I Love Lucy
Category: Music...
Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 05:28 PM [GMT-6]

I drafted this post two weeks ago. After deciding it made me sound like a pitiful fanboy, I put it on hold. Then, yesterday, I again fired up the iPod and after listening to the album three more times, I realized that I am a fanboy. I can live with it.

I was watching a now-forgotten movie on AMC a few weeks ago, and enduring the endless repetition of that channel's ads for upcoming movies. My pain was eased somewhat by the music that accompanied one ad, a snippet remarkable for its energy and intriguing arrangement, a catchy pop tune with some throwbacks to another period, including a clarinet riff and some nasty horns. Fortunately, AMC had the good sense to show the song title and artist in the lower corner of the screen, like MTV used to do in the old days when it actually featured music videos. The song was Use What I Got by a woman named Lucy Woodward. I immediately sought it out on the iTunes Store and invested 99 cents.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. I'm doing some rather tedious image editing, one of the few tasks that actually goes better for me with a musical background. Use What I Got popped into the shuffle rotation, and again sent me back to iTunes where I sampled a few more tracks from its album, Lucy Woodward is Hot and Bothered. Noting that I had a few bucks remaining on account from a gift card, I did something I rarely do: downloaded the rest of the album. I've listened to it a dozen times in the last three days or so.

In a nutshell, I'm smitten by Lucy Woodward's voice and musical talents.

I now see that her songs have been featured in a slew of movies (none of which I've seen, by the way, another testimony to my sad state of uncoolness), and she's even had a top 10 pop song, Dumb Girls (which I sampled and passed on; it's from an earlier album). So I'm late to this bandwagon, but in this case, it's better late than never.

Woodward's got this crazy voice that adjures adjectival alliteration: sultry, sophisticated, sassy, sizzling, soulful. She writes songs that beg for repeat listenings in order to dig all the layers. She has a feel for pop hooks that turn tunes into earworms, but this is oh-so-much more than a pop album. The lyrics are sophisticated and occasionally racy, and the musical references span decades (or, perhaps, centuries) and cultures. How can you not like a song entitled Hot and Bothered set to the tune of a Yiddish lullaby? Woodward cites influences ranging from Julie London to Ray Charles to Bjork to Etta James, and you could picture her singing in a speakeasy from the 40s as easily as in a trendy 21st century nightspot.

The musical arrangements on this album are imaginative and grown-up. This is not your teenybopper's pop music. In fact, the only reason I apply that genre is that it's what the iTunes Store uses. Regardless of the classification, the tunes are uniformly catchy and sufficiently layered (there's that word again) to bear repeated hearing.

I don't buy many albums – Love and Tommy Castro's Painkiller are the only others I've purchased this year, in fact [I would have bought Kyle's In Harbors Gray but I've got connections] – but Hot and Bothered is an investment I'm thrilled to have made. If you've never heard of Lucy Woodward, don't worry; you can make up for it by adding her album to your collection. It may not make you cooler, but then again, you probably won't care.

Technorati tag: Lucy Woodward