Feel the noise

To: Lee Ferguson

From: Sarah Liss

Subject: Anywhere I Lay My Head

Hey Lee,

I gave up on Scarlett Johansson a long time ago. She may make most folks swoon, but I’ve never seen the appeal – I mean, I get that she’s all sex on legs, with that huskily adenoidal voice and those retro-pinup looks, but she’s never sold me on her acting talents. Actually, I have a much greater appreciation of ScarJo the child star (she killed in Manny & Lo) than I have of anything she’s done since 2001’s Ghost World (in which, to be fair, she shone). Her Lost in Translation turn struck me as a bit precious, and her decision to play muse (three times!) for creepy old dude Woody Allen? Ick, ick and ick.

So let’s just say that even before I found out about her latest project, an ambitious attempt to cover the songs of Tom Waits, I wasn’t rooting for the girl. Aside from my core anti-ScarJo bias, I don’t put much faith in the musical vanity projects of actor types. And the notion of taking on Waits, a creepy-weird genius who has one of the most eccentric voices in contemporary music, spelled D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R. Not that I think Waits is a sacred cow – when the right artists cover his songs, their versions can be spellbinding. But a young, dewy-cheeked starlet trying to do justice to a singer/songwriter whose songs sound like the moonshine sonatas of a junkyard monster? A match made in hell, if you ask me.

Now, I’m unfamiliar with your opinions on ScarJo, but Lee, I know you’re an even bigger Tom Waits fan than I. How are you feeling about their unholy union?

S

To: Sarah Liss

From: Lee Ferguson

Subject: Re: Anywhere I Lay My Head

Hey Sarah,

I am a little in awe of your Scarlett Johansson-induced venom. I guess I should confess right away that, unlike you, I am still holding out hope for ScarJo – at least as an actress. She was, as you mention, a strangely self-possessed child actor — I’ll see your Manny & Lo reference and raise you a Horse Whisperer. But I’ve also found her commanding as an adult performer. Yes, her acting is uneven, but I maintain she projects an intelligence in her roles (including her turn as Woody Allen’s peppy sidekick in Scoop) that most of her contemporaries (Jessica Alba, anyone?) are sorely lacking.

Most of ScarJo’s appeal for me stems from her croaky, nonplussed line readings, which made me fall in love with her in both Ghost World and Lost in Translation. There hasn’t been a performer since Lauren Bacall who could do so much with a smoke-drenched voice, so the announcement that ScarJo would be recording an album of Tom Waits cover songs intrigued me. It seemed sneaky-right for a girl best known for playing wise-beyond-their-years weirdos to take on the biggest freak of them all, my man Tom Waits.

That said, the minute I began listening to this album, I nearly spat out my soup. It is wrong on so many levels; I’m not sure where to begin.

L

To: Lee Ferguson

From: Sarah Liss

Subject: Head aches

After listening to Anywhere I Lay My Head, I’ve decided it’s not the desecration of Waits’s canon I imagined in my wildest nightmares… at least not to the degree I predicted. The album contains 10 Waits tracks and one original (Song For Jo), and for the most part, it’s all gauzy atmosphere wrapped around Johansson’s vocals, which are insipid. It’s kind of like the aural equivalent of Lost in Translation. But for someone who makes her living interpreting other people’s words, Johansson sounds completely disconnected from the emotion, meaning and tone of her material. Her delivery, flat and monotonous, sounds like it’s coming from a SongBot.

Town with No Cheer, which originally appeared on Swordfishtrombones, is a boozer’s lament about living in a land where the liquor’s run dry; Johansson croaks it out like a bored dilettante ordering drinks at a slick lounge. I don’t believe her bloodless claim that “it’s hotter than blazes,” and when she sings “There’ll be no oasis for a dry local grazier,” I swear she swallows a yawn. Producer Dave Sitek has turned I Don’t Want to Grow Up into an absurd bit of synth-pop with a greasy Eurotrash sheen. Her pinched tone and complete lack of phrasing on it… well, the tiny hairs in my ears are committing hara-kiri as I write.

If she were interpreting the words of your average pop songwriter, I might give Johansson some leeway here. But Waits is a storyteller first and foremost – the very essence of his songs lies in their dark and twisty narratives. In Johansson’s hands, these lyrics might as well be nonsense syllables. She claims to be a major Waits fan, yet I’m amazed at how little she seems to get him. Am I missing something? Do you feel like ScarJo has defiled the legacy of a savant?

S

To: Sarah Liss

From: Lee Ferguson

Subject: Fembot fatale

I completely agree that Scarlett’s vocals have a FemBot quality, along with a disturbing lack of emotion. I know Tom Waits’s froggy-hobo voice is an acquired taste for many, but the key to his best songs (and I’m thinking of one of your favourites, Martha) is the real warmth and sincerity that lurks beneath his warbling. In contrast, ScarJo sings like someone who’s swallowed one too many Nembutals. Maybe I should be thankful for this, since her lethargic renditions of these songs — save for the almost-passes-for-upbeat single Falling Down or her convincing melancholy on Fannin’ Street — might be the cure for my ongoing insomnia.

