“I’d gone upstairs and looked in the apartment and noticed that everything was gone.” – Montina Cooper
Long before her career as a background singer for R&B legend Mary J. Blige and reigning Queen Beyonce, Montina Cooper suffered from abandonment issues.
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At 11, she watched her father look her in the eye and drive away from their family’s apartment while she screamed his name. He’d taken everything out of their house and stuffed it into the back seat and trunk of the car.
She sat on the porch, dejected, until her mother returned home from work around 1 a.m. That’s when she knew her family hadn’t just left her behind.
“Unbeknownst to myself, my dad had a drug addiction,” Cooper said. “This guy, who was supposed to love and care for me and protect me and all these different things that dads are supposed to do, had just drove off and left me alone. I just spiraled down from there.”
Cooper immediately became a food addict. By age 12, she weighed more than 175 pounds. She learned about her father’s addiction at 15 when she found his needles in their backyard. As he walked in and out of her life, she drifted deeper and deeper into depression.
At 18, she decided that enough was enough.
“I didn’t want to live anymore,” Cooper said, remembering the night she took every pill out of her medicine cabinet, dumped them into the sink and took as many as she could to kill herself. A phone call from a friend, who called 911, saved Cooper’s life.
“The next thing I remember is being in the hospital with a tube down my throat,” Cooper said. “It was really just a point in my life where I felt like I didn’t matter. I was worth zero.”
Stepping out as a solo artist, Cooper’s new single “Saved Me,” from her upcoming album, Closer, captures the raw emotion of her battle with depression and heartbreak.
“Music, it’s given me such great ammunition and has given me a means of being able to express myself emotionally because that was the only outlet for me at that point,” Cooper explained.
The Houston native has been singing ever since she was 2 – thanks to her father, a former musician, who spent time rehearsing Cooper and her older sister as children. After her hospital scare, Cooper sought therapy and God. Since then, she’s been able to forgive her father and let go of all the baggage she’s carried around because of him.
“A lot of the things that my dad did, he doesn’t even remember. And the things he does remember, he’s asked for forgiveness,” Cooper said.
Her father has now been clean for years.
“Closer, my album, is about going through relationships and getting to the right relationships,” said Cooper, who is now married with children. “I was carrying my dad around with me on my back for ever and ever and ever. When I let that go, I just felt free.”
Watch Montina’s live performance of “Saved Me” below.
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