artistic strong suits.) Still, the song's money lines are these: "There would be no black or white/The world would just treat my wife right/We could walk down in Mississippi, no one would look at us twice."

"My wife's father was a sharecropper from Mississippi," Thicke says. "But it doesn't matter where you go. We could be in L.A. or New York and go into a room where we're not welcome."

So about that "post-racial" thing? "Yeah, good luck," Thicke says, adding that he accepts that his race "will always be a part of the conversation, until I surpass those boundaries by just becoming Robin Thicke."

Meaning that at some point, if he's successful enough, maybe then people will stop describing him as "an R&B star who doesn't look like one" (New York Times) or "Tall White Chocolate Mocha" (a poster on the 6-foot-3 singer's Web site) -- if only because he'll have reached that point of mass recognition at which such descriptors are no longer necessary, when his whiteness goes without saying.

"You don't say: 'Marvin Gaye, R&B singer,' " Thicke notes. "It's just [expletive] Marvin Gaye. . . . It's my job to make enough great music to where people just go: 'That's Robin Thicke.' That's it: 'Robin Thicke.' " Pretty black and white, no?