Before she became one of the hottest dance queens of the '90s, CeCe Peniston was a bored college student who whiled away her time in chemistry class by daydreaming about what it would be like to meet Mr. Right.
"I was like, dang I don't even have a boyfriend," she recalled on the biographical series Unsung in 2013. "I was like, OK, what would I say if I met my man? I'd be like, finally."
She put her hopes into the poem "Finally," not knowing it would turn into a club classic and set her on the path to a successful music career.
Most of the time stories of so-called overnight successes in the music industry actually involve years of sweat and tears before an artist ever gets their name in the spotlight, but Peniston really did hit the fast-track to fame with her first song. She'd been singing around the Phoenix area when her producer friend Felipe "DJ Wax Dawg" Delgado invited her to sing backing vocals for rapper Tonya "Overweight Pooch" Davis, whose debut album he was working on in 1991.
Peniston's powerful hook on the minor dance hit "I Like It" impressed the record label, and they encouraged her to record her own single. With the help of Delgado and another producer, Rodney K. Jackson, she adapted her poem "Finally" into her debut song later that same year. When it quickly became a #1 hit on the Billboard Dance Club chart, Peniston didn't know what to expect.
"At the time I didn't understand what it means to have a number one song, I really had no idea," she recalled in a 2012 interview. "They said you have a hit on your hands and you're going to have to go to Europe. All of a sudden I was traveling the world, one show turned into two, that little girl from Arizona was going everywhere!"
So what does Peniston's dream man look like? In the first verse, she tells us he has "brown cocoa skin and curly black hair" and looks at her with "that gentle, loving stare." The singer finally did meet her man, Malik Byrd, who co-wrote the album's R&B ballad "Inside That I Cried" and appeared in its music video. But the romance was short-lived.
"We were married for about a year. I started traveling around the world and sometimes that's weird when you're young and trying to travel the world. And being married, that's a whole new experience. But yeah, I found him for a little bit," she
told The Huffington Post in 2017.
From 2003 to 2011, she was married to Massachusetts realtor Frank Martin.
A&M only offered Peniston a one-single deal, but after the initial success of "Finally," she was given the green light to record a whole album, but she only had two months to put it together. Just weeks prior to the album drop on January 30, 1992, a dance remix of "Finally" called the "Choice Mix" was released. Based on the piano riff from CeCe Rogers' 1987 house hit "Someday," the reworked single blew up around the globe, reaching the Top 10 in several countries, including #2 in the UK. Back home in the US, it crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #5.
Peniston shared her memories of recording the song with James Arena, author of the 2017 book Stars of 90's Dance Pop: 29 Hitmakers Discuss Their Careers: "It was a great experience making this song. I remember being in the studio with producer Felipe Delgado, and we didn't have the second verse written. I had forgotten some of the lyrics and just ad-libbed some of them - that 'yeah-yeah' part. They ended up sampling that, and it became a big part of the song. It's amazing how those raw moments happen."
While the album only managed to reach #70 on the US albums chart, it did yield two more chart-topping hits on the Dance Club Songs tally: "We Got A Love Thang" and "Keep On Walkin'." The latter also peaked at #3 on the R&B chart.
Peniston issued two more albums by the end of the decade, Thought Ya Knew (1994) - which boasts the #1 Dance singles "I'm In The Mood" and "Hit By Love" - and I'm Movin' On (1996).
Peniston honed her vocal chops singing soulful arrangements in church and as a backing vocalist, so she didn't expect to launch into the music industry with a dancefloor groove.
"You know what's so funny is I was always the one that came in and slowed it down," she told 5 Magazine in 2006. "That's what's so ironic about me putting out 'Finally,' because I was always the R&B person, the balladeer when I came in and did everything."
A "Classic Funk Mix" by keyboardist Eric Kupper was released in 1997 to coincide with the album's reissue in Europe in Japan. This version peaked at #26 on the UK Singles Chart.
In the 1994 comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which follows two drag queens and a transgender woman's adventures touring throughout the Australian Outback, the main characters lip-synch to the song during their cabaret act.
