Louie Louie’s 2nd Album Gets ‘Started’

Louie Louie, the pop-R&B; contender who hails from Santa Ana, is about to release the delayed follow-up to his promising 1990 debut album, “The State I’m In.”

The delay was largely due to a switch in record labels earlier this year. “The State I’m In” (which yielded a Top 20 single, “Sittin’ in the Lap of Luxury”) was issued by WTG Records, a Sony Music subsidiary. While working on a follow-up album that was to have been released early in 1992, Louie (whose full name is Louie Cordero) parted with Sony and signed a deal with the London-based Hardback label. In the United States, his work will be released by Reprise Records, a Warner Bros. subsidiary.

Cordero said in a recent interview that he also recently changed addresses, leaving his longtime home base in Santa Ana for new digs in Sherman Oaks. But Louie Louie’s immediate destination is London, where he’ll spend most of December doing live radio performances and other promotional work for his upcoming album, “Let’s Get Started.” A single and video, “The Thought of It,” is due out Jan. 7 in the United States, with the album release scheduled for February.

Cordero said the album includes five songs recorded while he was still with WTG, including two tracks written and co-produced by Prince: “Get Blue” and “Dance Unto the Rhythm.” Five others were written shortly after he switched record companies. The new album also includes a cover of the ballad, “Brother Louie,” a No. 1 hit for Stories in 1973. Cordero recorded it with production help from George Michael.

Switching record companies “meant a big (delay), but it was for the better,” Cordero said, adding that Hardback and Reprise have a better understanding of his wish to be “crazier” and “have the freedom to be a little strange.”

Cordero had a small role last year in the film “House Party II,” and he gets to play eight different characters in his upcoming video. That’s nothing compared to the role-playing he has in mind: Louie Louie’s work in progress is a musical he hopes will become a film vehicle, with himself in the starring role as “a renegade kind of preacher.” Said the busy Louie: “At first I was just going to write the songs, but now I’m about 40 pages into (writing) the script.”