'Don't go looking for Djay': Terence Howard interview

AS AN ACTOR IN FILMS LIKE HUSTLE & Flow, Crash and Iron Man, Terrence Howard has played characters who are much more emotionally complicated than they at first appear. That dynamic extends into Howard's music, or to people's expectations of it.

He says his own record company assumed he would make a hip-hop album after the song It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp – which he performed as the pimp and aspiring rapper DJay in 2006's Hustle & Flow – won an Academy Award for its composers, the rap group Three 6 Mafia. But Howard, 39, refused to perform the song at the Oscars because of its language and content. His own musical tastes lie in a decidedly different direction.

When we meet in a restaurant in a suburb of Philadelphia, he rhapsodises about the 1972 soft-pop hit Vincent, Don McLean's ode to Van Gogh. "Even at 12 years old, listening to it, I could hear Don McLean talking about his own disappointments," he tells me. "I loved being able to see that. I mean, Don McLean, Jim Croce and Paul Simon – all of them are incredible storytellers. I wanted to tell stories."

Regardless of his intentions, Howard's debut album, Shine Through It, released on Monday, does not sound like McLean or Croce, or, for that matter, Barry Manilow, another songwriter whom he cites admiringly. The 11 tracks tend more toward a blend of orchestral jazz and upscale R&B, with lush textures of flutes, horns, strings, female backing vocals and keyboards accompanying Howard, who plays delicate acoustic guitar.

The album's secret weapon is Howard's voice. "I'm not a great singer," he says, but, on songs like the title track and Mr Johnson's Lawn, his husky tenor works much the way his acting does. His delivery bristles with emotion, the elegance of the instrumentation and the smoothness of the arrangements cushioning the rawness of his expression. Like watching Howard move gracefully through his film roles, you wait for the outbursts of feeling, even during the quietest moments. It's a tension that comes naturally to him, and that roughens the edges of Shine Through It.

When we meet he is wearing the same green T-shirt he had on backstage in June after a Broadway performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which he had acted alongside James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad. Howard played the dissipated son and husband Brick with simmering intensity. His exchanges on stage with Jones, who played his father, Big Daddy – and who, at 77, is nearly twice Howard's age – were powerful. At one point, he says, Jones told him, "Sometimes I don't know if it's you and me out there, or Brick and Big Daddy."

Howard has claimed the main reason he accepted the role in Cat was so that he could learn how to perform on stage, as he will be doing in support of his album. That night in his dressing room he met with some radio programmers, and explained that he "hated" the character of DJay, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and that he wanted his own music to send a very different message, one epitomised by the title of his album's opening track, Love Makes You Beautiful. That meant, he says, that the young black listeners who might be expected to gravitate to his album might not like it, at least at first.

At the restaurant he addresses that issue in blunt terms: "My own people, black people, they've become accustomed to this hip-hop sound. If it doesn't have a driving beat, I don't know if they'll hear it right away. I think I have to go to a different crowd first."

Columbia, Howard's label, is similarly taking the long view. "It's definitely not about first-week sales, this album," says Liz Hausle, vice president for product marketing at the record company. "It's very different from Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez, if I had to compare. I believe this is a music critics' album."

From William Shatner and Don Johnson to Bruce Willis and Jamie Foxx, albums by actors have largely occupied a commercial and aesthetic graveyard. It is a fate Howard has gone to great lengths to avoid. He wrote or partly wrote all of the songs on Shine Through It, and produced the album with Miles Mosley, a classically trained bassist and arranger who has worked with Lauryn Hill and Herbie Hancock. Both the songs and the playing on Shine Through It are personal and idiosyncratic. "There are killing moments on this record," Mosley says, matter-of-factly. "It came from a place of brutal honesty."

It was not easy for Howard to earn the freedom to make the album his way. At first Lisa Ellis, the executive vice president at Sony who signed Howard to Columbia, sent him a list of producers with whom she thought he would be comfortable. When Howard told her he wanted to produce the album himself, she despaired. "In my mind I was going, 'Oh, my God, he's lost his mind,'" Ellis says.

When Howard would not relent, she gave him a modest pre-recording budget, essentially in the hope that he would learn how difficult making an album is and agree to revisit the list she had provided. Instead, she says, "he called me five days later and goes, 'Lisa, I'm done with the album.' I said, 'What? That's, that's impossible! No! No!'" She immediately flew to Los Angeles to hear what he had done. She was so impressed that she released the rest of Howard's advance, allowing him to finish the album properly.

