2018 MARKS BRAXTON’S 25^TH YEAR IN MUSIC

Toni Braxton, the multi-platinum 7-time Grammy Award®-winning icon of music, film, Broadway, and television, releases visuals for her new single, “Long As I Live” – taken from her 9^th studio album, SEX & CIGARETTES, out now via Def Jam Recordings. The album includes hit singles “Deadwood”, “Long As I Live” and the provocative title track single “Sex & Cigarettes”. “Sex & Cigarettes” is basically a song about the movement of infidelity, the slow walk of it and how your heart feels when you have to admit this is happening,” Toni says. This album sets the stage for the Sex & Cigarettes Tour this spring, with dates and ticket info to be announced in the weeks ahead.

2018 commemorates 25 years in the music business for Toni Braxton, since the release of her eponymously titled 8x-platinum debut album in 1993, on Arista Records.  The album included her career-defining worldwide hits “Another Sad Love Song” and “Breathe Again,” which made Grammy® history by generating consecutive awards in 1994 and 1995 respectively, for Best Female R&B Performance.  The album also resulted in Toni’s 1994 Grammy® as Best New Artist.

SEX & CIGARETTES is Toni’s first major release since Love, Marriage & Divorce, her Grammy®-winning Best R&B Album collaboration with Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds (released February 2014).  A critically acclaimed landmark project for both artists, Love, Marriage & Divorce was hailed as a “quiet-storm oasis” in People magazine’s 3-star review, and “a reuniter, a reanimator” by the New York Times.

A month later, in March 2014, Toni Braxton became the latest Grammy Award®-winning artist to join the cast of the Broadway musical After Midnight as “Special Guest Star” vocalist (with Babyface), for a limited engagement run at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. After Midnight reintroduced the Cotton Club’s exciting tradition of welcoming contemporary artists in limited engagements throughout the musical’s 272-performance run.

In May 2014, Toni’s heartfelt memoir Unbreak My Heart was published by HarperCollins.  In addition, she and her sisters (and family matriarch Evelyn) have enjoyed huge success in Braxton Family Values, one of WE tv’s flagship reality series, whose sixth season premiered last night (March 22^nd).

About Toni Braxton:
The distinctive, sultry vocals of six-time Grammy Award®-winning recording artist Toni Braxton, singer, songwriter, record producer, and philanthropist, have been celebrated internationally ever since she was first introduced to the world by Babyface and L.A. Reid in 1992.  Her self-titled debut album released the next year was a 10 million-selling phenomenon that generated Toni’s first Grammys® in 1994, for Best New Artist and Best Female R&B Vocal (“Another Sad Love Song”).  The album’s longevity led Toni to win her second Best Female R&B Vocal Grammy® the following year (for “Breathe Again”).  Her second album, Secrets arrived in ’96, and history repeated itself with 15 million worldwide sales.  At the Grammy Awards® in 1997, Toni became only the second woman in history (beside Dionne Warwick) to win Best Female Pop Vocal (“Un-break My Heart”) and Best Female R&B Vocal (“You’re Makin’ Me High”) in the same year.  She returned to the Grammy® podium in 2001, to claim another Best Female R&B Vocal award (“He Wasn’t Man Enough,” from the double-platinum album The Heat).  Toni’s seventh Grammy® came in 2015, when she and Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds shared the Best R&B Album award for their collaboration, Love, Marriage & Divorce.

Into the millennium, Toni blossomed into an acting career with Broadway musical roles inBeauty and the Beast (the first African American woman to play a leading role in a Disney Broadway production) and Aida.  She has also starred in three Lifetime TV movies including Twist of Faith, Toni Braxton: Unbreak My Heart (adapted from her same-titled best-selling memoir, published in May 2014 by HarperCollins) and, most recently, Faith Under Fire: the Antoinette Tuff Story.  She and her sisters (and the family matriarch Evelyn) have enjoyed huge success in Braxton Family Values, one of WE tv’s flagship reality series, whose sixth season premiered in March 2018.   Raising her two sons Denim and Diezel, Toni balances her career demands with the high priorities of family, health, public service, and charity work, particularly on behalf of the two diseases that have impacted her family directly: She is living with Lupus and her youngest child is living with Autism.  Early detection and intervention have helped both Braxtons to be role models on how to live normal lives with these conditions.  Toni is also a proud spokesperson for Autism Speaks and Lupus L.A.

DOWNLOAD/STREAM SEX & CIGARETTES  HERE

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