The very idea of Scarlett Johansson's debut album has been met with a strange collective kneejerk dismissal, not so much because she's an actor making a foray into music, but she's a good actor making a foray into music. The Bijou Phillipses and David Hasselhoffs of the world, the Lindsay Lohans and Don Johnsons, have trained us to think the worst of dabblers and dilettantes. But Scarlett comes from an already storied cinema career-- Ghost World, Lost in Translation, and Match Point among the highlights-- so we assume she has better taste than to do something as gauchely commercial as make an album. Moreover, the concept behind the album-- a collection of Tom Waits covers-- might have bought her some sympathy and at least a little curiosity, but instead it seems almost comically ambitious, an endeavor that even most non-actress musicians couldn't pull off (see: Holly Cole). What could the star of The Island ever tell us about Waits that we didn't already know? Waits himself never got so much grief for appearing in studio bombs like Mystery Men or The Two Jakes.
Johansson's affection for Waits' music, however, is unmistakable. Instead of obvious picks, Anywhere I Lay My Head reveals an artist with more than a passing familiarity with his work. These songs-- culled from later Waits albums like 1992's Bone Machine and 2002's Alice, with only one track from the 1970s-- sound like personal favorites, and to respectfully reinterpret them, she and producer David Sitek corralled a backing band that includes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner and members of TV on the Radio, Tall Firs, and Celebration. Sitek proves as strong a presence as Johansson herself, swaddling her voice in a soft, otherworldly drone of bells, saxophones, ambient guitars, and burbling beats that suggest a Brooklyn update on vintage 4AD bands like This Mortal Coil or Cocteau Twins (without Elizabeth Fraser's vocal acrobatics, of course). As the album proceeds, this sound, which Sitek has described as a "Tinkerbell on cough syrup," becomes a bit repetitive, the same tricks over and over. The drunken music box and ambient telephone rings on "I Wish I Was in New Orleans" sound overly precious, and "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" never gels in this setting, which may have more to do with song choice than production or performance.
Sitek guides Anywhere I Lay My Head as much as Waits does. In fact, much of the album sounds like the producer might have devised this particular aesthetic as a softer, feminine counterpart to his day-job band's more aggressive, abstract attack. Music boxes replace jagged guitars, warm reed instruments displace lunar howls. Of course, Johansson doesn't take such liberties with lyrics, leaving many of the masculine pronouns unchanged. Still it's startling-- and not unpleasantly so-- to hear a guarded female voice sing words and melodies most commonly associated with Waits' gruff vocals. With all this gender realignment, David Bowie's cameos seem almost inevitable.
So, how does Johansson herself sound? More expressive and less tentative than she did on "Summertime", her track from the 2006 Music Matters comp Unexpected Dreams: Songs From the Stars. While her voice is limited and her pitch occasionally shaky, she has a wide textural range, spanning from low, smooth, and melancholy on "Song for Jo" (the only original, which she co-wrote with Sitek) to bristling and edgy on "Falling Down", whose melody best suits her voice and Sitek's production. However, she sounds blankly inexpressive on "No One Knows I'm Gone", overwhelmed by her back-up singers on closer "Who Are You" and unable to sell Waits' lyrics on "Town with No Cheer"-- a major shortcoming for an actor. Likewise, singing about street musicians and red-beans-and-rice on "I Wish I Was in New Orleans", she's out of her depth.
On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess. Ultimately, her ambitions prove more musical than professional, and her willingness to make herself a secondary player here-- behind Waits, Sitek, and TV on the Radio-- makes the whole enterprise seem like a lark, an anti-vanity project. There are no tacky pronouncements of stars-are-just-like-you realness here, no statements about herself or her celebrity or really anything at all. The only thing we've learned about her is that she really, really likes Tom Waits. That's more than enough to avoid catastrophe, but not quite enough to make Anywhere I Lay My Head much more than a curio.
