Tom Waits’ music has never really been about the brighter side of this life. He champions the sort of people who (to paraphrase onetime New York Gov. Mario Cuomo) live in the gutter where the glitter don’t shine. They are beaten, wrecked and miserable.
But most importantly, the characters are alive.
In braving the dreaded crossover, Scarlett Johansson has dulled Waits’ vivid portraits to death on Anywhere I Lay My Head. Her debut album features 10 Waits compositions and one original, all delivered in the same hazy sleepwalk tone.
Beyond the single songwriting credit and vocals, Johansson’s participation in the project appears to have been pretty minimal. The weight of the album falls squarely on the shoulders of producer and arranger David Sitek (TV on the Radio). Although Sitek’s work on Anywhere varies greatly in imagination and success, it is conceivable he could have pulled it all off with the right voice.
The entire packaging of the album raises the question: Where was Scarlett laying her head while Sitek cooked up the entire album?
Johansson’s half-dead, brooding monotone loses out every time to Waits’ monster-in-the-closet whiskey growl. She never owns a second of a single track, faintly singing along to Sitek’s haunted, ’80s-noir bedtime stories rather than delving into the material.
And Sitek, whether knowingly or not, returns the favor by completely burying Johansson’s lead vocals in the depths of his heavily-layered tracks. Her performances – think Sinéad O’Connor on sleeping pills with a narrowed vocal range – are sadly reminiscent of her karaoke contributions in Lost in Translation, minus the fun (and the Bill Murray).
Waits is one of the greatest living storytellers, but with a distanced, indifferent narrator at the helm, even the best stories disintegrate.
A few attempts on Anywhere come across admirably. The title track takes the brassy original and sends it through a digital-age filter of synthesizers and drum loops, with a lovely echoing guitar part, (courtesy of Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), to cap it all off. Johansson sounds damn near convincing on the opening lines, “My head is spinning ’round/ My heart is in my shoes,” considerably less so with “I don’t need anybody/Because I love to be alone.”
She hits her most sincere notes on the album’s lone original tune. “Song for Jo” breaks up the album’s repetitive instrumentation nicely with a low acoustic hum to accompany Johansson’s droning mumble, which, at least in this case, feels appropriate. But even when Sitek pits his singer against some of his more intriguing backdrops, the renditions are frigid. There is no wrenching pathos in the execution.
Although Johansson’s passion for Waits’ music is less than evident on the record, Sitek fleshes out a few interesting, though mostly atmospheric, extrapolations on the artist’s work. The slipstream child’s music box on “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” gives a slight nod to the Tin Pan Alley Waits, perhaps with a bit too much kitsch involved.
But elsewhere, singer and arranger completely drop the ball. Even David Bowie’s presence, and backing vocals, cannot save the painfully slow covers of “Falling Down” and “Fannin Street.”
It happens only once, but on “Green Grass,” Sitek lapses into a far too obvious approximation of post-Swordfishtrombones Waits. The direct correlation to Waits’ distinct, industrial carnival sound puts the Johansson/Sitek version in a losing competition.
Aside from the wholly forgettable nature of the album, Anywhere could have been far worse. Sitek remodels “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” as a poorly conceived semi-techno farce. The song is tasteless where so many of the other tracks are simply bland or overblown.
As the album opener, “Fawn” (from the fantastic Alice), loses all the quiet mourning contained in the original, expressed by the scant, pained notes barely escaping from an injured violin. There is more sadness and longing in that 1-minute, 44-second track than anything presented on Johansson and Sitek’s lifeless homage.
In Sitek’s hands, “Fawn” has been multiplied by 1,000 as an army of horns storms in over the solemn organ, stamping out any opportunity for the listener to connect to any real emotion. It is an impressive arrangement, but especially when viewed in the context of the entire album, the epic treatment is at once empty and unwarranted.
Johansson’s absence from the track is not entirely noticeable, either. In terms of impact, she is absent from the rest of her debut, as well.
When viewed as a Sitek album, Anywhere is troubled, with a few brighter moments. As a tribute to the work of one of America’s greatest writers, it does no justice. And as for Johansson – let us think fondly back to the peak of her singing career, in a Tokyo karaoke bar.
zherrm@umd.edu
Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5 stars.
