Staton is no stranger to music, be it gospel or secular. She’s known worldwide and has accomplished what others only dream of. Her fans love her spirit and her music and so do I.  Enjoy as I share with you my interview with Candi Staton.

Hi Candi, how are you today?

I am wonderful…how about you?

I am blessed, I am doing great. I can’t believe that I am actually speaking with you. I am pinching myself all over to make sure it’s real!

Oh yes, it’s real…I am live and in living color.

How long have you been in this industry, and has it changed a lot since you first started?

Just about all of my life. I started singing gospel music when I was 5 years old. One of the ladies of the church discovered me; she was my mother’s friend. I was singing in the back of our home and didn’t have any idea if I was singing good or bad. She found out that I could sing, told the pastor and he called me on stage to sing and I just tore the place up at 5 years old, making my little runs and stuff…they just couldn’t believe that they had a little something like me among them!

We’ve seen singers come and singers go. Why do you believe that your career has lasted this long?

Because I stay current, I look to what’s coming and try to get into what’s out there and what people like. The basic thing that everybody needs to understand is that you don’t sing to please yourself, you sing to please God. Times are changing and sometimes you have to change with the times in order to stay current. A lot of people don’t want to take chances, it’s a risk when you put out a record or get into another genre or style of music you take a risk, because you don’t know if the stations are going to play it, or if anyone is going to like it at all, but if God gave you the songs and you know He gave them to you, know that He has an audience for you.

You’ve been experiencing resurgence lately with an album out currently and a new project on the way. Please tell us about the upcoming project “Ultimate Collection”.

It has a song on with my 13 year old voice, it called “It’s Too Late” I did that when I was 13 and you’ll hear the scratching…it’s really a collector’s item, you won’t want to miss it, you want to put it in your collection. We put the best songs we could think of together on this CD, it a double CD and we have a lot more.

You are one of those artists that isn’t afraid to try many styles of music…you are so diverse, how do you do that?

That’s the risk thing I was talking about. It’s the creative part of you that God gives us. I write songs by moods. If I’m sad or feel real spiritual, I write a song like “Grace” or “Your Face Is The First Face I Want To See”, and then there are times when I want to feel like I was still up in the clubs with some gospel lyrics behind it and just dance my day away because at time you feel like you just want to dance just to know that you are alive!

You’ve traveled to Europe extensively. Do you find the European audience to be more receptive to your music?

Oh yes, most definitely. They don’t care what you sing, they are so much different from the audiences here at home and are not religious; they just love good music. They don’t care if you were singing “Amazing Grace”, “Young Hearts Run Free” or “You Got the Love” which is a gospel song that went platinum over there and it went in all the clubs and they were still dancing to it. I go over there and I sell out everywhere I go, but over here you go to some of the churches and you don’t have a lot of people there. It may be the little core group of maybe 100 to 150 and sometimes 500, but in Europe you just have to put “Sold Out” on the door so no one else can come in.

Of all your Christian and secular fans worldwide, which side would you say embrace your music most; the Christian market place or the secular market place?

The secular market place…they accept your genre of music and what you represent. They love you for who you are and look back at your history and study you and place you on a pedestal and they just about honor you, while here at home, you are as big as your next record. If your record wasn’t big you are not big. In Europe they have every album you’ve ever recorded.

Finally, what advice can you offer to any person who has dreams of being in a long lasting career such as yours?

Don’t give up, you’ll be discourage and people will tell you that you are not good enough, but you just have to keep doing what God has put in your heart to do. If you stay faithful to that, God is going to open doors for you.