Johansson sings with the Jesus and Mary Chain (not pictured) during the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, Calif. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

But has she “defiled the legacy of a savant”? I wouldn’t go quite that far. For one thing, Scarlett has, thankfully, stayed away from most of Waits’s early material, which is the music I hold dearest to my heart. Secondly, she has been smart enough to surround herself with some very talented musicians, including David Bowie and Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I suspect this (and the production) is what saves the album from being the utter disaster you find with so many other celeb vanity recordings (like Bruce Willis’s The Return of Bruno).

While listening to Anywhere I Lay My Head, I kept wanting to evaluate two distinct elements: ScarJo’s vocals, and then the actual music and production. I think the music is fairly faithful to some of the boozy/carnival hall of mirrors spirit of some of Waits’s output for Island in the ’80s. I’m thinking specifically of Green Grass, which opens in the great, careening, clomp-clomp-clomping style of some of Waits’s Rain Dogs singles. ScarJo aside, do you like anything that’s happening musically on the album, or does it leave you cold as well?

L

To: Lee Ferguson

From: Sarah Liss

Subject: Anywhere but here

I rather enjoyed Dave Sitek’s woozy, scuffed-up production. Occasionally, he veers toward cinematic touches reminiscent of the Phil Spector/Van Dyke Parks camp – I’m thinking about the muffled bass drum, jingle bells, swirly strings and multitracked background harmonies (courtesy of David Bowie) on Fannin Street. On other tracks, like No One Knows I’m Gone, which builds from a chorus of crickets into thick washes of reverberating guitar and keyboards, Sitek draws on bleak alt-rockers like Joy Division (and their acolytes in Interpol).

All of this makes for a fine indie rock album, but I don’t know that Anywhere I Lay My Head passes muster as a Tom Waits cover album. It’s not that I expect ScarJo and Sitek to mimic Waits’s unique rattle-and-clang vibe, but it’d be nice if the songs here had some connection to the philosophy and mood of the originals. With the possible exception of the gorgeous, wistful ballads on Waits’s debut, Closing Time (one of my desert-island picks), his compositions always have an air of theatricality, of wonderment. Sometimes you can hear creepy-crawlies lurking in the shadows of his clattering tin-pan percussion; other times, there’s a surprising beauty in the way his rough, bear-like grunt claws its way up a tower of folksy strings. (I would love to see what these songs are like in the hands of an artist like Eleni Mandell, the L.A. chanteuse who specializes in noirish cabaret pop and jazz.)

I’m not surprised by any of the pieces that make up Anywhere I Lay My Head. ScarJo’s deadpan vocals are par for the course, and her collaborators have been carefully selected from hipster-approved acts in order to add a frisson of accessible indie credibility. Every bit, right down to the arrangements, feels very calculated, which is the last thing you want when you’re trying to navigate the wacky world of Tom Waits.

Favourite tracks: Falling Down, Song For Jo, Green Grass, Fannin Street

Rating: ** (out of five)

To: Sarah Liss

From: Lee Ferguson

Subject: Album with no cheer

That theatricality is exactly what I was hoping to hear on AILMH, and Dave Sitek makes a valiant effort to create some of Waits’s showier flourishes. The album’s first track, Fawn, strikes me as a perfect primer for listeners unfamiliar with Waits’s songbook: it begins with a Southern church-style organ, gives way to jittery, strip-joint cymbals and culminates in lurid saxophones that belong in a rain-slicked film noir. I also like the layered approach Sitek takes on Falling Down, which ends with Scarlett’s echoing voice(s) in a round, creating the creepy sensation that multiple ScarJos are singing out to us from the depths of some dank well.

But aside from the tracks we’ve both singled out, the album sounds more indie rock than Waits proper. Scarlett’s one original tune, Song for Jo, has a nice, early Liz Phair vibe to it, but there are some real misfires on Anywhere I Lay My Head that I just can’t shake. The title track feels very AM radio to me, and her take on I Don’t Want to Grow Up is the closest thing to sacrilege on this disc.

In your opening, you nailed what distresses me most about Anywhere I Lay My Head: Johansson may love Tom Waits, but that’s different than getting Tom Waits, and her pampered-little-girl take on I Don’t Want to Grow Up exemplifies the huge disconnect between Scarlett and her source material. In adopting the faux-edgy, downbeat Valley of the Dolls delivery, ScarJo inadvertently drains most of the discordant magic out of these beloved songs.

So we’ve arrived at the same conclusion — though I’m giving AILMH a half star more than you because the train wreck that is Town with No Cheer is sung with such (unintentional) drag-queen, Amanda Lear fabulousness, I suspect it will achieve some kind of cult following years from now.

Until then, I suggest both of us go lay our heads somewhere and continue playing our well-worn copies of Closing Time.

Favourite tracks: Falling Down, Song For Jo, Green Grass, Fannin Street, Fawn (guilty pleasure track: Town With No Cheer)

Rating: **1/2