Arts

Scarlett Johansson Can Sing!

In her new duet album, she’s not half bad.

Last week, the winsome young actress Scarlett Johansson released Break Up, a duets album with the shaggily handsome, patently inoffensive singer-songwriter Pete Yorn. It's her second release in two years, following 2008's Anywhere I Lay My Head, a collection of shoegaze-y Tom Waits covers. This second release makes her hyphen official: She’s now an actress-singer. Generally speaking, Americans regard actor-helmed records as Hasselhoffian follies, vanity projects conceived from a misguided sense of "I'm famous, therefore I'm talented." Johansson certainly grabbed her share of smirks when she appeared onstage with the Jesus and Mary Chain at the Coachella festival in 2007, and then afterward announced her intention to record an album. Who did she think she was, just because she got to hang out backstage in the VIP section? Critical reviews of Anywhere were unsurprisingly mixed; her voice was called everything from unremarkable to flat to disastrous. Most praise went to her producer, TV on the Radio guitarist Dave Sitek, for burying her singing beneath layers of pretty synths.

The thing is, her singing ain't half bad. Yes, her range is limited, but she works with what she's got. And what she's got, as anyone who's seen her films would know, is an ineffable sex appeal that might be muzzled by a more technically polished voice. On Break Up—which Yorn wrote in 2007 with Johansson specifically in mind—her voice gains a clarity that hadn't been apparent until now. She mines the coquettish gargle of Feist, or the girlish rasp of Billie Holiday (minus the emotional heft that comes with a serious drug problem, of course). Hugged by Yorn's golden slide guitar playing, Johansson sounds completely at home.

If there's any question about whether Johansson adds value to Break Up, just take a listen to the song "I Don't Know What To Do." The track originally floated around as a B-side in demo form, on which Yorn sings by himself. "I Don't Know What To Do" is a strange genre tune, falling somewhere in between a '50s country ballad and a Broadway showstopper. Left on his own, Yorn's strained treatment of the song treads into schmaltz. But then "I Don't Know What To Do" appears on Break Up as a completed duet, and it's the inclusion of Johansson's syrupy croon in the second verse that really sells it. Her affectless delivery, so pretty and simple, is just what the song needs to bring it back to earth. A stronger singer might've reduced it to jazz hands.

Limited though it may be, Johansson's voice lends a certain magic—some call it mystique, some call it plain old sex—that's usually missing from Yorn's music. Yorn released four full-length albums prior to Break Up over the past decade, and they've all gotten by on his workmanlike songwriting. With Johansson, though, his songs grow a narrative, a sense that something's happening beyond the songs' standard folk-rock formulas. Yorn knew exactly what he was after when he conceived of Break Up, too. In interviews, he's pointed to the famous pairing of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot as his inspiration. Bardot never could sing a lick, either; she just mumbles and purrs her parts with Gainsbourg. Compared with her, Johansson is way more of an asset.

The question, then, isn't about talent, but about ownership. Johansson sounds good enough, but has she made these songs her own? By working with musicians like Sitek and Yorn, she's swaddled herself in an airtight cocoon of indie cred. She attaches herself deliberately to projects that are tastefully produced and obviously well-thought-out. She's not Cher releasing an Auto-Tuned dance single, beloved by gay men and other connoisseurs of kitsch. Nope, she's asking to be taken seriously as an artist. And for the most part, critics oblige her—whether or not they ultimately win approval, her albums get reviewed in Rolling Stone and Salon and Pitchfork, in addition to Us Weekly.

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