“Let me introduce you to my lady,” says Robin Thicke, walking through the expansive living room of his home in Malibu, Calif. “Ohhh” -- he stops suddenly -- “she’s breastfeeding.”
The singer’s fiancée, model April Love Geary, waves serenely from a sofa, where she’s feeding Lola Alain Thicke, who was born in February. We beat a quick retreat, to a pathway leading from the front door to Thicke’s music studio, as a steady flow of people -- his band, a nanny, an assistant bearing a tray of cheese and fruit, and even daughter Mia Love, born a year before her baby sister -- pass in and out. Thicke and his family moved into this massive Tuscan-style villa after his previous home, just down the Pacific Coast Highway, was destroyed last November in the Woolsey Fire.
For Thicke, 42, it was the latest in a series of difficulties that began after his smash “Blurred Lines” topped global charts in the summer of 2013, ultimately becoming the No. 2 year-end song for both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts. Co-written by Thicke and producer Pharrell Williams, it had an infectious groove evoking Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got To Give It Up.” But for the Gaye estate, the resemblance was too strong, and it filed a copyright infringement lawsuit.