As Howard is talking to me, Frank Sinatra's It Was a Very Good Year starts to play over the restaurant's sound system. He hears the song's opening theme and falls into a reverie. "'When I was 17 ...'," Howard begins, reciting the lyrics. "Who can't relate to this? I related to this when I was six years old, wondering what I would be like at 25. I don't know what stage I'm at now." He hums the melody, and runs through the lyrics in his mind, stopping, obviously, when he comes to the verse about "blue-blooded girls of independent means." Then his movie-star reality comes into focus for a minute. His face broadens into a smile. "I'm in the 'limousine' part now," he says.

Howard grew up in Cleveland, and both his parents were of mixed race. When he was two, he witnessed his father stab a white man to death in a racially charged incident in a department store that drew national attention; his dad went to prison for 11 months. His mother and his maternal grandmother were stage actors, and he credits Cleveland radio, as well as his parentage, for his musical tastes. Asked how his friends responded to his interest in the likes of Dan Fogelberg and Harry Chapin, Howard responds, "I grew up in the projects, but Rick James wasn't my buddy. I was more sensitive than that. I didn't have peers. I grew up at a time when having light skin and green eyes in the middle of a black community was not popular."

Howard starting playing guitar as a teenager and auditioned for Motown, to no avail, around the time he was filming The Jacksons: An American Dream, a 1992 TV mini-series. When he met Ellis, who was working with Three 6 Mafia, after Hustle & Flow was completed, he told her he wanted to play her some of the 30 or 40 songs he had written himself.

Columbia Records has been through various shake-ups over the last four or five years, and a succession of executives, wary of an actor who wanted to sing, insisted that Ellis and Howard make their case for his lucrative two-album deal. "Every time, the music prevailed," Ellis says.

One of the subjects his lyrics address is his marriage, which has ended after 14 years (and one divorce and remarriage), and is the subject of a song called No 1 Fan. "I wrote that song as a stalker," he says. "It was raining, I was sitting there in front of the house, watching her come home from a date after we were divorced. I was imagining what she did on this date, and watching her giving him a kiss. I went home and wrote this song."

Plenty, meanwhile, explores the seductions of fame – the women, sycophants and ego massages that torpedoed his marriage. Most of the songs are cinematic; Mosley refers to them as "scripts". That is how Howard's worlds of music and acting come together. Drama, "storytelling" as he puts it, lies at the heart of both. Right now he is more gripped by his music, in which he can express himself freely, and does not feel the strictures of a writer's or director's vision.

"There's a place in the Cayman Islands called Hell," he says, when asked to compare his two worlds. "It's just all this sulphuric rock. It's arid. That's what acting is to me. I haven't made it to the green valleys yet. The characters I've had to play have been in these harsh places. I haven't been able to play the spring yet. I'm stuck in the middle of a desert with regard to acting. But with music, there's a thawing out. There's a spring in the music. So hopefully it will get me to summer, and I'll sit up in the meadows some day."

He pauses, then looks directly across the table. "I'm sorry, but this is how I talk," he says. "It's my pictures."

• Shine Through It is released on Monday on SonyBMG.

OTHER ACTORS WHO HAVE STEPPED UP TO THE MIC

When Minnie Driver launched her debut album back in 2004, she recalled how a record company executive told her her songs were good but that she shouldn't bother trying to be a singer because she'd get crucified. Driver's reaction? To call him "a f***ing bastard" and do it anyway.

He had a point, though. Driver was crucified by the press. "Talk about money down the drain," crowed the Mirror when her debut single only reached – shock, horror – number 32.

What is the problem here? Hollywood actors are routinely mocked for presuming to make music, with the likes of Russell Crowe and Keanu Reeves trotted out as examples of failure, while the successes – such as Tom Waits and Lyle Lovett, who move easily between both worlds – are forgotten. Bruce Willis didn't do too badly, I seem to recall, and Zooey Deschanal has won good reviews this year.

Jealousy is a factor here. Most of us get to be neither film stars nor pop stars, so the thought of someone being both is galling. Perhaps it helps lessen the jealousy if we feel we can somehow dictate the terms of their success. "We shouldn't allow actors to make records," raged Q magazine, when Driver's album was announced, as if music journalists can "allow" anyone to do anything.

Ultimately, it matters little who makes a pop record. If it's good, it's good.