Taking on Tom

This morning on my show I played Scarlett Johansson. But let's back up.

Some time last year, I heard that Scarlett Johansson, the actress, was recording an album. She had recorded a song for something, and someone was impressed with her voice, and wanted her to record and album. She didn't want to be an actress-turned pop star, like Lindsey Lohan, and she said she would record an album, but it would be all standards. Then she changed her mind and said they would be all Tom Waits covers.

(I should say, this is how I remember the story; I haven't looked up any of this to verify my memory.)

Anyway, I was impressed with that. It's gutsy to take on Tom Waits. He's a unique artist with a distinctive voice and style. He's a great songwriter, but his performance of his songs is as important as the songs themselves. (Compare, to take an extreme example, ABBA: the songs are better written than they are performed, and are highly adaptable to other styles.) Announcing that you are going to do an album of Tom Waits covers says, I think, that you want to be an musician's musician.

So of course, you have to have the chops. Johansson is certainly a talented actress, but that's a different matter from singing. Still, the story was that she had a good voice.

An artist I like a great deal, Holly Cole, did her own album of Tom Waits covers some 13 years ago. Cole is primarily a jazz vocal interpreter, though she has also done pop. Her style is also distinctive, but more importantly, she has the chops. There are some tracks which are perhaps unimaginatively close to the original, but even those are very good. Her slow smoky groove in "Tango Til They're Sore", on the other hand, is quite a surprise, and a real change from the quirky original.

This past Monday I happened to see a link somewhere to watch the video for Johansson's cover of "Falling Down". And I thought, oh yeah, she was making that album, I'm interested to hear it! So I clicked on the link.

It was very meh. The style was a wash of feedback and guitar, like the Jesus and Mary Chain (which seems to be coming up a lot lately; aside from
The Raveonettes, whose recent album, like all of their albums, sounds like JaMC, The Magnetic Fields this year did an album in that same style, called Distortion). It's the sort of style that's good for one or two bands, but you really don't want that much of it. It's also a style that you can hide behind, because of the distortion of the feedback. Her voice was fine, but unspecial. And I thought, OK, now I know what it's like. I was a little disappointed, and a little liberated, because I felt like I was done with the album.

Later that day, it showed up in new rotation at WLUW. I was surprised, because she's such a starlet; does she really need indie radio? On the other hand, the choice of Tom Waits indicates that she'd rather be on indie radio than on top 40. The label is Rhino, which is to me neither indie nor major; it's like another category somehow. Anyway, we'd recently been playing She and Him a lot, which is the pairing of the musician M Ward with the actress Zooey Deschanel. If I can play and like Zooey Deschanel, why not Scarlett Johansson?

There are some differences worth pointing out, actually. Zooey Deschanel is a successful, working actress, but she's not a starlet. She hasn't gotten the same level of attention as Johansson has. I know that should not make difference, but it does. Also, Deschanel teamed up with M Ward, which gives her a certain level of credibility — in fact, it was M Ward who convinced her to make the album. The two recorded together, in more or less equal billing, under the name of "She and Him", whereas Johansson is recording simply under her own name. Finally, Deschanel wrote her own songs, which she'd been doing for years (but hadn't apparently shown to anyone before Ward). Johansson wrote one song, and the rest are covers.

Also, I haven't seen any of the She and Him videos, but the video for "Falling Down" was pretty self-indulgent. It's just clips of Johansson wandering going from place to place and being famous (modeling, acting, driving off in a limo). Maybe "self-indulgent" isn't the right word, but the video is entirely wrapped up in her and who she is; it doesn't seem to be about the song at all, unless there's a parallel I'm missing. It was, to put it simply, the video of a famous actress.

So while my initial thought was to ignore the album altogether, I decided I'd play something this week, and then leave it, unless I was convinced that it was really great stuff.

Other DJs have been playing her, thought I only really heard it once. On Tuesday night, the Women on Women Music Show played her cover of "I Don't Want To Grow Up", which is ultimately pretty odd. The dense layers of feedback are accompanied by an 80's style synth-pop drum line. I could hear, around the edges, the possibility of a really good voice, but I couldn't be sure, under it all. The hosts, Jenny, Emily, and Elizabeth, concluded that is was very meh.

So here's what I did today: I played a Scarlett Johansson Tom Waits cover, followed by a Holly Cole Tom Waits cover, followed by a Tom Waits original. The listener response? One call, right after Johansson had ended and Cole had begun, saying "please play some real Tom Waits". I said absolutely — I'd been intending to.

Still, I think it was an interesting set, and I hope my audience thought so as well.

As for me, I think I'm done with Scarlett Johansson as a singer. She's fine, but not all that interesting.

Meanwhile, another CD that was added to rotation this week is by
the Last Shadow Puppets, and that sounded really good. (I accidentally played two songs — after the break, I started the same CD again. Oops. Both songs were good.)

Labels: music

posted by Tony at 9:39 PM