D. Train

The project was a collaborative effort between the band's namesake James "D. Train" Williams, who was featured as the lead vocalist and songwriter, and Hubert Eaves III, a keyboardist and producer who performed the instrumentation on the recordings. Hailing from Brooklyn, New York, Williams himself was a R&B/dance producer as well. He and Eaves met during high school and began performing together. Eaves would spend most of the 1970s as a member of the R&B band Mtume. However, by the 1980s, he and Williams had teamed up again. The group named themselves "D. Train" after a nickname Williams had acquired as a football player in high school. D. Train released their first single "You're the One For Me" in late 1981. The track became an instant success, hitting #1 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart that year; it has been remixed and re-released successfully several times since, and was contemporaneously covered by Paul Hardcastle with vocalist Kevin Henry in the United Kingdom. The duo's self-titled debut album (which prominently featured the "You're the One For Me" title on the front cover, and the album sometimes became known by this name) followed in early 1982, and several additional singles from this effort were successful on both the R&B and Dance charts, although they were not as popular as the debut hit. Among these tracks were "Keep On," which reached #2 on the Dance chart, and a cover version of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David penned "Walk On By", that owed more to the Isaac Hayes version than to Dionne Warwick's original recording.