BMWK: How did  the two of you meet?

Michael: I met Tanya at an event called Spirit of Love festival in Laurel, MD. When I met her I had gotten there late, but I’m on time now so it doesn’t matter [laughter]. Tanya was sitting under the tent doing her celebrity thing. I was just a little drummer boy, little piano player boy just trying to get my song heard. Everyone was saying I needed to meet Tanya and I wanted to meet Tanya up close and personal. And she just blew me off. So  I just started ministering and doing the Lord’s work and she ended up running across the field in her heels and asked if I wrote those songs. So she gave me her number and told me what she was about, and what she and her brother were trying to do. I threw the number away because my self-esteem was so low and I thought to myself: ‘yeah right, that’s Tanya Blount. She doesn’t want anything to do with me. She can get anybody to work with her’. But what I didn’t know was that God had a divine plan.

We started working and hanging out a little bit professionally. Before I knew it, my eyesight started changing towards her. She’s such a beautiful person, a beautiful woman and I was like, wow God, could you really bless me with something like this?

Before I knew it, we were just talking a lot and our conversations began to get elongated. She invited me to her birthday party and that night I gave her my gift which was a song I had recorded about all that I had learned about her. I bought her an Aretha Franklin CD (Rescue Me, collector’s addition), and I gave her a card. Little things like that mean so much to her. So I decided I was going to tell her how I felt. We were texting back and forth and she told me I left my sweater at her house and she asked what I was going to leave next? So I told her, ‘my heart’. I tried to have a little Jerry McGuire moment, ‘you had me at hello’ [laughs], and Tanya hung the phone up. I didn’t hear back from her until the next day around 12:30pm. The whole night I was thinking that I’d just ruined the relationship. But she called me and we went out to dinner and the movies. And we’ve been together since.